(part 2) 1   2   3   4   5  “I’m not a climber,” MacGillivray says simply, “so I needed someone who had those skills, as well a filmmaking background. After years of looking at mountain films, David’s work shined through.” A Newton-based filmmaker, mountaineer, and rock climber-with folklore fame from teenage years spent scaling the cliffs above Boulder, Colorado-Breashears, 42, first combined his climbing and filmmaking skills on a Himalayan project in 1978 and then worked as a sound technician on an Everest expedition in 1981. In 1983, he became the first to transmit live television images from Everest. Over the years, Breashears had organized 18 Himalayan expeditions, 11 of them on Everest, and he was the first American to summit the highest point on Earth twice. After ten awards, including five Emmys, an Academy Award nomination, Telluride’s 1992 Best Mountain Film, and its 1994 Grand Prize, Documentary, he established himself at the forefront of an entire industry: adventure filmmaking, eight on Everest alone. If anyone could handle the unruly 98-pound IMAX camera in the harsh Everest environs, it was Breashears. But, while he had agreed to take on the IMAX technology and its huge appetite for film, he insisted the fully-loaded camera and battery weigh no more than 45 pounds. So, for over a year, Kevin Kowalchuk and the IMAX team rebuilt the camera. They removed the fly wheel, spent days hollowing out any and all available internal mechanics, remade the six aluminum side panels out of lighter magnesium, replaced oil-lubricated metal components with plastic ones, and color coded and reduced the number of all the knobs and switches to make operation nearly child’s play. Then Kowalchuk and Breashears took their IMAX “lite” to the coldest place they could find for a test run-the top of Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire. Not satisfied with testing merely the camera that day, Breashears removed his mittens and plowed his hands into a snow bank and kept them there for nearly a minute. "I thought the guy was crazy," Kowalchuk remembers, "but he said he wanted to make sure he could thread the film with freezing cold hands." Crazy like a fox. more...
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