by Luis Fuerte
I knew I had charged the batteries the night before, and I’d also brought along spares. Yet I had a nagging thought that maybe I hadn’t charged them enough; I worried that they might run out of juice, or, worse, that I’d have to tell Huell the batteries were gone and we had to stop shooting. The fear was irrational, I know, but when you’re in a situation like that, with nowhere to go for fresh batteries, it happens. Fortunately, the batteries did what they were supposed to do, and the whole thing went very well. I think my Boy Scout “always be prepared” training definitely kicked in that day. We did so many shot setups in the Sixteen to One mine shoot that day that I felt like I was directing a movie. I sure hope all that effort comes across on camera.
Sometimes we went low, like into the mine, and sometimes we went high, like for the episode about the Giant Dipper, the 1924 wooden roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It’s a thrilling ride that hits fifty-five miles per hour on the first big drop. Huell wanted to go on the ride, and, of course, I had to shoot him experiencing it.
To do it right, I figured it would involve two rides. The first would be just me alone, facing the rails in front to get what Huell’s experience as a front-car passenger would look like. The second would be me sitting backward, shooting Huell as he went through all the dives and twists and turns of this great old roller coaster.
For the first ride, I got into the front car and was lashed down with a rope. I also ran the rope through the camera so it wouldn’t fly out of my hands. The darn thing was a bulky twenty-four pounds, and I didn’t want to hit a sharp curve and see it ripped out of my hands and launched into space. I was squashed in and couldn’t put my eye to the viewfinder, so I just held the camera up, pushing it against the rope to steady it as best I could, pointed it straight ahead, and hoped for the best. I felt like a bull rider ready to bolt out of the chute. I said, “Okay, let’s go,” and off we went. The roller coaster did what big roller coasters do best: banging and jarring me around, but I kept the camera rolling all the way.
Afterward, Huell and I looked at the footage and were pleased that the camera stayed pointing forward and captured the thrill of the ride.
Then it was time to shoot Huell. He sat in the second car while I sat in the lead car, looking back at Huell so I could get his reactions. The camera and I were tied down again, I got the camera rolling, and off we went once more. I captured all the excitement of him holding on for dear life on that first scary drop, and then all his yelling and cheering as it whipped around sharp corners and tossed him from side to side. He was having a ball. We looked at the footage and liked it, so luckily, I didn’t have to get strapped in and go on the darn thing a third time.
Another trying shoot was the one we did at Folsom Prison in 1995, which was difficult because it made both Huell and me very nervous. We were greeted outside the prison walls and had to strip down to our shorts before we were allowed inside—just in case either of us was trying to smuggle in drugs or weapons. They even checked my camera and equipment. We also had to sign a “hold harmless” agreement, so that if something happened to us the state wouldn’t be held liable. In case something happened to us? No one had warned us about that. Phil? Harry?
Our guides said the reason we had to be checked out so thoroughly for contraband was that Folsom was one of the most violent prisons in the United States—a fact that was driven home as I shot Huell commenting on the bullet holes in the walls and ceiling near the prison entrance. As I was filming him walking into the prison, Huell noticed a painting inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. A guide explained that the faces of the apostles in the painting were all murderers who were housed in the prison. That really didn’t sit well with Huell, and it set an anxious tone for the both of us for the rest of the shoot.
Another rough element of that shoot was the situation we faced going out into the yard with the general population. We were told that if we wanted to do that, we would be on our own. Well, Huell insisted on shooting there, so I dutifully followed him with the camera. I tell you, I had one eye in the viewfinder and the other on whoever was around me and how they were moving. I didn’t want to be taken hostage or shanked for no good reason. That was a tense shoot that I would probably would refuse to do again, if asked.
There were a lot more situations that pushed me in new ways, such as the show at Amboy Crater, shot in 115-degree heat. I almost passed out on the steep climb up and had to stop production to collect myself.
