I wake up at 3:20 a.m. and I don’t remember where I am. It’s pitch dark and I hear a steady hum somewhere far below my room. As I reach for my iPhone, it comes back to me: I’m in a ten-by-twelve foot cabin on the F Deck of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, the largest container ship in the world. We’re at dock.There’s no telephone, no television, and no wifi, only an orange glow visible through the window. It’s night one of a four-night voyage from Algeciras, Spain to Rotterdam, and our video crew is onboard to get a behind-the-scenes look at the operations of this mammoth ship.
Jim and I flew to Hong Kong in April, five days before our program host, Johan Norberg, was to arrive. Part of our mission as director and field producer was to find the exact location where Milton had stood in Free To Choose to describe the powerful Hong Kong economy of 1980. We were armed with still frames captured from the then thirty-year-old public television series. That meant taking Johan to some of the most interesting places Milton presented in 1980. Well, if we could get Johan to us. Hong Kong, you see, was our first location. Those first few days, Jim and I worked with a local production assistant named Ho. Ho was himself a producer, who was very familiar with the city and would help us on our search. The most important matching location was an overview of the impressive Hong Kong skyline. The idea was to position Johan just where Milton had been, so that the angle and size of the buildings matched the old footage, and we could see the changes. We knew that we needed to be positioned across Victoria Harbor, shooting from the Kowloon side, but we had no idea how many of the original structures would still be there.