That's a car that my Uncle Aaron owned in the fifties. This is the same Uncle Aaron who I mentioned in this article. Throughout the fifties, he often shot 8mm movies on two subjects. One was his travels around the world, which were extensive. The other was his favorite nephew, which was me. When he died around '62, custody of his film collection passed to me, and this included a Bell-and-Howell projector that was an antique even then. I watched a few of the movies but when you're ten, it's no big deal seeing yourself at age five. For the most part, the films stayed in a metal box in my closet, and when I moved out of my parents' home, I took them along and stashed them in a different closet.
Since I moved into my current home in 1981, they've been in — guess where? — the closet…and even if I'd been seized by some crazy urge to view them, I've had no way to do this. Uncle Aaron's projector expired a few years after he did, and its replacement, which I bought to run my Castle Films didn't survive the seventies. Every so often though, I'd notice the film box there and think, "Gee, I'd better get those things transferred to video before they rot."
Last week, I did. In the past here, I've plugged my pal, Stuart Shostak and his company, Shokus Video. He has a fine catalog of vintage TV programs that he sells on VHS and DVD, and you'd do well to browse his site and order many. But when I asked him who did good 8mm-to-DVD transfers, he replied that he did…and darned if he wasn't right. Practically overnight, he put about 150 minutes of cinema verite, Uncle Aaron style, onto DVD-R discs, and I couldn't be happier with the service or the quality. It came out a lot better than I'd dared expect.
The movies did not even begin to rot. There are plenty of things wrong with them — bad splices, scenes that are too dark, scratchy images, etc. — but I'm pretty sure all of that was wrong with them back in 1958, which is roughly the date of the last one we transferred. (I have more of Uncle Aaron's shaky cinematography, plus I have the dopey monster movies that I later made in my backyard with my friends and my uncle's camera, but I haven't gotten to them yet.)
Many of the problems, I can easily fix with Pinnacle Studio 9, which is my video-editing software of choice…though I made the decision not to "modernize" the footage with wipes or dissolves or anything of the sort. I'm just going to take out the black frames and messy splices, and try lightening the scenes of me getting my first bath. (I have a look on my face like, "Hey, get that camera outta here! Can't you see I'm naked?") I did a little tweaking the other night and it's amazing how, right here on my PC, I can correct bad edits and wrong exposure settings from 1953. I also did a frame-grab to create the above shot of Uncle Aaron's automobile.
Soon, I will have whittled the footage down to just what I want to keep. I don't really need an hour of my Aunt Dot posing with Russian peasants and waving in front of Buckingham Palace. I do need, or at least do want all that footage of me at various ages, if only to note one interesting progression. In the first reel of me, I'm being carried around since I can't walk. In the second, I'm crawling. In the third and fourth, I'm walking much the way I do now, only falling down every eight steps. In the fifth and sixth, I'm mostly dancing — probably the last time I danced, and you can see why.
As I watch it, I can still hear Uncle Aaron yelling, "These are motion pictures! Move around! Do something!" And then in the last reel, I'm doing feeble attempts at physical comedy — pratfalls, bad mime, and performing with my beloved Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. (You can actually see me doing a bad job of not moving my lips when Jerry's "talking." It had apparently not occurred to me at the time that providing his voice was not necessary for a silent film.) It all makes for a nice chronicle of my personal mobility. In a decade or two, when I'm much older and can't walk, I may edit in shots of me being carried around, just to complete the cycle.
But enough about this. Reading about someone else's home movies is only slightly less boring than being forced to watch them. I just wanted to share with you the amazing experience of getting these things onto DVD, and seeing not only myself but all those now-deceased friends and relatives. Boy, my parents were a handsome couple…and I'd forgotten how much Uncle Aaron, who occasionally let someone else take the movies so he could be in them, looked like Art Carney. If you have a box of old 8mm films in your closet, you might want to haul them out and get someone like Stuart to transfer them for you. Better still, get Stuart. Thanks to him, I have proof that I was once cute. Or, at least, cuter.