Mark Reviews Movies: WHIRLYBIRD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 5, 2021

The discussions around Whirlybird—what it shows and, more importantly, what it fails to discuss—will certainly be more probing and critical than Matt Yoka's documentary itself. The core idea here is an intriguing one. Yoka juxtaposes the personal lives of the people reporting the news with the news they were capturing. The major problem is the movie's unspoken acceptance: both that the people are more significant than the news and of the central subjects' outlook that their tactics for, framing of, and goals in capturing that news was sound and right.

The subjects are Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard, who changed a lot of how breaking news is reported on both the local and national stages. Tur, who's a transgender woman (Neither Yoka nor the interview subjects respect her identity, which might be a choice based on what we learn about Tur or might have been a "twist" lost in the editing stages), would drive around Los Angles, looking to record footage of crime scenes, car crashes, and other tragedies. Gerrard started dating and later married the freelance reporter—a "stringer," always hunting a story.

To keep up, Tur purchased and started flying a helicopter. Gerrard would sometimes dangerously hang outside the vehicle, trying to get the right angle and a steady shot. In the ensuing decade or so, Tur and Gerrard would capture stunning footage of the city, often within the context of disaster and tragedy.

They also obtained violent footage from the 1992 riot in L.A., were the first to track down O.J. Simpson during the infamous police chase, and were first to provide a live broadcast of a police chase, which ended with the police shooting and killing a man on daytime television. It wouldn't be the last—not only because of Tur's apparent obsession with violence, which started to take on more than a bit of racism, but also because Yoka questionably decides to show some of these killings unedited.

The footage, now a time capsule, is certainly worthwhile, but only the couple's daughter (Katy Tur, a TV journalist herself) even offers a hint that the trend her parents started, while profitable and attention-grabbing, might not have been best for journalism in general. Whirlybird ignores this notion, diving into a tale of abuse that, unfortunately, feels more like a deflection of the deeper issues at play here.

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