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What the hell am I doing with my life? I think I’ve strayed off target. Digital this, HD that, CG something-else. None of this is what I used to be all about.

If the events of the notorious Sid Terror — “London After Midnight” kerfuffle (there, he wanted his name connected with the famous, lost Chaney film, now he’s got it) had an upside, it’s this: in an effort to try and figure out how we were all fooled for a short period, everyone from the casual film buff, to a few preservationists who gave the story some cred, to AICN posting not one, but two stories about this fiction, I found myself going down a path, through the horror fan boards, to the serious film preservation boards, to the collector’s forums to a place that I left behind a long time ago …

I have always loved film. Not movies, I love them too, I’m talking about the actual, physical delivery mechanism by which they are delivered. When I was young, already into filmmaking full-bore, with my own sound super-8 camera, projector and editing equipment, I stumbled into the world of pre-packaged excerpt versions of classic movies that were becoming available from all the major studios (these were the days long before home video, man, I’m getting old) and smaller distributors such as Blackhawk, Castle and Ken Films. Famous Monsters of Filmland readers may remember the ads in the back for “Phantom of the Opera”, “Dracula” and “The Raven”. These were traditionally very short versions of the actual features, running 8 or 18 minutes in length (the treasured 200′ version of “Star Wars” I had in 1978 consisted of two scenes with a couple of very crude title cards thrown in, but I still watched it over and over until it crumbled to bits), but they were actual films that you could watch in your own home whenever you liked.

One of the thrills of my life was getting home from a hard day at school and finding there was a film catalog waiting in the mailbox for me. I poured over every entry in detail and made long lists of what films I needed to have, and what was being announced as coming soon, what rare prints had been found and were being struck into Super-8 format.

I’m sure my family hated it, but I always made a big ordeal out of it. If we could have “movie night” every night of the week, I would have been the happiest kid in the world, but, as it was, maybe a Saturday night rolled around where there was nothing on TV. I’d head on down to the public library, which, even in the small town where I grew up, had an astounding catalog of Super-8 films. I’d grab a could of cartoons, maybe a Chaplin short and a couple of “features”. I even had a couple of trailers that somehow found their way onto some of the other reels that I owned, carefully spliced those out and has a “coming attractions” section (for attractions that would never come). Popcorn would be prepared and I would man the projector. Like I said, I’m sure my family hated it, but the group activity is what it was all about for me. These were films that I’d seen a dozen of times each already, but they just took on a different tone in front of an audience, no matter how small that audience may be.

You don’t get that with home video or DVD, no matter how hard you try. Sure, you can go through the motions and set up the world’s greatest surround sound system and have theatre seats, but you’re still basically watching TV.

It was the “spectacle” more than anything; these tiny sequential frames which I could (and did) examine with my own eyes, projected on a giant (well, smaller than your average LCD screen today) screen, now given life. It amazed me.

Amazing when I think back on it now, because I tend to gloss over it in my mind, but at the end of high school (when most other normal kids were looking forward to the prom), I found myself running my own theatre in a small Northern Ontario town. The place had been abandoned, years before, and now the lobby had been converted into offices for the town council, who saw a perfect PR opportunity in having a group of kids put on some shows on weekends as long as they promised to clean up after themselves.

It started out small, and maybe as they thought it would: couple of shows on the weekend, via rented 16mm projectors and pretty tame subject matter: “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, which had come out the previous year, and some old Bogart classics. Seemed a shame to me that there was all this other equipment sitting around being unused though, which I routed through every chance I had. Found a nearly complete 35mm print of “The Rabbit of Seville” (missing only the first half of the credits, as it had been chewed away, over the years, due to repeated showings) which I treasured and studied frame-by-frame for years after (parts of it made terrific bookmarks).

After initial success had been proven with the retro 16mm program, I pushed and was allowed to ramp up the operation a little more, toward legitimacy.

The program changed nearly every night, a regular, licensed projectionist looking after the 7:00 and 9:00 shows, and me, illegally manning the old 35mm arc-light powered projectors for the midnight shows (mostly classic midnight films that I wasn’t even old enough to see yet). Like when I was a kid, it didn’t matter that there were only a handful of people in the audience, at that point I was more than happy for the business to hemorrhage money because I had a giant screen (now it was a giant screen) and was blasting my favorite films at full volume in a big auditorium.

Had film school not intruded on my fun at this point, who knows, maybe I’d be talking about platters and popcorn sales right now. I did manage to wrangle a fairly hefty movie poster collection out of the experience. Hilariously, you could order pretty much any poster you wanted from Consolidated Film Services (or trailer for that matter) and they would send it (whether you were actually showing the movie or not), never asking for it back, and, as I recall, asking only a minuscule payment as time wore on.

Many classic films could be found in the 16mm library at university (I saw “I Walked with a Zombie” for the first time here), which made me happy and fed my addiction for awhile, but then home video hit in a big way. Everyone had it and stores specializing in video rentals started cropping up all over the place. As I had more and more to do in my daily life, it started to seem like a bit of an ordeal to thread “Bringing Up Baby” on a projector, having to change reels and all that when you could always just switch the TV on and slide the video into the player. If I needed my “film fix”, there were always the rep houses, but, over time, the ease of video even replaced that habit … and it continued … through DVD … until today, when I seemingly have forgotten what all the fuss about film was in the first place.

It’s funny how easily the transition takes place. One moment you’re Mr. Analog, the next, you’re cutting and pasting sections of screenplay without having to retype and non-linear, non-destructive editing becomes part of your daily routine. I miss the feel of film. I miss scrubbing through everything I’ve edited so far, not because I can do it but because I have to do it, because that’s how I get to the beginning or end, rather than one mouse-click that will take me there in a split second. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. I appreciate all that technology has allowed the independent filmmaker every time I sit down to create something, and, with that same tech getting cheaper and cheaper (I am still thrilled to death about the RED Scarlett, despite its caveats), the sky has virtually become the limit.

Yes, film is still there. We just can’t touch it anymore. Camera crew loads the mag on the camera, your shots are filmed, it’s rushed off to the lab, and you get back a tape or a hard drive. This is what you work with for the rest of the production. If you actually wanna touch and feel the stuff, you have to visit the lab, or look at what’s coming out of the film recorder when your digital intermediate is ready to go.

Maybe this explains the steady decline of films over the past few years; fimmakers have lost touch with their medium, literally. After all, can you sculpt without ever touching clay, or paint without picking up a paintbrush? Sure, you can do it all on the computer you say, but does computer generated art have the same soul that handcrafted art has?

I don’t have the answer, or the solution. Yet.

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