Premier Story hit its stride the final week of September.
      The trial of O.J. Simpson began with jury selection in downtown Los Angeles on a Friday, September 23, 1994. Tall scaffolding was erected and trailers set up in a huge media encampment in the parking lot of the Hall of Records across the street. Vendors were in place with their "Don't Squeeze the Juice" buttons and "Free O.J." baseball caps. Protesters had their placards. Tourists had their cameras. Police had their hands full.
      Premier Story had a new idea. We were going to do the show from outside the courthouse. Alison would get to prove just how good she was on her feet, on the run.
      We spent some money on this one, including three camera crews. One we placed on a tenth-floor balcony across the way. Two roved around to catch attorneys, key players and other activity on the short, tree-lined street.
      Most of the network reporters and anchormen divided their time between a media room upstairs, where no cameras were allowed, and the scaffolded encampment around the corner and across the street that was dubbed "Camp O.J."
      This was typical hands-off network television, another Brandenburg Gate where the Brokaws and Gumbels and Rathers could stand in front of their cameras with a nice tableau of the action behind them, while actually being far and safe from it.
      The grunts, the cameramen, lowly general assignment reporters and producers, stationed themselves in "The Pit," at the foot of the stairs that led from the sidewalk to the metal detectors at the courthouse door. The Pit was where we set up a director's chair and microphone for Alison to open the show and provide commentary as the melee raged behind her.
      We were in place. Julie and Rio and Beth and the other Premier Story kids had our coffees and pads and tapes. Hi-8 Joe roamed the parking lot looking for faces he'd become familiar with in transcribing all the Simpson footage.
      There was a commotion up around the corner. Born-again attorney Robert Kardashian was arriving, performing his real function-- bringing a fresh suit for his pal O.J. to wear in court. Alison jumped up and told one of the crews to follow.
      I turned to Brennan. "Uh, should we get her to come back?"
      He smiled and shook his head. "I don't think we'd be able to stop her."
      Alison dived into the roiling crowd toward Kardashian, the only woman amid the beefy cameramen and mike-holders. A couple of people on the edge of the crowd were already shouting, "Where's the bag?"
      She pushed her way through. "Mr. Kardashian, hello. I'm Alison Holloway, good morning, Mr. Kardashian. I've been asking you for some time--" The cameraman moving at her right had had enough of her pushing him out of the way. He responded by swinging his heavy Beta camera and clocking her in the head with the fifteen-pound battery. There was an audible knock, like a hammer against wood, but Alison didn't skip a beat. "--where the bag is? Will you tell me now, Mr. Kardashian?"
      They were at the bottom of the pit. Kardashian mumbled a few words but walked inside without giving up anything.
      Alison sidestepped the crowd and beckoned the cameraman closer. "Well, you know, I was saying earlier how dangerous it can be to be in the middle of that sort of frenzy, when these people arrive and you try to get some sort of quote, you try to talk to them and you try to get in there-- I hadn't done that before," she confided to the camera. "And I've come off, I think, worse for wear. Let me just-- oww!"
      Alison leaned into the lens and pulled back her bangs to reveal a lump the size of a Grade A jumbo egg directly over her right brow. She smiled and kept on talking. "One of the cameramen hit me with the back of his camera. I actually think he knew he was doing it, cause he said to me, 'Get out the way,' and I wasn't going to get out the way and this is the result."
      She looked into the camera as if it were a mirror and mussed her bangs to cover the wound. "Oh, well, I'll just pull my hair over it. I hope it's okay."
      She shrugged and walked off camera. Cut.
      Brennan and I stood stunned and amazed. She was sensational. We had our promo. We had our show. We had our new direction.
      "Somebody get her some ice."

      With Premier Story's new persona, tabloid TV had taken over the news. Nobody was doing television like this and word about Holloway's performance spread over the weekend. With a camera crew and a microphone and a small troupe of producers with Hi-8 cameras and notepads, Premier Story managed to bring the viewer into the middle of the chaos and make some sense of it.

      The shows became a commentary on the media as well as the justice system; unlike the ponderous pundits who look down from a place safely removed from the scene, we were reveling in the thick of it, getting people and places the "big boys" wouldn't even notice.
      There was John Roberts, Dan Rather's heir apparent at CBS, sitting with his little laptop outside a trailer in Camp O.J., complaining, "The problem with this story is there's a dearth of pictures"--while four-story scaffolding loomed over his head and a circus performed around him. There was the now-deceased rapper, Tupac Shakur, at court to face another weapons charge, recognizing Alison and expressing concern about her head wound.
