:: Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer ::

It seemed like a tradition in the making, the annual Toy Test story with a poetic promo to match. The first year, it was just serendipity - I came up with a rhyming promo in about fifteen minutes and it was approved. This time, there was more process and more pressure involved: was I going to do another poem? Would this become an annual thing? Could I work some soundbytes into the rhyme? Lots of examination this time around - though I must say I did like the end result better. I was a bit surprised I was allowed to have little floating question marks pop up over anchor Megan McHale’s head in the promo, because that’s the sort of thing that some people within the company tend to over-analyze and ask “So, are you saying she’s clueless? Do we want to say that one of our anchors is clueless?”, etc.; I was pleased it stayed purely for comic effect. Sadly, this is the last time to date that we’ve done the annual Toy Test, so I haven’t gotten to write another poem or push the boundaries any further.

This is an edited-together version of a two-part sweeps package that I edited in 2002, concerning a local man of Middle Eastern origin who was rounded up in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. In the news feeding frenzy that surrounded this arrest, the other two news stations in the area both managed to disclose Omar’s name and even where he worked on the air, before those details were officially released in any capacity; when it came time for his wife to tell their story, 40/29 was the only station that got this level of access. It’s a pretty solid package, and we wanted to edit it in a way that the station’s all-tape edit bays just couldn’t do. The decision was also taken - this being exactly two months after 9/11 - to take it easy on any actual 9/11 footage and show it only fleetingly. (Shots of planes going into buildings were already forbidden by this time, and I was surprised I got away with the shot of the towers.) The shot of the computer screen depicting the internet ticket reservations for 9/11 was a bit of graphical fakery on my part, but it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

This story aired on November 12th and 13th, 2001. The reporter was Courtney Monie and the photog was Eric Semmel; they later got married, and Hady Omar was later released, though by now his chances of living any kind of normal life in this area were trashed and he and his family left for greener pastures.

A sweeps piece from November 2001, “Images From Ground Zero” promised to show us heart-wrenching home video from that gaping hole in lower Manhattan that we’d just spent two months getting all too familiar with. At least, so I was told when I was briefed on the story for the promo - the reality of it, we discovered, was that the local Red Cross volunteer who had shot the footage with his camcorder got no closer than a relief site on Ellis Island. While it’s acceptable to restrict the tease to long shots from across the bay, the story being promoted didn’t show much that the promo hadn’t already given us. Still, my chosen approach for this was to use text (over succeeding static backgrounds of red, white and blue) to tell the story, with a nice pensive music bed in the background. I also had to ramp up the chroma of the amateur video drastically to get it to look like it wasn’t in black & white.