Fly By Night

It’s one of those evenings when crazy things happen. At 10 p.m. the heat still seems to steam off the blacktop streets, and you can hear ghetto life en espan~ol emanating from the old rooming houses and walk-ups nearby. Police helicopters raze the thick air and emergency frequencies buzz in your ears.

But forget the police, the fire department, the paramedics. These here are the guys you don’t want showing up at your doorstep: Wearing tattered tennies and funky T-shirts and sweating profusely, this group of a few dozen videographers--all male--gathers every evening at the L.A. Convention Center parking lot off 11th Street.

It’s their freeway-close staging ground for another adventurous night shift. They make a living covering the news of the after hours--and that often means the news of the negative, even macabre.

When the well-paid television news crews go home, this motley crew of freelancers--videorazzi, if you will--takes over. They can make $30,000 a year if they hustle. They wait and listen to radios and scanners and then blast off down the freeway in hopes that they’ll get something they’ll be able to sell. They drive like cabbies, racking up DMV points faster than 15-year-olds and, yes, sometimes getting into wrecks. They eat worse than police and even are shot at in their search for stories.

Fires are good, especially if the flames are still showing. Murders are OK, but only if they’re in places where murders don’t often occur, like Beverly Hills. Traffic accidents can be a sell, but they’d better be major.

“We just got our first fire of the night,” says Louie Gallardo, a 35-year-old ex-tow truck driver and ex-repo man. “It was pretty good. Flames were shooting through the roof.”

Tonight, Gallardo is elder statesman of the lot, sitting in his geared-up ’89 Chevy Astro van with the air-conditioning blowing and the radios and scanners blaring. He keeps business cards, police press badges and photographers’ association membership cards at the ready. Police are an everyday obstacle.

Shamalar Fields, 20, is parked nearby in a Chevy Blazer. He’s known as a pedal-to-the-metal driver with a penchant for chasing accidents and police-involved shootings. He wants to be a cop.

“We go to the scene,” says the slim, handsome young man they call “Sham.” “Whatever’s there, we shoot it: shootings, pursuits, fires. Anything that’s newsworthy. But most of it is violence and fires.”

Print photographer Marcel Melanson is here too. At 21, he’s been doing this as a hobby for five years. His specialty is fires (“Very exciting,” he says). He’ll be closer to the action as a newly inducted member of the Compton Fire Department. And judging by the congratulatory way the crew here greets him, he’s a star on his way out of the parking lot.

Gallardo, short and round with a small mustache, changes from his sweaty KNBC Channel 4 T-shirt into a fresh polo and waits for the scanners to bring him bread. During lulls like this, the guys talk story, complaining about particularly evil competitors who block their shots or let air out of their tires.

Local stations pay a standard fee for freelance footage--about $135. And now freelancers are peddling clips to a growing number of national true crime shows and tabloid television programs, as well as national news broadcasts, all of which pay significantly more than the local broadcasters.

Many guys, such as Gallardo, work on their own, buying their own vans, cameras and dubbing equipment. Fields works for Newsreel Video, one of the few video news-peddling agencies that provide equipment and a steady paycheck to freelancers regardless of what happens on a given night.

About 11 p.m., Ray the Radio Man rolls up in a Ford Bronco II, custom fitted with half a dozen radios and scanners that yell out emergency dispatches in six-speaker sound. Some of the guys step up to pay respects. Ray is a restaurant manager by day who comes out and sometimes programs the videographers’ radios so they can receive police and fire frequencies they’re not supposed to. He’s a tipster too.

Ray hears something interesting and whispers to Gallardo, who tears off toward the freeway on-ramp.

Bomb scare in Burbank.

*

In the wake of Princess Diana’s death, many people are wary of the visual press. (An angry crowd, incited in part by the death of the princess, attacked a newspaper photographer earlier this month in Connellsville, Pa. The photographer was trying to snap pictures of a doctor accused of sexual molestation.)

The parking lot crew is on the front line of a television news market that critics say is crime-obsessed. One of the biggest complaints about this growing breed of freelancers is that they shoot titillating raw footage without doing much reporting or interpretation.

A study earlier this year by the University of Miami’s Center for the Advancement of Modern Media found that 28% of L.A. television news was dedicated to crime, versus a 20% average in the eight cities examined. The videorazzi “certainly make it easier for these stations to carry all this garbage,” says Joseph Angotti, the center’s director.

But Sherrie Mazingo, chair of broadcast journalism at USC, says, “I really don’t think it’s the freelancers who affect local news coverage. I think it’s the news stations who buy this stuff and put it on their newscasts.”

Some of the photographers say night assignment editors tell them what to look for, and even call if they need something in particular. Indeed, members of the parking lot crew are on the phone constantly with local television stations. “We do the same jobs the station photographers do, but just not in their vehicles,” Gallardo says.

“Like most stations in town, we don’t have crews who work overnight,” says Stephanie Rodriguez, assignment manager at KCAL Channel 9. “We rely on freelancers for overnight stuff. Unfortunately, what happens overnight is car accidents, crime, bad stuff.

“It’s not about more news hours to fill,” she adds. “It’s about stations downsizing their budgets. We don’t have the resources that we used to, and now everyone, it seems, has a camera.

“But,” she says, “we don’t tell them what to shoot.”

John Culliton, vice president and general manager of KCBS Channel 2, says he has cut down on buying freelance material because the station recently shifted toward more investigative reporting and so-called positive news.

But the up side of the news may be a ratings downer: KCBS remains in third place among the three major local newscasts.

*

Rolling up the freeway, Gallardo checks his Thomas Brothers’ map and then calls the watch commander at the Burbank Police Department, who grills him as to how he found out about the bomb threat.

“A tip,” Gallardo says into his cellular phone. “From a friend . . . his name is Ray. . . . Just Ray. . . . No, I don’t know his last name. . . . He just finds these things out. . . . Sure.”

He is summoned to the Burbank police station. The watch commander introduces himself and tells Gallardo where the action is but warns him not to tell any of his news-hound buddies. As soon as he steps into his van, Gallardo flips open his Motorola and calls a photographer friend who lives in the area.

He rolls around the perimeter of the bomb scare scene, which involves a public phone booth off Riverside Drive. Sources tell Gallardo a box was left, and that members of the 18th Street gang called police to say it was full of dynamite. Gallardo whips out his tripod and trains his Panasonic Supercam on the box.

“That would be so bitchin if it blew up,” he says. “You can quote me on that.”

The Sheriff’s Bomb Squad moves in via robot, which tears the box apart. It finds road flares and wires made to look like a bomb. Gallardo packs up, disappointed. No blast, no sale.

“What a waste of time,” he says.

He grabs a bottle of Mountain Dew at a 7-Eleven and ends up at the Convention Center lot at 2 a.m. He plans to stay on until 6.