Another was the Bristlecone Pines shoot, when we were at 9,000 feet in the White Mountains. I did a lot of taxing setups on that shoot and got a severe altitude headache for my efforts. Come to think of it, more than just the headache, this shoot stands out to me as the first time Huell really got carried away with his “amazing” descriptions of everything in sight. There wasn’t a single ancient pine tree that didn’t get the Huell gushing treatment. He was definitely in his element, and that made me very happy—despite the throbbing pain in my head.
One of many physically demanding shoots in the Sierra.
BLOOPERS, BLUNDERS, & THINGS GONE WRONG
One day, we went to the old Camp Lockett in Campo, down toward San Diego, to shoot a reunion of World War II veterans who were members of the last horse-mounted cavalry in the United States. The attendees also included the last veterans of the Buffalo Soldiers, the all-black military horse unit that had fought heroically in many American battles. They were a fun group, telling Huell great stories about their adventures at Camp Lockett as young men training to ride their steeds into battle. A few of the veterans even got up into saddles after fifty years and showed Huell how they rode their horses military-style.
At the end of the shoot, Huell asked me, “Louie, how do you think we should finish the show?”
I looked around and said, “Well, the sun is right, it’s getting late in the day, and the light is perfect. We’re in a nice valley, and it’s beautiful. Why don’t you and the guys ride your horses off into the sunset? That’ll be the closing shot, and we’ll roll credits over that.”
Huell liked the idea, so I set the camera in the field to get the sunset shot and lined up Huell and the soldiers on their mounts. I rolled the camera, got speed, and shouted, “All right, action!” and they took off, horses charging, riding into the sunset, just like in the movies. Except that Huell fell off his horse.
Huell and a horse in happier times.
As he got up and dusted himself off, I could see that he hadn’t suffered any real damage, so I pulled a Cecil B. DeMille on him and shouted, “Huell, you ruined my shot! How could you fall off the horse and ruin my shot?”
It turned out that the saddle hadn’t been cinched tightly, so it slipped and rotated on the horse, and off Huell went. I tried, but I could not convince him to get back on the horse and do a second take, even though we still had that west light streaming in low and I could get the great film shot I’d envisioned. But I did manage to finish the show with a gorgeous shot of the landscape at sunset. It really would have been so much nicer with Huell astride his horse, charging into battle.
I drove the Explorer home and kept hearing, “Oh, my knee! Oh, my leg, it hurts!” He often talked about his time in the Marines, so I finally teased him back by saying, “I thought you were a Marine. What were you, in supply?” My good-natured chiding hit home, and he cut down on the complaints—but he still whimpered all the way back to the studio.
California’s Gold says it all. The title of the show tells you that what you’re about to see was shot in the Golden State, right? Not necessarily—Huell managed to pull off a big, big stretch to get us on a steamboat that sails the Mississippi River. That’s right—more than two thousand miles from California.
The show was about the Delta Queen, a sternwheel riverboat that had been built in California in the 1920s along with its twin, the Delta King. In 1946 it was moved east via the Panama Canal to get restored in Pittsburgh and then ply the Mississippi for decades as a historic landmark. The boa
t was a living part of old California, plus it was a National Historic Landmark, and that was reason enough for Huell to set us off on a journey to Louisiana.
Huell interviewing the captain of the Delta Queen.
We spent four days on that boat learning (and shooting) everything about it, from the time it sailed on the Sacramento River to the present day. I shot Huell with an older gentleman who, back in his twenties in the 1930s, was an engineer on the ship. He was delighted to see that the engine room hadn’t changed from back in his day. I shot pretty much every nook and cranny in that engine room, and it felt good to be in that noisy hull, with all that polished steel whirling in steady circles, transforming energy into the power that turned the rear paddle wheel. It took me back to the days I served on a Navy destroyer, although it wasn’t propelled by a paddle wheel. I’m not that old!
