Although I started making movies with my father’s Super 8 silent movie camera when I was nine years old, I didn’t take care to become really good at it until I was in high school. The films before high school were slapdash if they were live action, though I did somewhat better with animation. In the library of Sierra School I had found a marvelous book called, Make Your Own Animated Movies, by Yvonne Andersen and it changed my life. The book was geared for a kid my age and had lots of illustrations on how to make the magic happen as well as stills from animated films that other kids had made. The method of animation was called “cut out” animation and rather than painting hundreds of plastic cells laid over painted backgrounds, you cut out the characters in parts and strung the joints together with thread so that you could manipulate them across the background in the same manner a three dimensional stop motion puppet would be animated. This method was pretty easy to accomplish with good results. As my artistic ability improved and I advanced in the area of storytelling, the films became quite entertaining, though limited. My brother Mark caught on to the hobby early on and we both made films regularly.
Animated films were tedious to make, however, and so we began to focus on live action stories. Of course we had to come up with stories we could cast with our friends, costume reasonably well and produce with a minimum of dialogue because we had to sync the sound with a tape recorder. Also, after I turned sixteen and could drive, our ability to get around to the locations we needed opened up our options considerably.
Prior to holding a driver’s license, my best early efforts were remakes of real movies such as King Kong and Chaplin’s The Kid. “King Kong? Charlie Chaplin?” you might say with raised eyebrows. My imagination (or obsessions) knew no boundaries. King Kong was a slick five minute version. It was crude in some respects, but wholly entertaining. I had made a tape recording from a television showing of the original film, cut it down to some key scenes and used it as the basis for my own soundtrack. When we filmed the scenes my cast would be lip syncing the pre-recorded voices of Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray. We lived in the woods, so our jungle environment looked pretty good. Kong was animated on miniature sets just like in the original film and spliced into the live action. The effect of Kong’s hand picking up and setting down Fay Wray was handled by a painted cardboard cut out of the hand in fist position, which I held in front of the camera as our actress scooted along pretending to be in his clutches or stepping down from a level to simulate being set down. With the help of careful framing the effect on screen worked.
I was in a Hollywood memorabilia shop in San Francisco reading a book about the films of Charlie Chaplin that gave an easy to read synopsis of each film, which first sparked the idea of making something that resembled a silent era movie. I had seen clips from The Kid on TV before, but never the entire film and so I paused to read the synopsis of that film. I had previously dressed as Chaplin for Halloween, even though I had never seen one of his films past the occasional clip. I loved him and I didn’t even know him yet. But, based on reading that synopsis and having etched certain scenes I had seen somewhere along the way in my mind, I formulated a scenario of my own for a five minute black and white silent film version of The Kid. Because I couldn’t drive yet, I scheduled my mother into driving the cast to the locations around downtown Placerville and then the rest was filmed in my garage studio and the house. My version of the story included a pie fight with the Keystone Kops and a final shot of me as the tramp walking off into the sunset with “the kid” down the train tracks. These things weren’t in Chaplin’s film, but I had seen another clip of him walking down the train tracks and also thought of the Keystone Kops as quintessential silent era stars that were as much a part of what made a silent film as the fact of not having sound. The end result was a good coherent story with some funny bits and a very good likeness to an olde tyme silent film. I still like it very much and it amazes me now that my 15 year old self would somehow make that little film with the very few resources I had available.
One of my brother’s films required a tracking shot following an actor running along a stretch of Main Street’s sidewalk. We all awoke very early in the morning and hit Main Street by 6 AM. This way, we would have very little traffic or pedestrians in our way as we traveled down the street in the car pointing the camera out the window and following the actor. Then we parked and captured a myriad of other shots that would all be edited together to form a very fine chase sequence through the streets of Placerville.
I loved an old Suspense radio show episode called “The Hitchhiker.” Orson Wells was the star and the story depicted a guy driving across the country who would keep seeing the same hitchhiker. The hitchhiker would call out, “Helllloooo! Going to California?” in this hollow ghostly voice that was very creepy. The repeat sightings drives Orson crazy and when he calls his mother in the hopes of hearing a comforting voice, he is informed that she is prostrate with grief as her son died in a car accident on the Brooklyn Bridge––the place where he first saw the hitchhiker. I fashioned a screenplay from this radio show, gathered a cast and set out to film it over a weekend. The new thing with this film was a night shoot. We faked a close up of me driving at night by filming me in place pretending to drive as my Dad lightly bounced on the car hood and my brother turned a spotlight by the window to simulate passing street lamps. Friend Eli was at the camera. Next, with my brother dressed as the hitchhiker, we drove down the road with Eli as camera man again and captured a shot of the headlights illuminating the hitchhiker as we drove by. The edited shots made a nice sequence.
The rest of the film, shot during the day, took us to various points surrounding Placerville, including a 1940s era abandoned gas station outside in neighboring El Dorado City. This time, Eli played the gas station attendant with a few lines and my brother took on camera duties. I was in the Orson Wells role because I physically had to drive the car and all of my cast members were pre-driver’s license.
The film schedule was planned around a key scene involving a train that was supposed hit the car when it stalled on the tracks, thanks to the will of Death in the form of the hitchhiker. We had a confirmation that the Michigan Cal Lumber train would come by a certain railroad crossing on Mosquito Road at a certain time and we arrived early to get several shots at that location as we were waiting for the train. When the train came along I simply pointed the camera at it and then got a shot of the train signal lights blinking as well. All edited together the sequence had me driving towards the tracks and stalling. Then a shot of the train signal blinking. Then I look up and see the hitchhiker before me. Then a shot of the train engine coming towards me. I try to get out of the car, but the door won’t open. Another ominous shot of the hitchhiker. Then we did a trick shot with Eli walking along the tracks towards me in the car as if he were the point of view of the train engine. Shot in half time, the scene was speeded up and had the effect that the train smashed into me stuck in the car. The End.
