TV Commercial Production – Gadgets

The folks who work in TV commercial production, actually any kind of film production, are gadgeteers by nature. Some more so that others and Tom Houghton, a cameraman who you met on the Brooklyn Bridge shoot in Chapter 18 of Circumstances Beyond My Control, was a big one. He probably still is.

This more or less rewritten little piece from Circumstances Beyond My Control is about one such toy.

Tommy was on some TV commercial production or other with me late in 1986 and he had a remarkable new device. I don’t need to tell you what it was.

Motorola Cell

Motorola Cell

I wanted one. However they cost around three grand. After talking with several other producers I realized that if I had one I could rent it to some of my production staff colleagues and my client companies (whether or not I was on a given job). I could charge them $50 per day plus a buck a minute for air time. I ran the numbers and figured that the phone should pay for itself in a year or two.

So a few months later I bought one and my plan did, indeed, work but I was off by a couple of years. Just about the time that the pocket sized cels went on the market around 1990 my $2,600 Motorola Dyna TAC had broken even plus I had personal use of the thing. And I had some fun with it.

After lunch one day with a producer who was looking for an AD on a movie he was working I stopped on the corner of Broadway and 78th Street to call and check my answering machine using the Motorola. On the sophisticated and usually blasé Upper West Side, I drew a crowd. In the few minutes I stood on the sidewalk with the phone half a dozen or more folks asked me about it; what it cost, what it could do (make and receive calls), they wanted to hold it. I was a celebrity for about ten minutes.

A month or so later I was driving to meet Elizabeth at her brother’s house in Bucks County. I’ll never forget a Motorola conversation I had with my nephew, Dan, when I got lost on the way.

“Hi Dan. I got off at the wrong exit and can’t figure out which way to go.”
“Where are you?”
“Going west on 213.” (These roads are probably wrong.)
“What intersection are you at?”
“I’m not at an intersection, I’m going west, I just passed Yardley Road.”
Pause…
“What do you mean ‘going west’? Are you at a gas station?”
“No. I’m in my car and I just passed Pine Street.”
Another pause…
“You’re in your car?”

It went on like this for a while and Dan finally got it, gave me directions and when I arrived there was a great show-and-tell.

This formerly state-of-the-art communication device resided in my closet from 1990 until 2015 at which time I sold it on eBay for a tidy sum to a German collector of Motorolas.

The moral of the story: Never throw anything away!

More tales of TV commercial production and film production in general will be found when you click here and get Circumstances Beyond My Control.

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