This was the first time I’d been in the South, and I was lucky to get to experience Southern hospitality at its finest. Huell was radiantly in his element. As the days went by, his accent got heavier and heavier, and it was great to see him relaxed and feeling at home with folks who spoke his tongue.
Huell absolutely fell in love with the Delta Queen. It represented a connection with California’s olden days that he so much wanted to be a part of, plus it had a new life in the South. He wanted to reclaim it and take it back to California, get it back to work on the Sacramento River where he thought it belonged. I wish he could have; in 2008, long after we shot this episode of California’s Gold, the boat was permanently taken out of service for financial reasons and turned into a hotel.
I met a lot of fascinating people that day, and I’m still in touch with a few of them. I still think it was a bit suspect to go to Louisiana for California’s Gold, but I sure am glad Huell made that stretch.
In all the years of videotaping hundreds of programs with Huell, I fell only once, while I was walking backward with my camera. It happened during a shoot for a program called “Terra Cotta.” We were up north in a town called Lincoln at the Gladding McBean foundry, which makes terra-cotta statues and fancy, one-of-a-kind clay architectural pieces. Huell was doing one of his walking interviews that he favored, and I was walking backward (as I always did) to get the shot. The place was about as dark as the sky slipping into night. I’d turned on the sun-gun light mounted on the camera, but I was barely getting enough light on them to make the picture usable.
I always looked back to see where I was going, but I couldn’t make out anything because the camera’s light blinded me to the dark behind me. Huell was about to end the interview when my foot caught on a small step and I fell backward on my butt. The camera rolled on, shooting a streak of video. Huell hurried over to see if I was okay, worried that I’d been hurt. I got up, embarrassed, and said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, Huell. Now let’s pick it up so I can make a cut.”
Strapping in before takeoff with the Blue Angels.
The camera never hit the ground. That’s what my body was for.
We did a couple of shows in El Centro, a town deep in the Colorado Desert in the southeast corner of California. One revolved around shooting the Blue Angels—the famous Navy and Marine aerobatic team that was based there. The guys put Huell in a spiffy-looking G-suit and took him to one of their hot, fast F/A-18 Hornets to be the man riding in the back seat, like Goose in the movie Top Gun. They strapped him in, and the pilot took that baby straight up, pulling some big Gs. Then he flew a few loops and made some sharp turns, racing around the sky in a howl of jet noise before he landed.
Huell climbed out of the jet and promptly threw up. I didn’t get it on tape, but at least he had the good manners to wait until he got back on the ground.
For the other El Centro shoot, we started out at dawn for a good long drive to do a Visiting with Huell Howser show about life there. When we got to El Centro, however, the people we were supposed to interview didn’t show up.
We just sat there in the car with the air conditioner blowing, out in the middle of the hot, dry desert some two hundred miles from home. Things looked bleak. Huell asked if I had any ideas for how to salvage the situation, to at least get something on tape. The best thing I could think of was to go to a cool bar and discuss the situation; maybe we could salvage the drive and come up with an idea. All we needed was some creativity—which is what bars are for, right?
He thought that sounded reasonable, so we drove around until we found a bar. It sure didn’t look like much, but we sat down with a couple of beers and talked about the situation. After a while, Huell looked around, taking in the place, the bartender, and the patrons, and then he looked at me, eyebrows raised. His wheels were turning, and I caught on pretty quick.
He said, “What do you think, Louie?”
I looked around and said, “Why not? Let’s talk to the bartender. They always have stories and know what’s going on.”
So Huell talked to the bartender, who gave him some input on who was interesting around there to talk to, and what might be worth shooting. We filmed a short segment in the bar, and on the bartender’s advice, headed to the local newspaper. Somehow, Huell worked his magic to stretch and stretch and stretch the little information we had—and we got a show! To this day, I don’t really remember what it was about, but it was fun and it worked.
