For his first experiment, in what turned out to be a long, evolutionary process to develop the Steadicam, Brown used lead sash weights to counterbalance a videotape recorder at the end of a six-foot long, T-shaped piece of plumber's pipe. Not counting the camera, he spent $13. Simplicity soon gave way to sophistication, however. Brown worked evenings, weekends, and in between his commercial film jobs, and hired a freelance engineer to help him execute his designs. At one point, about two years into the project, he holed up in a motel for a week. There were no phone calls to break his concentration, no interruptions, except for room-service meals. He needed time, he explains, to "sort everything out, assemble some order from the chaos." The motel maids no doubt thought he was nuts, as he scurried up and down the corridors balancing their brooms lancelike to simulate the feel of what he had down on paper.
In 1973, three years and about $30,000 after his first trip to the plumbing-supply store, Brown had a working prototype of the Steadicam, a complicated device with a simple function: to stabilize the motion picture or video camera by, in effect, absorbing or video camera by, in effect, absorbing or tuning out the movements of the operator. "At that time, the idea of [manufacturing] it myself was inconceivable," Brown says. "I was burned out. I wanted help." After months of getting nowhere with Panavision Inc., a subsidiary of Warner Communications Inc., he called Ed DiGiulio, president of Cinema Products Corp., a small Los Angeles company that in the mid-70s was establishing a reputation for manufacturing innovative technology. "I had never seen anything like it," says DiGiulio, himself an experienced camera engineer, recalling their meeting 10 years ago. That same afternoon, he and Brown shook hands on the deal. The licensing arrangement they eventually agreed to runs for 35 years and gives Brown a royalty somewhere under 10% on every Steadicam manufactured and sold by Cinema Products. To date, close to 400 orders have been filled. The basic system sells for about $33,000.
When the first Steadicam rolled out the door of Cinema Products in 1976, Brown says, he "cheerfully gave up his ad business" for a career behind the lens of his new camera. And once filmmakers realized the creative possibilities opened up by the light, mobile Steadicam, he was in great demand. Beginning with Steadicam's 1976 film debut on Bound for Glory, Brown has focused the camera on the sets of some 200 films. In 1978 Brown received his Oscar. It was the Steadicam that captured Sylvester Stallone in Rocky on his legendary run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. More recently, Brown shot the forest scene in Return of the jedi. And he risked his neck for Steven Spielberg to help capture the suspenseful rope-bridge sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Brown crossed the bridge many times, 350 feet above a raging river, in 103-degree heat, carrying the 65-pound Steadicam. As the camera's most experienced operator, he considers himself one of a score of "living masters," people who can do anything with it.
"It's an artistic, athletic adventure," he says. "It's photography on the run, a much larger experience than just pointing and focusing a camera. It's a diabolically hard thing to use and many a man has gone down in flames because he simply wasn't good enough. In it's way, the Steadicam is as personal an instrument as a violin. Alone, it's just junk; with a good operator, it's magic. It's my favorite activity -- barring one."
With Steadicam royalties pouring in quarterly on top of his operator's wages, which run more than $1,000 a day, Brown moored a sailboat in Chesapeake Bay and began scouting for a country house in the lush, post-and-rail-fenced meadowlands of the horse farms west of Philadelphia's Main Line. Even something he had started as a lark was making money for him. In the early 1970s, he had teamed up with a former ad agency colleague, Anne Winn, to try some Mike Nichols/Elaine May-style humorous ad patter. In a sound studio in Brown's Philadelphia townhouse, with him at the engineering controls and just a few key words in front of them, they started ad-libbing the first in a series of award-winning advertisements for Molson Golden ale. To be sure, it was Winn's alluring, sexy laugh (and the question raised for millions of men: What does she look like?) that helped carry the ads to an almost cult status. In any case, Brown will tell you, the two of them are "the highest-paid radio folks on the planet by a factor of two." Brown seemed destined never again to face red ink.
"I have every intention of simplifying my life," Brown says, "but I get myself in trouble with a scheme or an idea. And then I get committed."
The idea for Skycam came five years ago, when Garrett Brown and his Steadicam were filming from the back of a moving buckboard on the set of "Little House on the Prairie," and he found himself sitting next to actor Merlin Olsen, a former professional football player. their conversation drifted to TV coverage of football -- how the typical telephoto shots from the stands and the sidelines foreshorten distances and give an often unrealistic, disjointed view of the action on the field. "Suddenly it blinked on me," Brown recalls. "The only place in a stadium you could place the camera was on the very skin of a vast volume of space. Almost the entire volume was denied to you. I wanted access to that space, and a high degree of mobility." What he wanted, he realized, was a camera that could fly.
The more he thought about films and the more televised sports he watched, the more excited he got. The shots were there, untapped, just waiting for him. "Imagine watching a running play from 30 feet up, watching the holes open up and seeing where the play is going to go. And then actually staying with the running back as he moves downfield. For a guy swimming, I could be six inches above the water, just in front of him, right there, with the water splashing at the lens. For a diver, I could wait until he hits his apogee, then plunge along with him. I can stop just short of the water going 20 miles an hour." He wanted the tool to show those images to the world.