      There was the reporter from a city in the Midwest, so excited to be covering such a big story. "We're in a trailer with about seven ABC affiliates from around the country and we're all great friends now. None of us knew each other before," he said, as if Camp O.J. were actually some sort of Camp Runamuck. "We're all cooperating, swapping tapes: 'Did you get this? Who got Shapiro today? Did anybody get O.J. at the jail?' All switching and swapping and you don't usually see that in the media."
      "No, of course not," Alison said, smart enough to just let him talk.
      "That's very unusual."
      "So where's the sense of rivalry now? Has it gone completely?"
      "I think we put it aside for now, because I think we've all realized that very few of us are ever gonna get an exclusive with this and the best thing to do is be cooperative and please the bosses back home."
      Perhaps we were revealing too much about the media.
     

      We were making our way back from shooting at Camp O.J. when we noticed someone had taken over our spot in the pit.
      I nudged Brennan. "Holy mack'rel, will you look who it is."
      "Oh, yes, oh, yes," he said, and took Alison by the arm and pointed out the person we were talking about. Alison laughed and told Jay Kay the cameraman what she'd do next. He rolled, she gave a wink, and talked to her friend the camera.
      "Something interesting has happened this morning. I came to the courthouse steps to take up my usual position down there at the base of the steps--and someone was standing in our spot. Jeff Greenfield, reporter for Nightline. They've finally decided to come down. They must have thought it's a good idea."
      It was beyond great. Nightline was chasing us again, deigning to cover a story that Premier Story had run away with the past two nights. What was even better: Greenfield was in our space, and he looked like a boob, standing on a small stepladder looking down at the mass of media and clucking his tongue in disapproval, while a man in sports jacket and dark glasses held Greenfield's luggage--and the ladder, so his star wouldn't tumble.
      We couldn't ask for a broader target; now Alison was on her way with a big smile on her face to shake Jeff Greenfield's hand and ask him a few questions. This was Gordon Elliott shouting through a bullhorn at Bryant Gumbel's boat; Hard Copy pouncing on Maury Povich down the street from the Fox building.
      If anyone would see the humor, it would be the wiseacre "new journalism" pioneer Jeff Greenfield, who came all the way from New York to do a critical commentary on the media's O.J. obsession.
      Alison was making her way through the crowd as Greenfield stepped gingerly off the ladder. "There he is now," she informed the camera. "Blue shirt; having a chat to his producer. Let's go in. Let's go have a word." Greenfield noticed the woman and camera heading his way. "Jeff. I'm Alison Holloway from Premier Story."
      He backed off as if confronted by a bad smell. "I know, but--"
      "Can I shake you by the hand? I very much enjoy your program and I saw you down here for the first time today. What made you come down today?"
      Greenfield hemmed. "No, no." Then he hawed. "I don't want to talk about that; it's not appropriate for me--"
      "Really?"
      "Yeah, it really isn't."
      Around them, producers from other networks and stations were nudging cameramen. Cameramen were hoisting their gear and shooting the confrontation between the upstart late night show and the mighty Nightline--which had apparently pulled rank and muscled into Premier Story's battle-won spot by the door.
      Alison carried on with a smile; taking the piss, as they'd say. "I just thought it would be fun to have a very brief chat--"
      Greenfield looked embarrassed, yet patronizing. "No, the last thing--"
      "No, I understand you're tied up. We're all very busy down here. I just think-"
      "I know. No, but I appreciate it and thanks for the kind words. But I'd just as soon--"
      "Okay. Well, nice to see you. And see you around for the duration of the trial-"
      "Oh, no." Greenfield laughed at her. Was she kidding? Lower himself like that? "No."
      "We're here for the long haul," Alison said. "I'm sure we will."
      Other journalists laughed at the confrontation. As Greenfield muttered something to his producer-bag holder, the thought of him laughing at us like that really rankled.
      I whispered to Joe: "Go over and ask him what he thinks of Premier Story. Ask him why he wouldn't talk to Alison. Ask him what he's scared of."
      Joe ambled over with his Hi-8. "Excuse me. Why wouldn't you speak to Alison Holloway?"
      Greenfield gulped and turned away from the camera. "No."
      "Who are you with?" Joe had been asking many journalists which organizations they represented. Edited together, it would make an impressive end-of-show montage. Greenfield felt himself to be a man who needed no introduction.
      "Why wouldn't you speak to Alison?"
      There were more hearty laughs from comrades waiting for the next burst of activity. Jeff Greenfield, the man who for years pontificated about the media, who in 1988 said news had been taken over by "electronic barbarians; the carriers of the basest impulses unrestrained by shame, or for that matter, pride," was seeing the camera turned back on him.
