Captain Phil Harris (20 page)

It was a scene, said Thom, guaranteed to suck in viewers.

“The eye and the brain stuck to it,” he said. “That’s why those people kept watching. Nobody left.”

Nothing gets a TV executive’s attention like a few million viewers. The next day, Thom got a call from Billy Campbell, who had just that day become head of the Discovery Channel.

“Thom,” Campbell said, “that was unbelievably exciting. I want more, fourteen, fifteen shows. How quickly can I get them?”

“About a year,” Thom said.

“What? What do you mean a year?”

“Yeah,” said Thom, “we’ll shoot it next season.”

“Screw the season,” said Campbell, who was accustomed to working on scripted shows. “Just get a couple of boats out there.”

“And do what?” asked Thom.

“Do whatever. We can’t wait a year.”

Ultimately, Campbell had no choice but to wait for the start of the next crab season, but his frustration quickly dissolved when
Deadliest Catch
debuted in 2005.

•   •   •

Even with the success of the earlier specials and the fame they had bestowed on the participating crab boat captains, they still weren’t about to make life easier for the film crew that first season.

“None of the captains ever asked what they could do to help,” said Thom. “The only thing they ever said was, ‘Just stay the fuck out of our way.’ We were dog meat on their boats, nothing but a pain in their ass.”

As the seasons rolled by, however, that changed, as it has on Thom’s other shows.

On the first season of
Ax Men,
Thom and his crew were filming a guy chopping down a tree. When the job was done, the cameraman
said he needed to pause to change batteries. By the time he was done, the ax man was gone, off cutting another tree a quarter of a mile away without the slightest concern about the cameraman.

“By season two,” said Thom, “I was the one changing batteries and the ax man says to me, ‘Where do you want to go next? I was thinking about cutting down that tree over there. What do you think?’

“As soon as they get a sense of how many people are watching and how famous they are becoming, it all changes.”

Still, the idea of having a camera constantly in their faces as they try to keep their boats on course, their crews alive, and their crab pots full causes different captains to react in different ways.

“Keith Colburn [captain of the
Wizard
] is still trying to throw our cameramen off the boat,” Thom said. “He’s thrown them out of the wheelhouse and off the deck. His favorite line is ‘Get the fuck out of here or I’ll kill you.’ ”

At first, Phil, too, had serious doubts about allowing a film crew on board, according to Jeff Conroy, the producer assigned to the
Cornelia Marie
in the show’s first season.

“Well, what do I have to do?” he demanded of Jeff, now executive producer of
Deadliest Catch
.

“You don’t have to do anything other than your job,” Jeff told him. “I’ll get what I need.”

As Phil’s apprehension began to melt, it was obvious to Jeff that this captain was going to be a star on the show.

“Phil was a producer’s dream to work with,” Jeff said, “because he had very little filter. He told the camera his whole life, warts and all.”

“Once Phil learned to love the camera,” agreed Thom, “he embraced the show. He was so bright with his observations and so funny with us.

“Phil was a military shell filled with testosterone. He’d make a lot of noise, but then, he’d back it up. He was a man’s man.”

“Phil didn’t just live life,” said Clark. “He grabbed life by the throat and shook it.”

Not only did he have an appealing story to tell, but Phil learned to enhance it for the audience, creating even more drama than was inherently found in the hostile environment surrounding him.

“We would be looking at forty-foot waves,” said Jeff, “and Phil, for the benefit of the camera, would say, ‘Those are fucking sixty-foot waves. If they come over, they will bust these windows and could kill you.’

“We’d be walking around the deck and he’d say, ‘You get in the way of those pots and they will crush you like a soda can.’ He could be so dramatic that way and I loved it.”

Jeff soon realized that behind the menacing warnings and the salty language was a master of the seas.

“The way he ran that boat was awe inspiring,” said Jeff. “He was very much the skipper. I thought, It may be crazy out here in the Bering Sea, but I’m going to be all right with this guy. He knows what he’s doing.”

However, emboldened by his faith in the captain, Jeff soon abandoned caution.

