Behind the Scenes

Posted on July 23, 2003 by Sam Eifling 

The mobile command station looked as if it was right out of "The X Files." Sitting in an alfalfa field on a thousand-acre cattle ranch about 40 miles south of Reno the 96-foot truck served as the television brain for the ESPN Great Outdoor Games Retriever Trials event.

Outside, you're in a suburb of nowhere, a short commute to the middle. Inside, you're surrounded by laptops, banks of video monitors (129 of them, total), boxes of video cassettes, decks of dials and buttons and switches, carpeted walls, soundproof ceilings, electrical wiring drooping like dreadlocks out a huge board. This generator-powered behemoth last was at a Los Angeles Dodgers game and would next cover the ESPY Awards.

"In a week it's going to be in front of the Kodak Theatre," says Terry Lingner, the director of this event. "Right now it's sitting around a bunch of cow pie."

Lingner is among the horde of production managers and assistants who talk into headsets as they orchestrate the eight cameras and 20 or so microphones that pump raw television into the truck like unrefined crude oil.

After the event, producers will grind about 70 hours of tape down to 44 minutes. For now, Lingner constantly describes to a technician the camera shots he wants for what's called a line cut, sort of a rough outline of the edits for what will be the ESPN broadcast. He sounds like this: "Ready three. Coming back. Take five. Ready four. Take four. Ready five. Take five. Ready four. Take four. Ready two. Take five. Ready four. Let's see if he talks here. Ready three. Ready four. Ready three. Take three." Each cut, with the "ready" part and "take" part, indicating a camera change, lasts maybe five seconds or so. Lingner winds up talking a lot.

"Show me where she's going, please," he tells a camera operator during Ticket's qualifying run. The goal is to make the sport coherent to viewers, to keep all the relevant markers in the shots while minimizing the awkward elements (cameras, duck blinds, sound guys) that remind viewers they're watching a TV production.

Because the sport consists of dogs tracking down fake ducks across a huge field and pond, it's tough for the people to anticipate what to record. To stay a step ahead, those inside the production truck watch a dog's eyes and body language, remind each other of the dogs' individual tendencies - and, like a good number of sports television viewers, yell at the screen. During Super Sue's finals run, the yellow Labrador Retriever strays wildly off-course, and Lingner tries to manage the cameras' new angles. "I'm sure they're bass-ackwards right now," he says. "Because this dog is in Toledo."

Bill Fitts, the producer of the event, sits to Lingner's right, making suggestions and watching to see that everything runs smoothly, which of course it doesn't. There are about two miles of video cable and a half-mile of audio cable trailed around the site, and a great number of temporary employees doing everything from hauling heavy stuff to using audio equipment.

Someone drove over some cables, severing them. Mosquitos plagued the crew until the field was sprayed with insecticide. Dogs needed water, so a plastic kiddie pool had to be filled, out of gallon jugs. One of the parabolic microphone operators can't seem to stay out of the shots, so Fitts tromps across pasture to set the lad straight, in the process sending the other production workers into giggle fits.

"It's just too big and too many people involved for things not to go wrong," Fitts says.

Fitts and associate producer Shannon Nardi will be on mop-up duty when he gets back to Bristol, Conn., to turn this organized chaos into compelling television. Not only does each full 22-minute segment need to tell a coherent story, the show must make sense to viewers who enter somewhere in the middle. In his 50 years in the business, Fitts has found no sport more difficult to interpret for both the short- and long-attention-span audiences.

Late in the afternoon, Fitts again leaves the production room as he oversees the boxing and transport of the 140 separate Betacam video cassettes to a jet waiting to whisk them back to the East Coast. As the deadline approaches for sending the tapes, everyone is praying for the final dogs to be efficient in their runs. Super Sue, the dog who strayed nearly to Toledo, isn't helping matters.

Her 63-year-old handler, Jerry Day, is yelling to her, waving his arms and turning the color of a ripe cherry. Nardi, who seems to have memorized scouting reports on every dog-trainer pair, points out that Day has had heart problems, and Lingner orders him up some water. On one of the screens appears an arm offering bottled water.

That probably won't make the final cut. Nor will Super Sue's lingering in some reeds, discretely making what Nardi figured was a pit stop.

"Notice she stayed out of the way," Fitts said. "Didn't get into the limelight."

"She's very ladylike," Nardi replied.

Such is freshly harvested TV before it emerges from these barbed-wire borders to undergo the requisite editing and voiceovers.

"No matter what happens next," Lingner says near the end of the day, "I want everybody helping tow my car out of here."