Shooting for Pool at the Patty Hearst Kidnapping Trial- 1976

Shoot First: Code of the News Cameraman

Book Excerpt:

Chapter 15: 207

 The police code for a kidnapping is 207…

On February 4, 1976, two years to the day following her abduction in Berkeley, Patty Hearst appeared in Federal District Court in San Francisco for the beginning of her trial.  It lasted two months.  During that time, the assignment desk sent my camera colleagues and me to cover all bases at the Golden Gate Avenue location: the press room on the twentieth floor, where attorneys and anyone else qualified to face the media sat behind a large table clustered with microphones; the entrance to a down-ramp leading to the parking garage under the building where a vehicle carrying Hearst arrived each morning; and inside the garage, where, on several occasions, I was the pool camera selected to capture the defendant on film.  Firing off a motorized rapid shutter, a still photographer worked alongside me as pool for newspapers, wire services and the like.  Afterwards, the film we shot would be rushed to a lab to make copies for other media organizations, which qualified by having their cameras positioned elsewhere at the scene of the story.

Routinely, a United States Marshall escorted the still photographer and me down to the garage beneath the Federal Building and stayed with us for Patty Hearst’s arrival.  Oddly enough, security at the closer San Francisco County jail on Bryant Street was deemed inadequate, and Hearst was transported each day of the trial from the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, some twenty-five miles away.  Silhouetted by sunlight outside the ramp, the vehicle carrying Hearst would enter the garage and pull into a parking space a short distance from a waiting elevator.  That didn’t leave a lot of time for film footage, but the marshals were running the show here.  For maximum end-to-end coverage, my lens would be pre-focused, camera already rolling and battery light burning at the very first sight of them.

Patty Hearst's Parents- Photos courtesy of KPIX/CBS 5

Janey Jimenez was appointed personal guardian to Patty Hearst and usually preceded her when stepping from the car.  She was a fine looking woman in her uniform of a United States Marshall. Because of her role, she became a celebrity in her own right.  She was soon followed out of the vehicle’s back seat by the passenger in her custody.

My first impression of Patty Hearst at closer range was of how much shorter she appeared than in the pictures I had seen of her, including the one from the Hibernia Bank.  (Toting a semi-automatic weapon tended to add a few inches.)  Here, she was frail, a bantam weight in the neighborhood of ninety pounds, her face pale and drawn, sad eyes, mostly downcast, adding all the more to her vulnerability.  She seemed to me like a small bird, wings clipped (and handcuffed), removed from one cage and placed into another.  Filming became a matter of first-you-saw-her, then-you-didn’t, from car door to elevator door in fifteen seconds, in frame but out of sight, as the elevator door closed between us.

Shooting pool camera was almost the same as shooting for a single television station, with one exception.  If you screwed up, lost your film loop and had a camera jam or fell on your ass while walking backwards, then every other station, network, cable channel, foreign television, or broadcasting outlet in need of pictures that moved screwed up too.  They ended up empty-handed, and you with egg on your face.  Knock wood, it never happened to me.  But additional pressure was always brought to bear whenever assigned as a pool camera, which was why it was more often assigned than volunteered.

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