Ever since the first motion picture cameras began clicking and whirring in Hollywood, Catalina Island and the waters surrounding her have figured prominently into Tinseltown’s filming locations.
Ever since the first motion picture cameras began clicking and whirring in Hollywood, Catalina Island and the waters surrounding her have figured prominently into Tinseltown’s filming locations.
It is estimated that around 300 movies have been filmed in or around Catalina since D.W. Griffith’s “Man’s Genesis” was filmed here in 1912. The vast majority of the films shot on Catalina harken back to the Silent Film era and odds are pretty good that just about any such film you see that features an exotic island or “South Pacific” location was filmed on Catalina.
But Catalina wasn’t just a filming location. It was also a major “relaxation” destination for the movie stars of yore. The great movers and shakers of Hollywood like Cecil B. DeMille, Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson found Catalina to be the perfect place for both making money and spending it. On Catalina, they worked hard and they played hard.
As with any major commercial enterprise with a certain amount of risk involved, accidents did happen from time to time, such as the sinking of a barge during the filming of the Clark Gable version of “Mutiny on the Bounty” in 1935. The barge, loaded with camera gear and a number of crew members, sank north of Catalina Island taking all of its cargo to the bottom—and resulting in the drowning death of a crew member.
Fifty-five years later, in 1989, an eerily similar event revolving around filmmaking occurred; an event which also resulted in a single drowning death. The film was “The Hunt for Red October,” based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name and starred Sean Connery, who played the role of a defecting Soviet naval officer named Marko Ramius, and Alec Baldwin, who played the role of Clancy’s protagonist Jack Ryan.
Since most of the story revolved around a Soviet nuclear submarine, Paramount Pictures had contracted with the U.S. Navy to use the U.S.S. Houston, a fast attack submarine based at the Naval Submarine Base in San Diego, to play the role of the Soviet sub.
Shortly before dawn on June 14, 1989, the Houston was traveling through the channel near Catalina Island getting ready for filming later in the day. Unfortunately, at the same time, the Connelly-Pacific tug Barcona with three crew members aboard was also in the channel bringing two barges loaded with rock and fill material from the East End quarry to Long Beach.
At 4:45 a.m., obviously unaware of the presence of the tug, the Houston snagged the tow cable leading from the tug to the two barges she was towing. The tug was suddenly and violently dragged underwater.
Back on the Barcona, the startled crew members, clueless as to what terrible and invisible force had seized their vessel, tried swimming in the rapid vacuum left by the dragging tug. Two of the men, Captain Mike Link and 27-year-old Dan Rodriguez, managed to make it back to the boiling surface and safely aboard one of the tug’s barges. But the tug’s pilot, Bryan Ballanger, was not so lucky and drowned.
Incredibly, although the submarine surfaced after the incident, they made no attempt to rescue the two survivors. The two men had to be picked up later by a private vessel.
Adding insult to injury, the Navy didn’t even notify the Coast Guard about the incident until two hours after it had happened. The Navy did emphasize that the studio had nothing to do with the incident and that none of the film’s stars were present at the time.
The incident was so traumatic for Link and Rodriguez, the two survivors, that both abandoned their seafaring careers, although Link still works within the confines of Los Angeles Harbor.
Believe it or not, the captain of the Houston, Cmdr. John H. Sohl III, was not immediately reprimanded for the incident. In fact, it took two more near-disasters within the following months—an accidental flooding that threatened to sink the Houston and the accidental cutting of the sub’s sonar cable—to finally convince the Navy to relieve him of command.
Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores all over Avalon.
