Filming N.Z. For TV

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30951, 6 January 1966, Page 3

Filming N.Z. For TV

"The Press” Special Service AUCKLAND, Jan. 5. A seven-man camera team of the American Television Film Unit will arrive in Auckland this month. After two years of research the team will arrive by sea on January 27 with seven specially equipped station waggons, three 16 millimetre cameras, and the first 35millimetre sound-track camera to be seen in the Southern Hemisphere. The vans have hydraulically-controlled booms. They will shoot a full-length

feature film, and many small features, during eight months in New Zealand. Mr J. McGuire, the chief cameraman for the unit —a subsidiary of Metro Goldwyn Mayer—is already in New Zealand. He has been in the film business since 1922, first as a cameraman on location for M.G.M., then as official photographer for the War Office, and lately as chief cameraman for the unit. Mr McGuire said he had worked in 84 countries so far —but there were still more to come.

He has just completed three years and a half in Australia doing documentary work, even from the back of a camel in the dry interior. In India, he was puzzled to receive complaints from California saying that the ■films he used were useless. Fungus was ruining the reels. Although they tried several mixtures, the camera team eould find no cure until they packed the films with dust from tea leaves. There was one hitch: the Indian Government demanded an export licence for the tea. Mr McGuire has never seen one of his films. He just sends the reels back to the United States and they are edited into their final form. “If they weren’t satisfied 1 wouldn’t still have my job,” he said. He never goes to the

I movies—“they'd bore me stiff,” he said. After their' eight months in New Zealand, the team will move to Norway.