‘Whirlybird’ Review: The Rise and Crash of LA’s Married Helicopter Newscasters

, is the compelling story of the thrill-seeking couple’s rise and descent before their divorce in 2003. It’s a documentary about how the drive to document — that itchy awareness that somewhere in their megalopolis,is happening — can distract people from their own reality. As the pair cruised the skies looking for trouble, both could ignore Tur’s hot-temper and Gerrard’s emotional exhaustion.

And yet, even this recounting of Gerrard and Tur’s turbulent romance doesn’t entirely belong to them. When Tur leased the couple’s first chopper in the early ’80s, a financial risk for two freelancers expecting their second child, the country itself was plunging into a toxic affair with the 24-hour news cycle. Yoka monitors how these tandem passions — their home-life dramas, and the TV ratings obsession with gripping footage — made it hard for their reporting to be neutral.

Also left unsaid is the film’s implication that the couple’s part in dehumanizing swaths of Los Angeles exacerbated the city’s racial tensions. This comes to a head at the midpoint of the film when four LAPD officers were acquitted of beating an unarmed man named Rodney King, footage that was itself a pivot point in the power of the lens. As Los Angeles exploded, the spouses took to the skies. Tur narrated the assault on truck driver Reginald Denny on live air.

Among the tens of thousands of hours of the couple’s life’s work, Yoka is repeatedly drawn to images of an unfocused lens swirling over the landscape, a camera disoriented to what matters. Occasionally, “Whirlybird’s” score is jarringly playful for the images onscreen. But the doc is a fascinating insight into how individual choices can shape the news.

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