…how would you improve it? I’m thinking about the music and network-coverage details, not so much about the arrangement of the fireworks per se (although if you have ideas on that too, please chime in).
**The fireworks background music: ** I think this is one occasion that really calls for a high degree of traditionalism. If you open up with comtemporary recording artists, at least have the good taste. Turgid, overwraught and ballads by over-emoting here-today, gone-tomorrow pop singers just don’t hack it. The Boston show was basically fine, but the Macy’s music selection was horrid. Here’s some stuff I’d much rather hear: traditional (and anonymous) folk songs, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rogers & Hart, Johnny Mercer, Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, Johnny Cash (“Ring of Fire,” anyone?), Dick Dale, The Supremes (or any of the other great Motown acts), Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Bobby Darin, The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkle, Bob Dylan/The Band/Neil Young (pick one), U2, Bruce Springsteen, The B-52’s, R.E.M., and literally hundreds of others; not to mention music from soundtracks by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, or any of dozens of others – before wrapping it up with the obligatory John Phillip Sousa.
**Network coverage: ** NBC’s Macy’s coverage was virtually ruined by the excessive use of cutaway shots and pointless video overlays. The viewer can’t appreciate that Macy’s increased the number of shells by 20% this year, if NBC’s coverage misses at least 20% of the show! The Gratuitous Celebrity talking head lessons were inane and even redundant with each other, and often accompanied by a blurry graphic of a line of flagpoles. Memo to Katie Couric: Thomas Jefferson’s dictating a letter two weeks before his death, encouraging an enthusiastic observance of the 4th, wasn’t ironic; it was simply timely, or affecting, or heartfelt… but no more “ironic” than Alanis Morissette’s misinterpretation of irony. Besides, John Adams had famously endorsed the most ebullient festivities as appropriate to the 4th, many years previously.)
NBC didn’t interrupt the fireworks with commercial breaks, but their coverage was plagued with cutaway shots. One brief cutaway shot at the end of each musical piece (preferably overlaid with feed from the fireworks arena) would have been sufficient to keep the show in its East Side context. Instead, what we got was constant cutaways to the grandstands – many of them static head shots maintained for five or more seconds, often followed by leisurely pans across the East River and back to the fireworks. (Five seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but in a fireworks show, that’s losing an entire volley’s worth of bursts. Infuriatingly, some of the cutaways were for more like 8-10 seconds.)
Not only that, but their cutaway shots were stagey, limited to the people in the grandstands. By the end of the show, I felt like I’d spent more time with these people than with my own relatives, fer pete’s sake. Newsflash to the NBC producer: this ain’t the New Year’s Times Square ball drop; not only is the crowd not the main attraction, but the real crowd is scattered literally all over town, from the northernmost Jersey Shore to the Hudson River parks of Hoboken, from Staten Island to Brooklyn. You want some interesting crowd shots, send a couple of energetic camera teams out to get snippets of footage from people reclining on blankets in the parks, sharing a bottle of wine at an outdoor cafe, enjoying the view from high up in a condo building or office tower… I would compare the different possibilities to the city montage sequence in the SNL credits, which has always presented in interesting and varied views of the town, its people, and the SNL cast du jour – as opposed to just aiming a camera at the SNL audience, say.
By contrast, the CBS Boston Pops/fireworks show used fewer but less obtrusive camera angles – chiefly of the fireworks from the crowd’s perspective (with somebody’s head in the lower corner of the screen). That’s annoying too, but at least you still get to follow the fireworks, albeit from a greater distance. But the CBS show also found an interesting view or two, like that of a big periwinkle burst as reflected (briefly) in a mirrored skyscraper.
Unfortunately, CBS blew it by cutting away to commercials in the middle of the fireworks. Arrgggh.