Bob Brown(1942-1978)
- Cinematographer
Brown was the NBC-TV cameraman who accompanied Rep. Leo Ryan as the Peninsula congressman led a team to Jonestown to investigate reports that Jones' quasi-religious compound there was holding people captive through coercion and mind control.
As the half-dozen gunmen sent by cult madman Jim Jones bounded off a tractor-trailer, rifles in hand. As they aimed at him. As he took a bullet to the leg. And as he fell to the ground, the wounded leg crumpling under him.
Within seconds he was dead with a final shot to the head. And the film in his camera, shakily showing the attack that ended his life and those of four others, including the first U.S. congressman ever to be killed in the line of duty, became one of the most grimly riveting video clips in history.
As a camera operator from San Francisco to Los Angeles throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Brown river-rafted with President Jimmy Carter, filmed war protests in Berkeley, and covered so many bloody horrors, including the Juan Corona serial murders, that he earned the nickname "Gory Brown,"
In 1970, they both went to Vietnam so Brown could cover the war, and that's when he was shot out of a helicopter. He was filming a battle in Cambodia, and when the chopper took rounds it pitched to one side, and he plunged 40 feet to a field of thick grass and cracked his neck and collarbone, Bob just picked himself up and ran to a landing zone.
Four years later when police got into a shootout in Los Angeles with SLA members who had earlier kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, whose family founded the corporation that owns The Chronicle. As the two sides blasted off hundreds of rounds, Brown found himself on his belly under the fire line - shooting footage, just like in Vietnam.
As the half-dozen gunmen sent by cult madman Jim Jones bounded off a tractor-trailer, rifles in hand. As they aimed at him. As he took a bullet to the leg. And as he fell to the ground, the wounded leg crumpling under him.
Within seconds he was dead with a final shot to the head. And the film in his camera, shakily showing the attack that ended his life and those of four others, including the first U.S. congressman ever to be killed in the line of duty, became one of the most grimly riveting video clips in history.
As a camera operator from San Francisco to Los Angeles throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Brown river-rafted with President Jimmy Carter, filmed war protests in Berkeley, and covered so many bloody horrors, including the Juan Corona serial murders, that he earned the nickname "Gory Brown,"
In 1970, they both went to Vietnam so Brown could cover the war, and that's when he was shot out of a helicopter. He was filming a battle in Cambodia, and when the chopper took rounds it pitched to one side, and he plunged 40 feet to a field of thick grass and cracked his neck and collarbone, Bob just picked himself up and ran to a landing zone.
Four years later when police got into a shootout in Los Angeles with SLA members who had earlier kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, whose family founded the corporation that owns The Chronicle. As the two sides blasted off hundreds of rounds, Brown found himself on his belly under the fire line - shooting footage, just like in Vietnam.
