Tales of TV past A veteran filmmaker and photographer shares insights from a lifetime of documenting the world

As a 14-year-old kid in 1951, Don Moore knew he wanted to get into filmmaking and photography when he saw his first television show, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” on a 4-inch screen.

“It tied together two interests, electronics and the theater, and that spelled ‘television,'” Moore said. A 50-year veteran film producer, director, cameraman and still photographer, Moore, a resident of Port Clyde, recently talked about his experiences in the days of live television broadcasting.

Through friends of his parents, Moore said he started visiting NBC in New York, where he watched producers, directors and performers put together various TV shows of the time, “Your Hit Parade” on Saturday nights, and “Robert Montgomery Presents” on Monday nights.

“I was what you’d call a TV groupie at the time, but I connected with the engineering department and managed to get some pieces of equipment from them,” he said. “When I was 15, I built my own studio in the basement of our home in New Milford, Conn.”

Moore said his parents used to watch for him on host Steve Allen’s “Tonight Show,” until it signed off at 1 a.m. That way they would know Moore was all right in New York City because they could see him on TV.

“There was a woman called Mrs. Sterling, who used to come in and sit in the audience to get in out of the cold,” Moore said. “When Steve [Allen] would go down to the audience in the last 15 minutes of the show, at quarter of 1, she was always there. She became an audience icon.”

Moore said he doesn’t know what became of Mrs. Sterling.

During live television a few mishaps would go unnoticed, he said. One instance showed the influence of strong labor unions on the sets. Between the last dress rehearsal and the aired show of “Robert Montgomery Presents” one night, a carpenter had left a hammer on a bed.

“Because the carpenters were gone, nobody could move the hammer. The show went on the air with the hammer on the bed,” Moore said. “Nobody made a scene about it, but it was just funny because they were not allowed to move it.”

Live television gave way to videotaped shows in the early 1960s. Moore by then had gone to work as news director for the new CBS affiliate, WTIC in Hartford, Conn. The CBS connection led to his working on “60 Minutes.”

“To me, television lost some of the spontaneity,” Moore said of videotaping. “That’s what I liked about doing news. It had to be live.”

Moore and his family moved to Port Clyde in 1972, leaving behind a 20-year career as a television documentary producer-director. He and his wife, Suzanne, founded Composite Productions Inc., the company for Moore’s film documentaries and still photographs.

Since that time, he has directed and photographed television projects for Discovery, ESPN, National Geographic and The Outdoor Life Network. Over the last 35 years, his love for still photography has grown into a full-time career, he says.

Moore has earned an Emmy for a documentary film on hard-core unemployment, two United Press International awards for documentaries on the 1944 Hartford circus fire and a study on an outdated jail, and an Edward R. Murrow Award for Documentary Direction for several live shows dealing with youth, adult and senior parenting.

His attention to details paid off with the circus fire documentary, “The Day the Clowns Cried.”

“I was able to find 8-millimeter footage of the actual fire as it was happening on the ground at the time. We reconstructed the tent and the runways the animals went through,” he said.

The film depicted a Hartford police officer’s interest in the one unidentified person of the 144 people who died instantly from the fire and smoke.

“That officer twice a year would place flowers on the grave of the victim, known only as Miss 1565,” Moore said.

“Eventually, somebody in one of the fire departments nearby began to do some research, and put it together and decided on the identity of the girl,” Moore said.

Since arriving in Maine, he has worked as a plumber, carpenter, electrician, surveyor, as well as a filmmaker for the artist-in-residence courses and made Army and Navy training films for military police and the JAG (Judge Advocate General.)

“The legal stuff was fun because it was like doing ‘Perry Mason,'” he said. “We would create the crime, investigate the scene, do the medical stuff, and then take ’em to court and do the trial to find if the guy was guilty or innocent.”

He now shoots the photography for “Wild Fibers” magazine, a quarterly about the world and traditions of luxury fibers. Published in Rockland by Linda Cortright, the magazine is in its fourth year.

“Don is the quintessential professional,” Cortright said. “He has a fantastic eye for a picture that makes the story.”

A travelogue of Moore’s photographs of his journey to the Orkney Islands in Scotland and to Unalakleet, Alaska, to talk with the women who knit with the fiber of the musk ox, drew more than 35 people March 28 at the Jackson Memorial Library in Tenants Harbor. Moore narrated while his grandson, Tim Crockett, ran the video projector to capture the live performance.