a dan rather footnote

I was going to post this story when Rathergate first erupted but I forgot. Now that Dan has announced his long-overdue retirement, it feels like the right time to add this little footnote to the general evaluation of Rather and his contributions to what I'll loosely call journalism. It's not about Rather. It's about one of his producers -- an earlier version of Mary Mapes. I'll call him "Mike" because I don't want to be sued.

Mike was a producer/cameraman who worked with Rather twenty years ago, during his Gunga Dan phase covering the war in Afghanistan.And Mike came to National Geographic where I was working, and proposed shooting a film in Antarctica about getting to the top of some mountain named after a dead friend. It would be a treacherous and dangerous journey, Mike assured us, and it would make a fabulous adventure film.

Before hiring Mike, we checked him out – SOP for all new producers. And we kept hearing the same story from a number of people… something that had happened in Afghanistan many years earlier.

According to that story, Gunga Dan and Mike had gotten to a bridge that had been attacked and captured from the Soviets a day or so earlier… when the cameras weren’t there. So Mike (and Dan?) decided to set off a few explosions on the bridge, and film it as if it was the real battle. When the charges went off, a local Afghan man was killed. And CBS decided not to air the piece.[I have no idea if that story is true or not. But my own experience with Mike -- see below -- certainly doesn't rule it out.] Anyway, since nobody knew if the story was true or not, and since it had happened years earlier, National Geographic gave Mike a big fat wad of money and he went off to Antarctica and shot a film and came back to D.C. to edit it. Which is where I met him.

Mike seemed like a great guy… big, rugged, charming. A man's man. And unlike a lot of producers, he was a complete pussycat to work with -- except... except when we asked him to tell us, day by day, what had actually happened on this dangerous journey to the top of a snowy mountain to honor the dead friend.

“Mike, we need to know. Did you fall into the crevasse before the windstorm or after?”

“I’ll have to check my field notes.”

“Did the ultra-light crash before or after the radio went dead?”

“I don't remember. Why don’t you just put it in the place where it makes the best story?”

Mike seemed to have trouble grasping that National Geographic was fanatical about getting the facts right, and he never did provide the blow-by-blow field notes he claimed to have kept.

So we ended up assembling a meandering, ho-hum one-hour “adventure” movie, artfully filled with vague language about what was going on, and constructed so that the viewer was never told that the mountain was actually less than a mile away from where the ship docked, and the only reason they crossed the crevasse field was to film something cool, etc.

[NOTE: this kind of crap happens all the time when docs are made. It’s one of the main reasons I’m no longer in the management side of film making. National Geographic, to its credit, was one of the last big time documentary producers to give in to the guys in marketing who demand that every film be exciting and dangerous... even if it’s just about a guy floating down the river on a raft – HIS RAFT COULD CRASH INTO A LOG AND TIP OVER!!!!! STARVING BIRDS COULD ATTACK AND DEVOUR HIM!!! HE COULD BE HIT BY A METEOR!!! etc]

But Mike’s movie did have one fairly gripping scene.

In it, Mike and another guy were in a tent on the side of the mountain. They couldn’t go on to the top unless they tried the _____ (insert some technical mountain-climbing jargon) Maneuver. So they sat in the tent and argued. The other guy thought it was too dangerous to go on. Mike gave an inspirational speech about the dead friend. The guy finally agreed with Mike, and they made the special mountain climbing move and eventually reached the summit, which they celebrated by raising their arms in the air and hugging each other.

Pretty typical stuff. But the scene in the tent was good… and sometimes that’s all you need.

Then… a glitch. Or maybe more than a glitch.

We were finishing the film’s technical elements when I got a call from the assistant editor, who was responsible for sound. He wanted me to listen to something. I put on the earphones and listened to Mike and the other guy talking in the tent. Nothing unusual there.

Then a period of silence. The editor held up a finger: wait.

Then I heard it: a long low hum in the distance that could only be one thing. Crickets. Hmmm. Either we’d discovered a heretofore unknown species of Antarctic cricket, or Mike hadn’t actually been south of Kansas when he shot the scene.

When confronted with the evidence, Mike hemmed and hawed and said he couldn’t explain it. Maybe a bleed-through when the sound was transferred?

No, Mike. It wasn’t a “bleed-through.” It was a fake.

You knew the film needed a little zing so you took a tent and a camera and went somewhere here in America and pretended to be in Antarctica and filmed a nice dramatic little scene. Maybe you and the other guy did have a confrontation on the side of the mountain. I suspect you did. But you didn’t film it. So you decided to cheat.What you gave us is called a forgery. And you would have gotten away with it... if an alert assistant editor hadn’t noticed that something just wasn’t quite right on the sound track.

A superscript from a typewriter that wasn't around. The chirping of the Antarctic cricket.

What's going on over there at CBS?