VIDEO/mp4/17mb/3:42m
Charlton Heston is the quintessential American,” according to Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Biley.
Mr. Heston and a cadre of Republican hopefuls gathered for a campaign stop in Huntsville at the USSRC on Friday that was declared to be in honor of Mr. Heston. The event was free and open to the general public.
Overcast skies threatened to put a damper on the party, however, Mr. Heston saved the day. Keeping in step with his omnipotent portrayal of Moses in “The Ten Commandments” he stepped to the microphone just as a light drizzle subsided and intoned “glad to do it.”
The legendary film actor recently announced that he is suffering from symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s disease. Even though his humor is still intact, he has become somewhat frail physically, and his remarks were limited.
Updated 2017.09.12
I notice in my original comments I failed to mention the best part of this video – for me. As it were, I had obtained a press pass at the Space & Rocket Center to cover this event for TOCC TV. When I went out to find a spot to get a good angle, there was a boardwalk set up for the media to use. I sauntered right on up the steps and set up my tripod and not very fancy digital camera. As seen in the video, the guy with the big media outlet was standing right next to me with his very fancy equipment and apparently he couldn’t resist the urge to jump around on the less than concrete wooden boards beneath us, making this video a bit shaky. Hard to imagine the attitude problem of guys like that.
Nevertheless, I focused on Mr. Heston as he entered holding my head up with the brim of my baseball type cap high in the air. As he headed up the stairs I began to zoom in and just as my shot was tightly framed I instinctively lowered my head, and the bill of my cap, to give the Hollywood star a cue to continue the scene. IT WORKED! Right on that cue, he waved his hand and continued onto the stage to the podium where he would be speaking. Although I never have really aspired to be a big Hollywood producer, I have to admit that the great Charlton Heston following my cue as a director was one of the coolest things I have ever done!
This video was originally posted on September 20, 2002. At that time, video on the Internet was all very limited compared to today. The video seen here was actually recorded with a digital video camera -at only 192 pixels wide. Since then, I have lost the original raw footage, however, I did have the wherewithal to make the highest possible quality backup of the edited and produced video. So, even though this video is up scaled to 640 px wide, it’s still a great deal better quality than the video I originally posted which was only a 1.5 mb file.
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©2002, 2017 – Jim Casey
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