      "What do you think of Premier Story?"
      "Shall we just walk over there?" Greenfield suggested to his producer-ladder holder. They snatched the bags and set off toward the safety of Camp O.J. across the street.
      Joe followed a few steps behind. "Why wouldn't you speak with Alison Holloway? Why are you running away?"
      Greenfield skittered away to derisive laughter from the grunts in the pit. Our cameraman, Jay Kay, kept his distance as Joe followed the pair across the street. Spectators, vendors, cops and journalists alike looked on with a smile. Yeah, who's he to drop in from the airport to stand on a ladder, survey the scene, have a glass of Perrier at Camp O.J., and then fly back first class to file a report saying that all us people who care about this case are idiots?
      Jeff Greenfield, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, his buddy from Elaine's, was being mau-maued.
      "What do you think of Premier Story?"
      Greenfield and his manservant were safely across the road, entering the guarded Camp O.J., seconds from shaking young Joe, when they were assaulted from the front. A tall man in a permapress suit accompanied by a cameraman stepped forward to welcome the star to the isle of civility. "You know, usually you're the guy looking at the media," he crowed in a Southern-fried anchorman's voice. "Today, the media looks at you too, right?"
      Jeff Greenfield gave him a pained, "Are you an asshole?" look.
      "Richard Belcher with your ABC affiliate in Atlanta," the man said, extending a hand and sucking up to the big network boy at exactly the wrong time.
      "Hi," Greenfield mumbled, giving an ix-nay on the alk-tay jerk of the head toward Joe that Belcher didn't notice. "How you doin."
      "Fine. You got time for six hundred questions we're gonna ask you?"
      This man from his Atlanta affiliate was worse than the kid with the camera standing nearby. Greenfield muttered. "Yeah, um, but I think we oughta just wait until this rather unpleasant young man is finished."
      Joe laughed in good-natured surprise.
      Belcher pressed on with forced joviality, trying to make an impression on his bigtime colleague. "He's one of about twelve with Premier Story. Have you met him?"
      "No, but I, you know--"
      "My name is Joe Guidry," Joe said, extending his free hand. "How you doing?"
      "No," said Greenfield. "I have no interest in shaking your hand. This is the kind of lack of civility that I really think is unfortunate." He turned to Belcher. "So we're not going to do anything until he is...weary."
      Belcher looked at Joe. "Can I have a second with him?"
      "No problem," Joe replied.
      "Can I?"
      Greenfield sighed. "No, I'm--"
      "I'm just asking him," Belcher said a little too sharply to Greenfield. He had no idea what his idol had been through. "See, I've cut my separate deal with him."
      Joe realized he was being treated like some kind of gang member. "I just wanted to ask him who he was with," he said.
      Greenfield shook his head. "Well, we're not gonna get into--"
      Belcher stepped in it again. "Jeff Greenfield, with ABC News," he said confidentially.
      "ABC News? Okay."
      Greenfield rolled his eyes. "See, that's just what--" He sighed, defeated.
      Belcher pressed on with his interview. "But look, you've made, for years-"
      Greenfield turned his back to Joe's camera and shook his head. He wasn't going to answer any questions.
      "I'm not interviewing you," Belcher said. He was getting fed up. It was clear that Greenfield had gone from journalistic hero to pompous poop before his very eyes. "But this is part of what you do expertly, is to observe this kind of stuff. Is this the first time you've seen one like this?"
      Greenfield shook his head again, and for the first time his bag handler spoke.
      "He's still shooting!" Snitch. Rat fink!
      The good old boy was getting fed up. "I'm not. I'm not."
      "He is." Greenfield winced as if he was having a particularly unpleasant attack of intestinal gas. There was an uncomfortable silence.
      Joe broke it. "Who was that guy who was holding your ladder? Is it like, do you just hire him as a ladder holder?"
      That did it. Greenfield turned to the camera and stuck his damp face close to Joe's lens. "You don't get it, do you?"
      "I'm just asking a question."
      "No. This is in-civil. It's rude. It's invasive. And it's part of the problem. And you are part of the problem, not the solution." Greenfield was winding up into his best journalism schoolmarm lecture. "This is not the way to do journalism. And I feel very sorry for you if you have any hope for a career in it.
      "This is unpleasant business." He picked up his bags. "Okay?"
      Joe stayed put as the Nightline commentator, valet in tow, harrumphed off behind the Camp O.J. scaffolding.
      "Thank you," Joe said and, after a moment, added, "Are you hiring?"

