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
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 (
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
‘”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
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
“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
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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Network” won him an Academy Award, remembers earning one of his first
honors. “When I graduated from
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.”
———
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
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You first glimpsed him on
needed something restored to its original brilliance. Now you can catch
Dale with his own show, “American Restorations,” which premieres
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.
———
(c) 2011, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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