by Garth Meyer
The video man of the Beach Cities has retired.
After 35 years taping Redondo Beach city council meetings and other city functions, Doug Nielsen’s last assignment was a special budget and finance commission meeting April 30, concluding a career that also featured work for Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach.
He started in Hermosa in 1985 with a new concept of videotaping city council meetings. Then other cities came calling: Inglewood, and Culver City, which Nielsen worked for from 1996 – 2022.
Redondo Beach Mayor Jim Light gave him a surprise salute at the start of the April 22 city council meeting.
“I don’t think they’ve ever given an award to a vendor,” Nielsen said. “Looking at (city hall) from a third-person perspective, when you see how hard the staff works, the city manager, they work hard. It became a family of mine. I have a lot of respect for the employees I’ve worked with.”
In May, Redondo Beach had one more project for contractor Nielsen – to record the State of the City address.
“I don’t mind doing special projects, just not nightly things in the box,” he said of the council chambers’ taping station. “It just got to be too much.”
Nielsen worked for Channel 10, Storer Cable in the South Bay, from 1982-90, filming live shows in a converted warehouse in Hermosa Beach; highlighted by “Wave Watch” and “Burgie Live Show.” He worked for Mattel for 20 years, shooting prototypes to be sent to the ad agency. He did lighting and camera for Columbia/Tri-Star Pictures, in hotel suites for press junkets at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills.
City councils were steady night-time work.
“It’s kind of nice to have been a fly on a lot of walls,” Nielsen said.
The first assignments he ever had for Redondo Beach, as a subcontractor in 1989, were taping GPAC meetings, the General Plan Advisory Committee, which completed a plan update in 1992. In January of this year, another generation of a GPAC finished seven years of meetings for a new plan, much of them taped by Nielsen.
“He’s been awesome, just great,” said longtime city clerk Eleanor Manzano. “He’s been very helpful, because we didn’t have to worry about that part. We’re just going to miss him being here.”
Nielsen began in video in 1977, with a two-man color wedding service called “Color Video,” the only area outfit then not recording in black and white.
“The camera cost the same as my car,” Nielsen said.
Consumer color video then was brand new.
“People would say, ‘you’re going to film it with Super 8, right?’” he said.
Instead, it was video on a half-inch open reel. Nielsen and partner George Vinovich would tell customers that, “Soon you will have a machine in your home and we can transfer it onto your T.V.”
The first camera they had was a Toshiba IK-12. The second one they later gave to client Sea Shepherd Society, which lost it overboard a ship in the Antarctic Ocean.
Nielsen and Vinovich would shoot six to seven weddings on a single weekend at La Venta Inn in Palos Verdes.
Upon retirement, Nielsen is now a California Surf Club founding member and a Friendship Campus donor with a room to be named the “Dougie Room”; one of the laboratories.
He paddles to pick up trash in King Harbor three times per week (mostly candy wrappers).
“He’s been professional beyond belief. He’s phenomenal,” said Diane Cagle, Redondo Beach arts commissioner, as she walked into an April 26 meeting. “I wanted us to be the last meeting.”
“There’s a new team coming in,” Nielsen said.
“Because we need a team to replace you,” said Cagle.
Over the years, former city council veterans would come back as commission members.
“You’re still here?” Nielsen recalls a few saying.
“Yeah, where have you been?” ER