    The Greenfield segment was the talk of the courthouse the next morning. We'd gotten an item into Page Six of the New York Post that made it seem old Jeff was a spoilsport putting the whammy on Joe Guidry's chance at a career. The phones and fax lines at Premier Story were ringing with calls from newsrooms back in New York--ABC included--congratulating us for taking the piss out of a holier-than-thou media commentator and showing him to be too prickly and ungracious to share a word or two with the woman whose show was beating the pants off Nightline on the Simpson story.
      Not everyone was laughing. Alison was having a coffee in The Pit when someone came over and warned her. Nightline was striking back. They were going to be looking at the media, all right. They were focusing on Premier Story.
      We went about our business. Alison was interviewing a sidewalk musician who'd been detained by police after following Johnny Cochran into the courthouse, when I got a nudge from someone else-- an ABC cameraman was a few feet away, shooting Alison.
      I went up behind her and whispered in her ear. Alison turned around and told Jay Kay to follow. "Hi," she said to the ABC cameraman. "Why are you shooting me?"
      The ABC veteran laughed, then sidestepped the question and Alison as he did a humorous dance around his camera and tripod. It was all good fun on the sidewalk--until a sharp voice cut through all the others.
      "You're interviewing my cameraman?"
      It was another of those bizarre, fortuitous television moments. Until then, Alison had been the only woman on a sidewalk crowded with sweaty male journalists, photographers, and street people. Suddenly there was another female. She was blond, too, and her haircut was quite similar to Alison's. Only she was about twenty years older and tough as a leftover Thanksgiving turkey.
      "Hello, I'm Alison Holloway from Premier Story," Alison said.
      "Judy Muller." She was another reporter from Nightline, taking over from Jeff Greenfield, who was probably in bed with an icebag on his head. She looked at Alison as if she were performing some unnatural act, talking to the cameraman--the cameraman Judy Muller told to shoot Alison. "Why are you interviewing my cameraman?
      "Everybody is interviewing everybody else. Why are you interviewing me?"
      The crowd pushed closer, eager for a fight. Our second cameraman, Chris Telford, moved in as well. Hi-8 Joe crouched and shot up from the sidewalk. Judy Muller's cameraman zoomed in as well. The exchange that followed was something out of Beckett.
      "I'm trying to find out why you're interviewing us."
      "Because it's sort of the media show, isn't it? Everybody's interviewing everybody else. Do you think it's a good idea?"
      "Lemme ask you a question, Alison," Judy Muller said, her eyes in a mean squint and the lines on her face growing taut, "when you yell questions at Kardashian like, 'What's in the bag' and 'Where is the bag,' clearly you don't expect an answer like, 'My God, you've broken the case, let me tell you right now, here on the sidewalk.' That's part of your shtick, correct?"
      Alison seemed taken aback. "Gosh, that's a very abrupt, upfront and very direct question. Um, I wouldn't ask a question unless I expected an answer. But you wouldn't ask me that question unless you expected an answer. You know, we go round in circles."
      "But you don't expect an answer when you, when you ask that on the sidewalk?"
      "Oh, I might, but I might not. I might, but I might not. You know, it's a very important issue. Let's not get away from what we're dealing with here. That's a very important issue. Let's not make light of it, okay?"
      "I don't make light of it. But don't we make light of it when we conduct that sort of thing on the sidewalk?"
      "Are you saying you wouldn't conduct that sort of thing on the sidewalk?"
      "That's what I'm saying, yeah." Judy Muller's face was stretched back in a rictus grin. She looked like she wanted to kill.
      "Are you?" Alison said. A print reporter scribbled notes. Everyone else waited to see who would throw the first punch. "Oh."
      "No?"
      "Oh, you're holier than thou," Alison said. "No, I don't think so."
      "Okay, thanks."
      With that, they backed off. Judy Muller turned and slipped into the crowd.
      I turned and smiled. "Hey, Joe!"

      Judy Muller corraled her cameraman and producer and was rushing toward the safety of Camp O.J. Waiting for the traffic to pass, she noticed the young black man with the Hi-8 camera behind her.
      Joe tried to get a question out. "Do you think--"
      "Do me a favor," Judy Muller growled.
      "Yes, ma'am," said Joe, following. "I just want to ask you a question, just a couple of questions."
      "I don't want to answer any. Bye!"
      They were across the street. "No questions? None at all?"
      "Nope!" Judy Muller pretended to be hard at work. She had the cameraman set up his tripod and shoot the CNN correspondent doing a standup on a plywood stage.