There is no logic as to why the Orson Wells character is established as dying upon first sight of the hitchhiker, but then is actually killed on the railroad tracks later on, but that’s how the radio show went, so that’s what we did. The final result was intriguing and visually interesting. Our dubbed in voices never quite synced and I vowed to only make films sans dialogue from then on. I couldn’t get a voice as spooky as the one from the radio show to do the hitchhiker, so I just clipped that old voice and used it. We had to do the voices, music and all the effects at once the way Walt Disney put sound to Steamboat Willie in 1929. It was impossible to get the timing down perfectly, but I would adjust in showings by either pausing the projector or pausing the soundtrack to make one or the other catch up.
Our dog Penny and our cat Oliver were the stars of two films we made. My grandfather had bet me that I couldn’t train a cat like one would train a dog and I took up the challenge. I used raisins as food treats and trained Oliver to sit, stay and come to me on command. And he could do it along side Penny and know the difference between his name and Penny’s name when a command was given. This made it possible for Mark and I to direct Oliver in a movie. The first was about how the pets ran ramped around the house making a mess while the owner was away. By the time the owner returned home the house was back to normal and the pets looked like perfect angels. Penny and Oliver had a natural habit of rough housing with each other, so all we had to do was to put them together to instigate the fun. Oliver fought back, so the battle scenes were lively. A simple idea, but it was entertaining.
In the second pet film the owner left for the day again as in the first film, but this time a pair of cat-nappers showed up and drove off with Oliver in a bag. Penny’s mission was to follow the cat-nappers down to Main Street and save Oliver and then get him back home before the owner showed up having no idea what his pets had been through that day. So, there we were on Placerville’s Main Street in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, giving directions to a dog right in the middle of everything going on, calling “action” and rolling film. No one paid much attention to us and we easily got our shots. Penny mostly obeyed and we got most of her stuff in one take.
When Mark was a freshman in high school he came up with one of his best ideas for a film. It was another seemingly strange choice for a small town boy of the early 1980s for he wanted to make a 1940s style movie serial with a cliffhanger every chapter. The serial was called Trigg Solo and Mark wrote, directed and starred in it. I handled the driving, the camera and generally helped out in all departments. We filmed it in black and white and gathered together enough fedora hats, blazers and cap guns to give the characters the look it needed.
Our method for keeping track of all the footage was to cut up the scenes and clip them along a string so they wouldn’t get scratched. We’d put the scenes in order, then run them through the editing machine to splice them together. Then came the thrill of the first showing, which was always the best for the feeling of great accomplishment. We had the sound session before we showed it to our parents who were usually the first to see the final product outside of the kids helping us to complete the film.
In my younger years I set up a movie theater in the garage and held matinees for neighborhood kids, just the way the Little Rascals might have done it. I also collected commercially sold Super 8 Disney cartoons and other films of a kind that used to be on the market before video took over the world. What we were doing as a hobby was dying out fast and only a few years after I entered college it became very difficult to buy Super 8 film. About the time Super 8 film became a special order item I had moved on to focus on the theater. Had I become a film major in college I would have graduated into more advanced forms anyway. High School era showings of the films were held on the last day of school in the Drama classroom or shown as a parlor trick when friends and relatives came over.
After I left home for college and a life in the theatre, my brother continued to make a few films and in one particular semester when I was home again, we made our last and best film: The Ticks. We didn’t have a complete story, so we just made a trailer for a supposed horror film involving giant killer ticks sucking the blood out of humans. We just filmed all our funny ideas and strung them together with a 1950’s science fiction styled coming attractions treatment. The oversized ticks were made of gray balloons and black pipe cleaner legs. We rigged ways of having the victims pull a big tick off of their neck which caused a leak of blood squirting out, or the tick would spit blood back at the victim. The whole thing was fast and funny and the most enjoyable film we ever made. The Ticks was our farewell film and then my brother went off to college to study the theatre too.
Our production company was always “Jackson Films,” named in the first title card at the beginning of each film. Our back lot was Placerville and environs. No one else our age was doing anything as creative with their time. As I recount our movie making years I realize how interested in classic film we must have been, for we were obviously influenced by a great deal of old Hollywood product of a kind most kids we grew up with had little knowledge. In our own little way we were doing something amazing when you think of all the trouble other kids were getting into, or still others who were just dead from the boredom of small town life if they handn’t dedicated themselves to a sport at school. We were making movies and delighting ourselves and our friends in the process.
These days, with the ease of digital technology, affordable cameras and excellent computer editing programs a kid can do what we were doing one hundred times better technically speaking. Writing, casting, staging, costuming, scoring and such is another story, but I wonder what we would have created had we had the ease of today’s technology? For our time, the 1970s and ‘80s, we were doing quite a lot with a Super 8 camera and a reel to reel manual editing machine. Moreover, as an added benefit that we hadn’t considered, we have a record of our teenage years on film that not everyone can claim. Now what I see in those films is not only our quirky creativity, but our childhood home, our backyard that extended into the woods of the gold discovery hills, our dogs and cats and Main Street as it was then.
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