Producer of ‘Deadliest Catch’ and ‘Ice Road Truckers’ tackles coal mining

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PASADENA, Calif. — They were a pride of real American men, executing manly work under deplorable conditions. And nobody ever noticed them. But Thom Beers did.

Beers is the documentary filmmaker who brought us
the perilous plight of crab fishermen in the “Deadliest Catch,” the
heart thumping driving of the “Ice Road Truckers,” the dangerous
drilling rigs of “Black Gold.”

“Who’d have thought in a million years?” says Beers,
in the crowded foyer of a hotel here. “If I’d tried to sell a show on
crab fishing, every network in the world would’ve looked at me like I
was crazy. I just happened to get some footage first and walked in the
door and said, ‘Look, I think this is an amazing world.’

“And I got stuck in the worst storm in 30 years, so
this footage was incredibly dramatic. And that’s how it all got
started. And then once that series got going — all of a sudden we’re in
season 3, 4 and it’s not about fishing anymore. It’s about
relationships. It’s about people, and it became human drama.”

Beers specializes in graphic human drama. With his next show, “Coal,” he explores the owners and miners in a West Virginia coal mine who claw their cramped way 600 feet into the mountain to extract the precious fuel. The show premieres March 30 on Spike.

Beers wasn’t always looking for the dark side. He
started as an actor. “I worked for Lee Strasberg, studied with him. My
mom was an actress (Sammi Beers) when I was growing up and she showed up one day with Jane Mansfield with a little pink French poodle. And Jane had given it to my mom for
her birthday. So I grew up around that. I found myself always
surrounded by these really powerful, fascinating people.”

He became a playwright and, for a time, worked in theater. “After that I was broke,” he says.

“But I had a buddy who directed television
commercials. So I got into working in TV commercials while I was doing
theater. So TV commercials taught me, I learned the film business and
lighting and all that from the commercial industry. All these things
were the building blocks of what we do now.”

Beers spent 13 years with Turner Broadcasting, 11 years as executive producer for National Geographic’s “Explorer” series and six years with Jacques Cousteau.

‘”Through all of that I became an observer of
culture. But what I found fascinating was the fact that nobody had
really spent that amount of time and energy in our own country, in our
own backyards … My observations of the rest of the world for 11, 12
years traveling — I lived with tribes of Indians in the Amazon. I lived
in jungle hammocks for months at a time.,” he says.

“I’ve shot in 21 countries in Africa
alone. I’ve been all over the world. But all the same observations I
made there, it just turned me on my head. I said, ‘You know what?
Nobody’s done this in America.’ But then you’ve got to find the things
that made America great. You’ve got to find the iconic elements that
everybody would understand.”

Nobody was more surprised than the Discovery network
when “Deadliest Catch” became a hit. “When that show aired, the
original one-hour show aired, it did a great number. It took three
years for me to talk them into doing three more. The first one, there
were shipwrecks and everything, the second one almost nothing happened.
The network looked at it and said, ‘This isn’t very exciting. Where’s
the big waves?’ So they put it on a Sunday night at 8, 9, 10 o’clock.
Not one promotion, not even on-air, nothing. They just threw it away on
a Sunday might. In three hours it went from a .8 to a 3.8. Three
million views showed up in those three hours,” he says.

“You know what it was? It looked different than
anything on television. It was the light, the halogen lamps, the orange
slickers, the wet, the sinister ocean. There was something about it; it
hit the lower part of your brain.”

He displays the same fascination with coal mining.
“I see the same thing, that dark, dark space. You’ll notice about
‘Deadliest Catch,’ about 80 percent of the time I use the night stuff
because it’s much more visually interesting. That’s what happens with
these coal mines. The light is the same, and I think it’s going to hit
that brain stem, that flight-or-fight part of your brain.”

Beers grew up in Batavia, N.Y.
“It was a town of 20,000 people, but I gotta tell you I grew up with
the woods in my back yard, and something else — I got a little Tom Sawyer in me. Saturday mornings we always played baseball in the neighborhood,
but everybody had to cut the lawn Saturday morning. So I always waited
until the last minute to cut the lawn. Because everybody else wanted to
play baseball. I knew that six kids would show up at my house with six
lawn mowers and I’d have mine done in 10 minutes.”

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Aaron Sorkin, whose adapted script for “The Social
Network” won him an Academy Award, remembers earning one of his first
honors. “When I graduated from Syracuse University Drama Department, I got something called the Sawyer Falk Award for Outstanding Achievement.  Sawyer Falk had been an alumnus.  That award came with $200, the most money I’d ever seen in my life.  So I put that $200 with me, put it in my pocket and went to New York
to start being a writer.  That award meant a lot to me.  I had no
reason to believe that there would be another award that could come
after that.”

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The dog days of summer may not be so bad, as both
“The Closer” and “Rizzoli & Isles” will be back on TNT after their
spring hiatus. These top two cable dramas will land on July 11. Before that, “Men of a Certain Age,” arrives on June 1 with “Memphis Beat” and “Hawthorne” hitting their marks on June 14 and “Leverage,” plotting against the bad guys on June 26.

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You first glimpsed him on the History Channel’s “Pawn Stars.” Rick Dale was one of those “buddies” that the pawn stars sought out when they
needed something restored to its original brilliance. Now you can catch
Dale with his own show, “American Restorations,” which premieres April 15 on the History Channel.
As much an artist as a craftsman, Dale resurrects rusty, crusty
memorabilia returning it to its former glory. Whether it’s an old
Coca-Cola machine, an oxidized Conoco gas pump or a musty, mildewed
ice-box, in his hands everything old is new again.

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(c) 2011, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau on the World Wide Web at www.mcclatchydc.com.

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