      "Don't you want to know what's inside of that bag?" Joe asked. "Don't you want to know what's inside of that bag, ma'am?"
      "Go away, fella." She pointed out something to her producer.
      "Please?" Joe was unfailingly polite. "Wouldn't you like to know what's inside of the bag?"
      Judy Muller put a hand to her lips and put her face into the camera like Jeff Greenfield did. "Shhhhh! We are recording," she whispered.
      "Excuse me." Joe stood silent, the camera fixed on the woman's hawklike profile. After a long pause came an almost inaudible whisper from Joe. "Don't you want to know what's inside of the bag? Don't you want to know what's inside of the bag?"
      Judy Muller turned her head slightly to the camera and said from the corner of her mouth, "Fuck off, fella."
      Joe was stunned. He giggled like a little kid who'd just heard a bad word. "Oh, you don't have to use profanity, now."
      Judy Muller and her crew moved on. "Thank you very much, ma'am," Joe said, meaning it. "Thank you. Tell Jeff I said hi!"

      Fuck off fella! We had our promo for that night's show. Sure, we put a bleep over most of the "fuck," but you sure got the message.
      It was the highlight of our story about how the folks at Nightline focused their cameras on us because of the Jeff Greenfield incident. We re-ran highlights from that segment, followed by Alison's encounter with the cameraman and the entire Judy Muller showdown, unedited, bouncing among three cameras and climaxing with Hi-8 Joe and the immortal, "Fuh-bleep-cough, fella."
      I had to feel sorry for Judy Muller. She couldn't report what it was really like in front of the courthouse. Her segment was rush-released to Peter Jennings' World News Tonight broadcast, a two-minute, well-balanced report on the "media circus" that described Alison as "one reporter who uses the shtick of asking Robert Kardashian what he did with O.J. Simpson's garment bag," followed by Alison's soundbite: "It's sort of the media show, isn't it? Everybody's interviewing everybody else."
      Fuck off, fella.

      The mainstream media was not about to let us off the hook so easily. Just as Peter Brennan waited for the other news shows to go after Robert Kardashian once we exposed the bag story, so ABC News gave us our comeuppance through other channels.
      Both were in the print media.
      The first was from Jeff Greenfield himself in his nationally-syndicated newspaper column...
      You might guess who fired the next shot across our bow: Howard Rosenberg, using his column in the L.A. Times.
     

     
      We didn't need to seek revenge. A few weeks later, Ted Koppel and Nightline provided it for us.
      When I heard about the Nightline segment, I had the tape brought into the office and watched it with Brennan. We couldn't believe our eyes. What a fool!
      We set aside a minute or so at the end of that night's show for a package making use of the clip. Alison set it up in the intro by mentioning that our Hi-8 Joe discovered there were imitators out there. We dissolve to Jeff Greenfield's infamous invocation: "This is not the way to do journalism."
      Freeze on his face. Joe begins the track: "Boy, was I disappointed. I finally got to meet one of my journalistic heroes, Jeff Greenfield, at the O.J. Simpson trial, and he tells me that."
      "This is unpleasant business," Greenfield adds.
      "I know it's unpleasant, but I still wanted to get into TV," Joe continues. "So, in order to facilitate our special access to parts of America normally not open to a television news crew, I proposed that I would go into these areas alone with a Hi-8 camera.
      "And I got exclusives with people like Prince Charles--and Kato! But I couldn't forget the hurtful words from Jeff Greenfield of Nightline."
      Greenfield: "This is not the way to do journalism."
      Joe: "So get this. This week, I accidentally turned on Nightline--sorry, Alison--and there was Ted Koppel himself, doing a story in prison. And guess how he shot it?"
      Here we see Ted Koppel from the previous night's Nightline. Ted is wearing a neat denim shirt, and he holds a Hi-8 camera as he is led by guards into a cage with another man.
      "In order to facilitate our special access to parts of the prison normally not open to a television news crew," Ted intones in voiceover, "we proposed that I would go into these areas alone with a Hi-8 camera..."
      There's Ted, looking like Charlie Brown in his safari outfit, holding the biggest goddamn Hi-8 camera you could think of, with a huge shotgun mike sticking off the front and all of it attached to headphones sitting like earmuffs on his Alfred E. Neumann coiff.
      They cut to Ted's POV of a prisoner. Ted asks, with squeaky insouciance: "So, you're in maximum lockup, right?"
      Dissolve from the con to Hi-8 Joe. "This is not the way to do journalism," he just manages to get out, cracking up.
      "But it works," Alison adds with a smile and wink. "Doesn't it, Ted?"