My brush with stardom

I wasn’t much of a fan of the 1950s Hollywood movie stars. I think it’s because in those movies (which I mostly saw on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movies) they seemed so far removed from any reality that touched me. There was no way that I could connect with them.

So when a Navy videographer friend of mine came into town one summer with his team for a project with Kirk Douglas, I though the invitation to shoot the production stills as more of a lark than anything else. (I love shooting those.)

The spot was part of what was called “Sitrep 30”—a half-hour of essentially newsreel-type news that was broadcast at Navy installations and on ships. The film The Final Countdown (about the supercarrier USS Nimitz being thrown back in time to December 1940 near the Hawaiian Islands; Douglas played the captain) had just been released, and the team’s commander had managed to wangle the star into a pro bono voiceover narration, with stand-ups for the beginning and the end.

I helped edit the script the night before, and on the day, we converged on the Helmsman statue at a small park in Marina Del Rey. We got set up and Douglas showed with his lawyer/manager—he was apparently on his way to evict a tenant from one of the condos he owned in the area.

Well, it was not a felicitous experience—Douglas kept flubbing his lines for the standups, so the commander had to quickly write up gigantic cue cards. Then the soundman kept having to re-record, what with the air horns from boats in the marina and take-offs and landings at nearby LAX. The actor was impatient with it all, so we did a bit of scrambling.

But eventually we got enough to go with, and I got to shoot about a gazillion frames. (I was loaded with two Nikons, one for black-and-white and one for color.) Here are a couple:

His obits said that he was active in the community, and a major factor in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Maybe he was just having a bad day. And so may his memory be a blessing.