Finding Film

Finding Film after a Tour in Space

by Sam Russell

        I grew up in Connecticut, in the country just outside of Middletown. Right from the start, I took a great liking to building things. My dad had a shop in the basement… I have fond memories of my dad, my brother, and I leaving the evening dinner table and bounding down the spiral staircase into that shop, leaving the dishes with my mom. We would work on projects! My dad’s thing was woodworking. I was more inclined towards technical things: radio, sound recording, photography, movies, and… rocket ships. An avid reader of science fiction, I was fascinated with the idea of space travel and men actually walking on the moon. An idea held absurd at the time.

        Once, when I was 10 or 11 and was fussing with some electrical thing, I remember my dad saying almost casually, “ I know, you’re going to be an engineer and you’ll go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” What a tongue-twister, I thought! But it was like a pronouncement. In fact I did apply and go to MIT. I graduated, however, from RPI with a degree in electrical engineering.

        Goodbye Connecticut. I had landed a job with a wonderful, company known as Airborne Instruments Laboratory in Long Island. A group of researchers from the wartime laboratories at MIT and Columbia had banded together, forming this company that continued development of all sorts of radar and aviation electronic systems. It was informally known as a “company of engineers.” I fitted right in.

        October 4, 1957. I had not been at Airborne for a year when the Russians lofted their Sputnik satellite. The whole world seemed to abruptly change. There I was, in the right place at the right time! Three months and I was working on an Air Force project that had to do with surveillance from space. It being classified, I could never say much more. In two years, though, I was working on a NASA project. This I liked and could talk about it. A great scientific project seeking to bounce radio waves off the ionosphere from above.. But the lure of the manned projects to the moon pulled me away from the East.

        Hello Texas! I was off to Houston with wife Jane and two sons, John and Jules, and a large yellow Labrador named Puff. I had taken a position with the Grumman Aircraft Company in Long Island, contractor for the Lunar Lander, but I was assigned to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, to assist in planning for the grand leap to the moon!

Dr. Fred Kelly in orange (That's me on the left next to CAPCOM Keith Kundel.)

        June of 1965. I was far at sea, aboard an old World War II liberty ship, the Rose Knot, converted by NASA for space age duty. We were stationed about 300 miles southwest of Lima, Peru. A flight control team of six had was aboard for a space mission: two doctors, two engineers, the CapCom and me. I was the rookie of the crew and mainly took part in simulation exercises. The upcoming mission was Gemini 4, the first flight in earth orbit to last longer than a day. It was to be four days in fact and it would stage the first U.S. spacewalk. Our ship was positioned to become the sole point of contact with the spacecraft during the intervening nights.

        For me, it was the ultimate online experience. We worked at five operations consoles in a hi-tech room within the ship. Just before the spacecraft would pass overhead, it became very quiet as we attended to our scheduled duties. Then a loudspeaker declared, “Acquisition of signal… telemetry lock.” The consoles suddenly came alive with relays clicking, lights blinking, and meter needles snapping to attention. It felt as if a wave of energy had locked onto us. Just like a Speilberg science fiction flick when the space invaders approach the house and the chinaware starts rattling and the doors begin to bang.

        The lead aero-medical doctor, Fred Kelly, waves us over. “Look at this!” he says. We bend over a chart recorder with pens busily inking EKG lines. “Look at Ed White’s heartbeat. Look… it’s not even.” Yeah, it did look erratic. “He has arrhythmia, but the docs can’t find anything else wrong with him. He’s an oddity; they let him fly anyway.” That moment is frozen in memory. Here we were, just a small group hunching over a chart recorder. But I felt a profound sense of expanse… the enormous scale upon which this scene was being played. Here we were, hundreds of miles from anywhere, a spacecraft was up there, 150 miles over our heads, hurtling through space at 4 miles a second, and here we were, watching the heartbeats of this guy who had just made history, first American to walk in space.

        The technology that made this possible was complex, yet crude by today’s standards. Today, we’re used to having high speed internet on our computers and we look down our noses at a dialup link that communicates at only 56,000 bits-per-second. In 1965, there were no communications satellites. We were connected with Houston by voice and through teletypes with 110 bit-per-second links, carried over short-wave radio, which was unreliable. Reception could fade at any moment. If it did, we were it. We would be in charge as Mission Control!