Another bust of an outing happened on the shoot for the show that Huell called “Blossom Trails.” He’d received a letter raving about the magnificent beauty of the flowering fruit trees in Reedley, a small farm town in Fresno County. It went on to say that the blooms wouldn’t last forever, and if we didn’t take immediate advantage of this opportunity, we’d lose the show of a lifetime—or something to that effect.
Huell was a huge flower lover and couldn’t resist the sales pitch, so up we went on what we both thought would be an easy, one-day shoot, as the drive over the Grapevine and into the San Joaquin Valley was only a few hours from the studio.
We pulled off the 99 at the Reedley exit and began looking for the great groves of trees loaded with those luscious flowers. We drove miles in and all around Reedley searching for the big blooms. We found flowers all right, but they weren’t the ones described so glowingly in the letter. We spotted a few flowers here and there on the trees, but hardly enough to make a show. Apparently our hot tip was old information, and we’d probably missed the big bloom by a few weeks. But Huell didn’t want to let the drive go to waste. He said, “We’re here, Louie, let’s try to make something of it!” Once again, Huell worked his unique gift for making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. He took the wheel of the Explorer and drove us back into Reedley, where after a bit of exploration, he found the Mennonite Quilt Center, introduced us to an Armenian delicacy called keyma at Uncle Harry’s Classic Meals, and encountered the world’s longest-running pinochle game at the Camden Café. The show called “Blossom Trails” turned out nothing like we’d originally planned, but there were a few blossoms—and viewers discovered that Reedley was a whole lot more interesting than it seemed upon first glance.
THEMED SHOWS & OPPORTUNITY SHOOTS
Huell was big on themed shows and opportunity shoots. The themed shows were California’s Gold programs that featured segments with a common thread but not directly related to one another—nor were they likely shot on the same day. There were theme shows on just about anything you can imagine, from “Trees” to “Flying Fish” to “Neat Houses,” and we’d shoot all over the state to make them.
The opportunity shoots often wound up in theme shows, and they usually happened by chance. Typically, Huell and I would be driving to or from a location shoot when one of us would spot something interesting. We’d stop the car, Huell would hunt for someone to talk to, and if it worked out, we’d shoot something there spontaneously.
One of the opportunity shoots that I’ll never forget was the field of marigolds we drove by in the Las Posas Valley—we were in the Camarillo area on the way to another shoot and just happened to come upon miles of marigolds, a rolling sea of gold and
orange. To quote Huell, it was amaaazing. We got out of the car at the side of the road and Huell searched for someone to talk to about this spectacular sight. He finally located a couple of brothers who were growing the flowers, and he interviewed them amid the marigolds in the fields.
What made this shoot memorable was Huell’s reaction to the brothers’ answer to his question about where the flowers were destined. He was, of course, expecting to hear that they were going to flower shops. But they said that all those gorgeous orange petals were destined to become chicken feed, because the marigolds helped make the egg yolks a richer color.
Huell looked as shocked as if he’d just stuck his finger in a light socket. I thought he was going to fall over! Then, when the delightful surprise about coloring eggs hit his funny bone, he broke out in that huge Huell grin.
“Chicken feed? To color chicken feed?!” he exclaimed in that marvelous Tennessee accent. His reaction really is hilarious.
Huell’s long-term approach to California’s Gold was one of the things that made the show so successful. He knew that if he found and shot enough varied and interesting segments, over time they’d fit with other segments he had in the can or was going to shoot, and he’d have a show. If he already had a couple of segments that seemed related, he’d take me out and we’d shoot another one that would fit in, and then we’d have a show. I never saw the bank of all the segments that I shot, but it must have been impressive.
The themed show “Wind” comprised the usual three segments. We visited the Warner Brothers Burbank lot to see a studio wind machine in action, the historic Caltech wind tunnel, and Point Reyes, which was, according to Huell, typically the windiest place in California. I’m guessing that Huell saw the Caltech and Burbank shoots as local and easy to shoot, and then waited for an opportunity to go to Point Reyes when we were up north for something else.