Radio age research, manufacturing, communications, broadcasting, television (1941)

Story Behind a Spectacular... "Assignment: Southeast Asia" By Robert D. Graff Behind the 90-minute color spectacular "Assign- ment: Southeast Asia," soon to be seen on NBC-TV, lies a colorful story of an NBC film crew's three-month visit to that strategic area. The story is told by the show's producer and director. w. E FULLY expected an incident or two in the filming of NBC's 90-minute color spectacular, "Assign- ment: Southeast Asia," and in this we were not dis- appointed. Once we set up our equipment on the fringes of a riot in Singapore. Suddenly the rioters turned on us and, quite impersonally, smashed our cameras to bits. Again, when one of our sound-camera crews went out into the hills near Djakarta, Indonesia, for a close- up of life in the villages, they were so threatened and harried by guerrillas that they had to finish the job under escort of police armed with submachine guns. But by and large, whether in the office of a prime minister or in the hut of a farmer sharing a bowl of rice, we were welcomed with surprising warmth and good will. Surprising, that is, because Southeast Asia is a highly combustible mixture of old fears and new hopes. Here are seven nations, many of them just emerging from colonialism, with 200,000,000 people who are, in effect, waking up to the Twentieth Century. These people are determined to make some kind of better life, if not for themselves, at least for their children. They are living through one of the world's great adventures — and in our own time. If we in the West are to help the Southeast Asians we must first understand them —- which in itself is no easy thing. James A. Michener, who acts as narrator and guide in the film, is well aware of this difficulty. In his years of writing on Asia he has found out just how thoroughly Americans are oriented toward Europe. "It's only logical for us to be more interested in Europe than Asia," he says. "Nine-tenths of us in America probably have our roots in Europe. Our family names are European. The streets in our towns have European names; we have no streets named Hong Kong. But present conditions demand that we take greater interest in Asia than we have in the past." The very complexity of Southeast Asia forced us to move slowly, learning as we went. We began with six months of research during which we studied all the material we could lay our hands on. This was followed by an exploratory trip to the area by assistant producer Milton Fruchtman and unit manager John Herman, who looked over specific locations for filming and came back to New York to outline an itinerary. By mid- August of last year we were ready to start actual shoot- ing. We set out from New York — Miss Beatrice Cunningham who is an associate producer, Messrs. Fruchtman, Herman and myself — stopping in London long enough to round out a crew that included camera- men W. Suschitzky and Kenneth Reeves, and sound men C. L. Mounteney and Peter Pardo. By Car, Truck, Oxcart When we arrived in Southeast Asia, we began the job of tracking down the locations and people that could best convey the feeling of each country. This meant aerial searches; trips by car, truck or oxcart; trudging through rice fields and wet rice paddies. Once, near the Thai-Burmese border we Traveled for five lurching miles on the backs of elephants. In all, we covered 100,000 miles and filmed at more than fifty places in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaya and Indonesia. We concentrated on Thailand as the oldest free nation in the area, and on Indonesia as one on the world's newest nations, and, after the U. S. and the Soviet Union, the richest in raw materials. To cover this vast area we had to work on a schedule which turned out to be perilously tight. In Indonesia, for instance, we spent several anxious days waiting to film an interview with President Sukarno, who had been delayed in returning from his trip to Moscow and Peiping. We finally filmed the President and then raced to the airporr, taking off just before it was closed down by a strike against foreign airlines. Again, travel- ing from Bangkok to Chieng-Mai, we nearly missed con- 20 RADIO AGE