        Back East. After Gemini, we moved to New Jersey. I was with the RCA Space Center in Hightstown. The big project there was to develop a remotely controlled, color TV camera that would ride on the moon buggy during the last three Apollo missions. We had won the NASA contract and had set about to make TV from the moon look as good as what you’d expect of the Saturday afternoon ball game.

        Why, you may ask, since public interest in moonwalks had waned after the first few landings. Seen one, you’ve seen them all. For Apollo 15, the networks were planning spot coverage only. But we had hopes for more. I recall sitting in the NASA TV Lab near Mission Control. It was 8:20 Houston time on the morning of the first Apollo 15 moonwalk. We practically held our breaths in anticipation, waiting for astronaut Jim Irwin to climb down the Lunar Module ladder and open the cargo bay where the camera was stowed. When he opened it, the picture that flipped onto our screens was all that we could have expected. The networks, seeing what was being fed them from Houston, dropped their regular programming and devoted full time to the exploration that “the big eye” was offering from the moon. Estimates later told that 500 million people around the world watched that day. It was an exciting time.

        Mid-life crisis. I left RCA and left engineering. Early interests in movies, photography and sound recording had bubbled up. I met two filmmakers in Princeton who were producing documentaries for New Jersey Public Television. Together, we decided to bank on the future of video as a filmmaking medium and, in January of 1978, opened the doors at Telequest, Incorporated. Initially, our work was produced on film and slides. Then, as technology advanced and became more affordable, we produced in video. Some projects were for television, but most were for corporations. Industrial films. “Boring!” you might say. Not at all. I found the work exciting, different, and constantly challenging. Sure, we did our share of dry product introductions and sales training pieces. But we also mounted some wonderful projects.

        We produced admissions videos for colleges and boarding schools. These were carefully crafted mini-documentaries that gave a prospective student the sense of what it might be like to be at a particular school. They offered a glimpse of school life that no brochure could conjure. We were successful at this and were awarded many honors.

        We produced case study films for the Harvard Graduate School of Business. One of these told of the Tylenol poisonings and how Johnson & Johnson and CEO Jim Burke had handled the situation in what is considered to be a textbook case of responsible corporate behavior.

        We produced a vignette for the New York Times on the famed caricaturist, Al Hirschfeld. Al, you may know, was the one who regularly concealed his daughter’s name “Nina” in his renderings. We followed Al, starting with his attending the opening of “Long Day’s Journey into Night” in New Haven, where he sketched ideas in the darkness of the theater, to his 4th floor home studio on Manhattan’s upper east side, to the presses in New Jersey, rolling out the Sunday Arts and Leisure section of the Times. It was a bonus to meet and interview Carol Channing, Coleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards and others, all of whom appeared in the piece. But mainly, it was an opportunity to meet an extraordinary yet totally unpretentious man. Al was first published in the Times in 1926 and was active till the century’s end. I always recall him saying, “The trick to being an artist is to live long enough. If you live long enough, everything happens.”

        We did an undercover piece to expose the scams that bus passengers often faced in the New York Port Authority terminal. It was a presentation created for the governors of New York and New Jersey. We stuffed subminiature video cameras into boxes, books, handbags and went into the building. Being an older-looking group of gents, we didn’t get much. Then, on a hunch, we fitted my partner’s 16 year old son with a backpack. In its frame was hidden a tiny camera, aimed to look out over his shoulder. We shoved the boy into a line of passengers exiting a bus, making it appear that he had just gotten off. In the first minute, he received three offers for drugs. We captured it all on tape, full frame and with sound!

        In thinking about all this, I culled through old notes, counting the number of programs I had written and/or produced at Telequest. I was surprised; the total was over 70. Each had been crafted to meet a specific objective. And each had special needs. What medium would work best. What kind of talent was called for. Would graphics or animation make clear explanations that were otherwise dense? Each program presented a challenge in problem-solving through concept, writing, style and execution.

        The foregoing was based on a talk I gave in 1996. At that time, I had just left Telequest and was searching for the next step in life. What followed is told in the Videography article Starting Out… Again!

        The work of Russell and Company has now expanded from the rather narrow theme in that article. At the outset, it seemed that falling back on my technical background was the keystone to success. What developed, though, was considerably broader range of work that includes music and dance and the teaching of these arts to children. This website exhibits several examples of current work and, I believe, supports the company tagline “Film that teach, train, and enlighten.”