In which a talented inventor perseveres against long odds and countless mishaps, first with financial disaster, and pushes himself and his troupe of dungaree-clad engineers to their physical limits in quest of yet another angle for the instant replays.
On August 18, 1984, television screens across America flashed an image never before seen: a close overhead shot of the huddled San Francisco 49ers. The red-jerseyed football players appeared to be so near it seemed natural to try to hear quarterback Joe Montana calling the play. As the 49ers broke their huddle and squared off against the San Diego Chargers, CBS announcer Pat Summerall explained to the fans watching at home: "That rather unusual view is from something we call Skycam, which is a camera suspended on wires above the field. Very mobile. And that's all I can tell you about how it works."
Several press boxes down from Summerall's booth, hunched over the controls, sat Skycam's creator, Garrett Brown, 42, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. This was not the first time he had come up with a revolutionary camera. His earlier creation, Steadicam, had won him an Oscar for technical achievement. But the challenge of Skycam was even more formidable. Any major technical failure in this, its debut on national TV, might well scuttle its acceptance. Any piloting error would be disastrous. And Skycam had its share of both in earlier runs. Brown, clad in an orange-and-white-striped polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers, wore a look of anxious determination, his eyes fixed on his invention.
Moving the joysticks on the remote control console, he piloted Skycam into position so that the CBS cameraman seated beside him could capture the next play using a separate set of console controls. A splendid picture of the 4 1/2-foot tall, dumbbell-shaped Skycam against the floodlit sky was aired coast to coast. Next on the monitor appeared an aerial shot taken from Skycam. This one-two punch brought whoops of excitement in the Skycam press booth, jammed to overflowing with CBS officials, a representative from the National Football League, and even observers from NBC, scheduled to rent the Skycam for their football broadcast the next day. "You should be paying me for a shot like that," joked Ray Savignano, director of operations for CBS Sports.
Meanwhile, the people who, with Brown, had spent a frantic year working to get Skycam ready were scattered all over San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. Walkie-talkies pressed close to their faces, they monitored the four computerized winches that let out and pull in the steel cables that fly the rig. Despite the excitement in the press booth, however, all was not going well for Skycam in this, its maiden television voyage. At halftime, its battery, which wasn't charging properly, had to be changed. What's more, the motor for winch number one was groaning loudly. The crackling of the walkie-talkies among the Skycam crew spelled trouble: "The voltage is 106 . . . . Needed, 110 . . . . Everything is running starved . . . . Best to avoid straining the motor further by avoiding certain spots above the field . . . . Play it safe . . . . Keep the speed way down, no more than five miles an hour." Skycam, capable of speeds of up to 23 miles an hour, was operating at a fraction of its potential.
Worse, the crew had less than 16 hours to figure out what was wrong, reload their rented truck, drive to Los Angeles, set up in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and be ready to cover the Raiders/Miami Dolphins game for NBC at one o'clock the following afternoon. Brown and his crew were counting on successful coverage of these preseason games to lead to an NFL contract for the regular season -- and, not incidentally, to turn on potential investors.
At that very moment in Jack Murphy Stadium, the company was virtually penniless. The wild, year-long rush to perfect and market Brown's machine was proving to be tougher than expected. The 40-pound Skycam had gone through $1.5 million in venture capital. About half of Brown's two dozen employees were on "leaves of absence," awaiting a second round of financing. And Brown and a core group of engineers, who had been over-worked for months, were strung about as tight as the wires supporting their creation. Although Brown had been a non-smoker for six years, his fingers were beginning to show the stains of too many unfiltered Camels. All of which suggests just how complicated it is to bring a radically new bit of technology to market -- even for somebody who has done it before.
From an early age, Garrett Brown had tinkered with things mechanical, and had shown himself to be something of a maverick as well. When he was around 11 years old, he built a ham radio, and in time became a late-night relayer of messages from servicemen stationed in Antarctica to their families back home. By his mid-20s, Brown, a college dropout, had set his sights on a career in film work -- although he had never so much as owned an Instamatic camera. He spent a couple of years in a Philadelphia advertising agency, first as a copy writer and then as a television producer, but, tired of corporate life, left to start his own film production outfit, The Moving & Talking Picture Co. Indeed he was the company, equipped with a $50 Bolex camera from Fotorama Corp. -- which could shoot only 24 seconds of 16 millimeter film at a time -- and $1,000 worth of lights, a dolly, and other gear from a bankrupt local producer. "Hand to mouth" is how Brown now describes the operation -- until he turned to special effects. There he discovered a niche, and began to compete in the ad market against the big agencies.
For one customer, a bank, he crafted a spot in which the film ran backward, but the actor, miraculously, spoke forward. Brown had hired a linguist, and together they had concocted nonsense sentences that, when played backward, created the mouth movements they wanted for dubbing in the desired script. "Fix or pitch the ocean up," for instance, was dubbed: "Money sure is slippery stuff." To this day, Brown says he can speak sentences backwards, a claim he demonstrates by twisting out this bit of a tongue twister: "Beaf norf bistlebash beduncanezer phunerim besiae." Recorded and played backward, he says, the garble becomes: "A submarine offers a unique mode of travel to Port Said."
On another assignment, for Subaru of America Inc., Brown filmed a commercial aloft in a helicopter -- with his camera attached to the end of a 30-foot pole. The camera turned out to be pretty stable, and that observation, combined with the chore of loading and unloading his 800-pound dolly from a pickup truck on every job, led him to the the idea of the Steadicam. A stable hand-held camera, he decided, might be the only thing between himself and a hernia.