“It’s the same with nearly all my producers,” he said. “When they first go out on the boat, most of their footage is shot from the vantage point of the shelter deck, the part of the ship protected from the sea. Everything is from that one angle because they stay where they’re comfortable.”

Not only are the huge waves intimidating, but, with pots swinging overhead and the deck moving violently at unpredictable angles, the shelter deck seems the only sane place to be.

“It’s quite a lot to absorb,” said Jeff. “But, as the days go by, the new producers and cameramen venture out farther and farther. Soon they are all over the boat like the seasoned guys.”

Jeff himself went through that learning stage.

“I would start to tell myself, Okay, you can go two steps farther and not die,” he said.

But Jeff soon went from fearful to foolhardy. Despite crashing
waves and a restless sea one day, he wandered out to the edge of the deck, leaning on the railing.

“It’s a mentality many producers and cameramen experience,” Jeff said. “I wanted that awesome shot that completely douses me and the camera.”

As a gigantic wave indeed engulfed him, he heard a loud, angry voice crackling over the loudspeaker from the wheelhouse.

“Jeff,” screamed the voice, “get the fuck out of there!”

Recognizing it was Phil, Jeff didn’t need to be told twice.

But later, he did need to be lectured a second time after “another instance of stupidity,” as he put it. This one occurred one night with waves soaring over the
Cornelia Marie
’s starboard side. Jeff noticed that the camera secured outside above the wheelhouse was not pointed in that direction.

Determined to capture the moment, Jeff climbed out onto a plankway that encircles the wheelhouse to turn the camera. Not only was it freezing outside, but the seas grew ever rougher, forcing him to struggle to secure his balance as he was repeatedly slapped in the face with wave after wave. Though the plankway was becoming slicker and his fingers were growing numb, Jeff managed to turn the camera.

But how was he going to get back inside? As his grip on the situation seemed to get more tenuous, he thought, So this is how I’m going to go. I didn’t even need to do this. How dumb of me to be out here.

Jeff fell to his knees, gripped the plankway as tightly as he could, and crawled back around to the wheelhouse entrance, embarrassed at the thought of how he must look to any crabbers who might be watching but heartened by the realization that, most importantly, he was going to survive to see his wife and kids.

“Sometimes you get so excited about what you’re doing as a filmmaker,” said Jeff, “that you lose perspective.”

With all they are confronted with, film crews hardly need another challenge, but they often get one nevertheless from deckhands who
don’t want them around. It’s not just the captains who can be obstinate.

“In the beginning, a lot of the fishermen did not want to be on camera,” Jeff said. “They saw no real benefit to us annoying the hell out of them. You’re putting microphones on them and generally interfering with their job. If you want to do an interview, that might be five minutes they could be sleeping. And sleep is such a valuable commodity out there.

“The way the deckhands often see it, we are making a difficult job even more difficult.”

Thom laughs at the idea that some scenes in
Deadliest Catch
are staged, an accusation leveled at other reality shows.

“You think Phil would have ever gone along with that? Never,” said Thom. “There’s no way any of the crab boat crews are directed to do anything. We pride ourselves on the authenticity of our show.

“A lot of programs at some of the smaller networks simply do not have the budget to make impactful television. If they only have two days to do an entire show, they may have to tell the people in front of the camera, ‘Here’s what you have to say.’ The luxury we have is to be able to shoot four hundred hours for every hour that gets on TV. We have the time to develop authentic stories. You can see the difference between a show that is kind of fake and
Deadliest Catch.
That’s why
Catch
wins Emmys.”

On the crab boats, trying to waver from authenticity for even a few words can be a problem. If an engine starts sputtering loudly, a producer or cameraman may say to a captain, “Could you repeat what you just said?” But the reaction is often “Fuck you, I already said it.”

“I know, but we didn’t get it,” the producer will insist.

“That’s your problem, not mine,” the captain will tell him.

The same might be said when it comes to danger at sea.

“Nobody mollycoddles our guys,” said Thom. “But that’s not necessary. They have been on those boats for so long, they’re like part of the crew. Everybody is equally at risk.”

