The Cameraman in Clogs, Always Rolling
A memoir by Jeff Schwartz
An ordinary guy from Queens picks up a video camera. For the next fifty years, it takes him to places he never imagined.
In a recording studio with Keith Richards, Schwartz gets the footage, then walks off with three of Richards’s cigarette butts as souvenirs. Off the coast of Morocco, he spends days aboard a fishing trawler searching for giant octopus. Arrested while filming on a Manhattan sidewalk, he winds up in handcuffs in a police station.
While filming behind the scenes of a movie, Schwartz draws Al Pacino’s stare through the lens, then gets kicked off the set. On Forty-second Street, a stranger steps in front of his camera and reaches into a paper bag. A gun? A knife? The man pulls out a lightbulb and starts eating it.
Sometimes, doing the job means questioning his role. He films a potential AIDS treatment, believes what he sees, and invests. When FDA rejection sends the stock crashing, he wonders whether his camera helped sell the illusion.
He films a surgical demonstration knowing the dogs will be euthanized, then regrets staying. At a get-rich-quick seminar, a salesman takes two dollars from a young man who looks like he can barely spare it, and Schwartz walks off the job.
A homeless man struggling with alcoholism wishes his grandchildren could climb him like a tree again. Speaking to the camera, he decides to enter detox. Did being filmed help him make that decision?
A veteran who has lost both legs discovers the freedom of surfing. “I can get in that wave, and I can forget about everything else. I’m just another guy enjoying life.”
Short, cinematic chapters follow the connections between experiences as Schwartz looks back. Through it all, he builds a business, raises a family, and balances the career he loves with the people he loves.
Written with humor, curiosity, and a willingness to admit when he got it wrong, The Cameraman in Clogs, Always Rolling reveals what fifty years of telling other people’s stories taught Schwartz about his own life.
“The camera taught me to see the world. My family taught me to be in it.”