It began with a phone call. Can you help please?
National Geographic wants to ride the high seas.
There’re shooting a reality piece, Los Angeles “America’s Port”
The focus, life on the waterfront, bring ‘em on was the retort.

The advance team arrived on a bright and sunny morn
Scouting for locations that would define the norm
Of pilots, cops, and longies, Geraldine too
Nothing would be spared from the camera’s view

From initial meeting we saw this was a change
Not a quick trip as usual it seemed a bit strange.
To have the cameras rolling at Thanksgiving meal
The friends and family asking, “What’s the deal?”

It’s not easy filling an eight-hour slot
So donning chef’s hat I grabbed the nearest pot
Carving the turkey was certainly a treat
Standing orders given to save the dark meat

Had to pull out the stops to make this dog hunt
Original Productions was rarely forced to punt
Many “oh-dark thirty” boardings were required to get it right
Despite the mundane assignments and that blasted camera light

Next it was time to film the crane ship
Special meetings, measurements didn’t want to hit
The Vincent Thomas Bridge that stood in the way
There were 20 cameras shooting the drama that day!

Through it all the cameras rarely ever missed a shot
The mic caught it all though we wished it would not
The camera was steady and always set
It was all coming together the deadline would be met

So how to create drama for an eight-hour piece
Moving ships is a job that will never cease
The show will go on for the public eye to see
“America’s Port” is ready for prime time TV

The top products arriving at the Port of Los Angeles are:
(1) furniture;
(2) apparel;
(3) vehicle and vehicle parts;
(4) toys and sporting goods;
(5) electronic products.

The majority of these products are manufactured at factories in China. That’s why we decided to go to the Nike factory in Gaobu and follow a sneaker coming off the assembly line on its journey to the store shelf in the United States.

Going to China was the trip of a lifetime. We flew into Hong Kong, traveled on a train to the bustling city of Guangzhou in mainland China and then motored a few hours to the factory in a rural area. (I was pleasantly surprised when every area I visited carried the National Geographic Channel!)

After being loaded into a cargo container, the sneaker was trucked to the Port of Hong Kong, which is one of the busiest ports in the world. It’s a vibrant, wild place full of colorful characters. We met a 50-ish woman who’d been working on the same water taxi at the port since she was 12. She drove our camera crew right along side a massive cargo ship as it was being loaded with sneakers from the Nike factory.

Watching a sneaker being made was utterly fascinating—at least 200 hands are involved in making each pair. Most of the workers were teenage girls wearing fashionable western-styled clothing (probably made in China). The factory itself was bigger, brighter and more modern than I had imagined it would be. Except for the bathroom facilities–which consisted of a hole in the floor.

I was hesitant until I remembered an appropriate slogan: Just Do It.

Get a firsthand look at the Port of Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday,
May 17 & 18, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free one-hour boat tours leaving
from Ports O’ Call Village in San Pedro and Banning’s Landing in
Wilmington to commemorate World Trade Week 2008.

Bring the whole family. This place will knock your socks off! ~ And
they were probably shipped through here as well.

For more information, contact (800) 831-PORT or www.portoflosangeles.org.

A friend said to me, “How you ring in the New Year determines how the rest of your year will go.” Well, that doesn’t bode well for me because I spent New Year’s Eve in the back of a cop car.

Luckily, it was voluntary. I did a ride-along with Port Police Senior Lead Officer Livonis Pilitsis, who is very proud of his Greek heritage. When his patrol took us past a famous local Greek restaurant, Papdakis Taverna, we saw some of the waiters dancing outside. If that much fun was happening outside, I wanted to see what was going on inside. I wasn’t disappointed when Officer Livonis immediately started dancing with a gyrating belly dancer entertaining the capacity crowd.

Back on the streets, it was a low-key evening full of traffic stops. Until ten minutes before midnight when a distress call came over the radio. A local resident named Chuck had just gotten a cell phone message from a friend who lives on a yacht in a marina at the Port. This friend has a wife and 17-year-old daughter. On the 6-minute voice mail, Chuck heard shouting and what sounded like a boat horn honking. Then came a woman’s blood-curdling scream. Calling 911, Chuck hoped for the best but feared the worst.

Blue lights all lit up, we hightailed it from the western boundary of the port (the Pacific Ocean) over the Vincent Thomas Bridge to the eastern-most side of the Port. The scene was tense as we arrived with guns drawn at the eerily named yacht, the “Irish Wake.”

To find out what happened and how marshmallows play into the mystery, you’ll have to tune into the last episode of America’s Port on Monday, May 19th.

While still filming at the Port, we’re simultaneously writing and editing the early episodes. I have a tremendously talented writers and editors, many of whom have worked in docu-reality for years and really know the ropes.

Here are Steve’s early observations about working in an entirely new genre (as he holds the aerial photo of the Port upside down below.)

I’ve worked as an editor on a pretty wide variety of projects: movies, network television shows, pilots-–but never on a non-fiction series like America’s Port. Most recently I worked on the ABC series LOST, which, like everything else shot from a script, has been shut down by the Writers’ Guild Strike. Last year I met one of the editors of Deadliest Catch. My sons and I are fans of the show. I praised his work, he praised mine…we kept in touch with each other, and when I finished with LOST, I asked him if his company was looking for editors. To my amazement, I got a call asking me to come in for an interview.

I’ve only been on the job for a week, and in that week, I’ve made two observations. The first is that everyone I’ve met connected to America’s Port believes in the project and believes in doing their best work. That makes a huge positive difference to the working environment: we’re all working and encouraging each other towards a common goal – making the best show.

The second observation is that editing a non-fiction series like America’s Port is a helluva different job than editing scripted material, and that I’ve got a lot to learn about the differences. When you’re editing footage shot from a script you’re trying to achieve the best version of the script: best performances, most deftly crafted dramatic moments, a pace that suits the material, etc. etc. When you’re editing non-fiction material there are story beats, there are objectives for the series and for your particular episode, but there’s no script to help you feel out the tone, or which characters want more screen time and which characters want less. The dramatic moments that are written into a script, set up by the director and actors, and crafted in the editing room – in non-fiction that’s all to be discovered by the writers and editors based on what happened on the day and what the camera recorded.

The editing language is very different. Yes, there are rules, but not the rules we use on a dramatic series like LOST. The work flow is different. Even the names for the same process are different. To move from the dramatic world to the non-fiction world, and I suppose the other way around – you’ve got to be up for the challenge.