While the focus of
Deadliest Catch
is the courage, work ethic, and daredevil nature of the fishermen, the same could be said for many of the cameramen who get the shots that captivate viewers. If maneuvering eight-hundred-pound pots along a slippery, gyrating deck into a menacing sea and then pulling them out, often under arctic conditions, is a scary way to make a living, how about the cameraman perched above the fishermen on a crane, hovering over that storm-tossed sea? How crazy is he?

Like the deckhands they shadow,
Deadliest Catch
cameramen have not always come home unscathed. Film crew members have suffered broken ribs and arms. Two have been airlifted off crab boats due to dehydration. “We have paid for two sets of new teeth,” said Thom. “In both cases, our people did face-plants on the deck.”

But that hasn’t stopped them from stretching their limits.

“Nothing motivates a cameraman more than the possibility of winning an Emmy,” said Thom. “
Deadliest Catch
has won several for cinematography. There’s real competition over who can get the coolest shot.

“You are never going to see our cameramen working
The Biggest Loser
or
The Apprentice
. These are guys who just love adventure.”

With more personnel and more cameras, the
Deadliest Catch
film crew has the whole boat adequately covered. Nothing that happens anywhere on board escapes the eye of the lens.

“When I was out there the first time,” Thom said, “if a wave came over the ship, by the time you got the camera in place and pressed the record button, that wave was already gone.”

While most cameramen on board are thinking about how an Emmy would look in their dens, there are a timid few who are more worried about making it back to their dens, their houses, and their families. Filming aboard a crab boat might have seemed like a great adventure when they were standing in Dutch Harbor, but the reality of standing on deck being buffeted by monster waves is quite another thing.

One cameraman, assigned to the
Aleutian Ballad,
used the satellite phone to call Jeff at the Original Productions studio in Burbank to complain after the sea became especially ferocious.

“Listen, man,” the cameraman said, “it’s not worth it for me to be out here for what I’m getting paid.”

For
Deadliest Catch
producers, it’s not worth having a cameraman on a crab boat if he doesn’t want to work in rough seas.

“That’s what makes the show,” said Jeff. “It’s TV gold for us. That’s when we want our cameramen and producers to put off their sleep and film, film, film.”

Jeff didn’t argue with the disgruntled cameraman because he will never force an employee to put himself in harm’s way.

“But it really burned me,” he said, “because I always try to discourage people from doing this job before they ever get on a boat. I describe to them how miserable they are going to feel, how frustrated they are going to be because the harsh conditions will prevent them from being able to work as efficiently as they normally do, and how scared they are going to be because they will face danger to a degree they have never experienced before. I assure them that, no matter how much they’re getting paid, they are going to feel like they are getting ripped off.”

Finally, Jeff tells them, “If you’re not willing to accept the fact that you are choosing to do something that could kill you, then don’t go.”

Before getting on a crab boat, every producer and cameraman is offered an airline ticket home from Dutch Harbor “with no questions asked,” according to Jeff.

No one has yet taken him up on that offer.

“That’s because, until they are out there, they don’t believe it could be that bad,” Jeff said.

The first sign that a cameraman realizes that it is indeed as bad as he was told and that he wishes he had taken the ticket home is a malfunctioning camera. Not one or two, but all of them. A cameraman will head down into the galley time and again, claiming his equipment
isn’t working. After the first few times, the producer realizes it is not the camera, but the cameraman who is breaking down.

“We had one cameraman who started to freak out after the boat was under way,” said Thom. The cameraman’s angst was increased when the boat caught fire. It returned to port, was repaired, and went out again, with the cameraman still on board. But then, the ship responded to a distress call from another crab boat, the
Big Valley
, as described earlier. Upon reaching the crisis site, the crew found the boat had sunk and there were bodies floating in the water.

“That was enough for that cameraman,” Thom said. “He suffered a total meltdown. He announced, ‘I’m done,’ went into the room he was sleeping in, locked the door, and didn’t come out for the remaining five days of the trip except to sneak some meals. The next time anyone saw him was when the boat was back in the harbor.”