Denis Cameron was a stringer for CBS and was one of only five US journalists still in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 when the US-Lon Nol junta was defeated by the Khmer Rouge. He was actually a minor character in the 1984 movie 'The Killing Fields' and is seen in the French embassy scenes along with the other westerners whose white skins and passports saved them from the revolutionary chaos engulfing the Cambodian capital. There is a part in the movie when the Khmer Rouge, whose racist, messianic version of Maoist communism was just as hostile to Soviet communism as western capitalism, frog march Soviet diplomats into the embassy. 'Did you see that Denis, the Russians are coming!' quips one of the Red Cross team. There is another scene when the freelance photographer Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) is desperately trying to forge a passport for Dith Pran, the brave Cambodian reporter who saved the western journalists from execution at the hands of a KR death squad. Rockoff and Cameron are seen trying to set up a dark room in order to make a photo. Incidentally both Rockoff and Cameron loathed the movie for its simplistic politics and 'Hollywood' ending and disowned it. After nearly a month in captivity, Cameron and the others were trucked to Thailand having had to watch their Cambodian friends force marched into The Killing Fields. Cameron is also mentioned as a rather debauched drinking and womanising mate of the ill-fated Neil Davis in the latter's 1987 biography 'One Crowded Hour' (Tim Bowden), at one point investing in a floating restaraunt when Phnom Penh was under nightly rocket attack! Both Francois Bizot's 'The Gate' and Jon Swain's 'River of Time' mention that he and Richard Boyle (the star of Oliver Stone's Salvador) were trying to airlift several hundred Cambodian orphans to Australia when Phnom Penh fell. None of the children got out and its unlikely many survived the Pol Pot nightmare. He had also photographed extensively in the Middle East in the late 1960s, Vietnam and went on to work in Beirut, Iran and Iraq.
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