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.

Dr. Geraldine Knatz is the Executive Director of the Port of Los Angeles. As the first female head of the number one containerport in the United States, she’s one of the most powerful movers and shakers in the shipping industry and a respected environmentalist with an undergraduate degree in zoology, master’s degree in environmental engineering and a PhD in biology. Her dual priorities, which are often at odds with one another, are to grow the Port economically while “greening” the Port environmentally.

Geraldine is also the “Energizer Bunny” of the shipping world. When she’s not traveling around the world to a United Nations conference in London or to a meeting at a port in China, this mother of two teen boys gets up everyday at 4:45 am, goes for a run with her husband, gets to work by 6 am running the port, spends her lunch hour swimming laps at a local pool, attends countless meetings and functions throughout the day and night, weekdays and weekends. (Plus she belongs to three book clubs and volunteers on historical commissions.)

People especially look forward to attending morning meetings with Geraldine because she is famous for bringing homemade goods baked from scratch by her own hands, often with ingredients she grows in her garden. I heard from several sources that her blueberry muffins have won over the gruffest of men in this traditionally male-dominated world of port “tough guys.”

Here is her recipe, including a secret ingredient she’s reluctant to let her staff in on. Her plan for not letting them find out? Give them so much work to do that they don’t have time to look at this America’s Port blog!

Dr. Geraldine Knatz’s Secret Blueberry Muffin recipe

3½ cups all purpose flour
½ cup cake flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cardamom
2 ¼ cups fresh blueberries ( I used frozen ones when they were filming me because I could not find fresh- they were not as good)
½ pound unsalted butter softened
1 1/3 cups plus 2 Tablespoons more of superfine sugar
4 large eggs
1 Tablespoon (yes, this is right, Tablespoon) vanilla
1 teaspoon Fiori di Sicilia **
1 1/3 cups milk
Extra regular sugar for sprinkling tops of muffins before you bake them.

Preheat over to 375 degrees. Grease or spray 14 jumbo muffin tins. Sift flour, cake flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cardamom onto a sheet of waxed paper. Toss the blueberries with a few tablespoons of the flour mixture. Cream butter, and add superfine sugar in two additions and beat for a minute after each addition. Add eggs one at a time and beat in. Add vanilla and Fiori di Sicilia. Add the flour mixture in three additions with the milk in between. Stir in blueberries. Spoon batter in muffin tins. Sprinkle tops with regular granulated sugar. Even though the recipe will make 14 jumbo muffins, I usually make about 10 from this (this is for port people, you know.) Bake till golden, about 25 minutes, depending on size.

**The Fiori di Sicilia is an all natural citrus and vanilla flavoring, like an extract but really strong so you don’t add as much as you do of the vanilla. It’s something I added to the recipe to make it really special. You can mail order this from King Arthur’s Flour in Norwich Vermont.