Snowden sends word of the Austin HMD event on behalf of Anne Shelton, the official HMD coordinator, and deems it a great success.
Howdy!
The first-ever Austin Home Movie Day was an unqualified success. We had about 50 people show up during our two-hour screening window, and nearly a dozen people brought films to show. The local NPR affiliate, KUT, ran a nice spot on us this morning (great soundbite from Caroline Frick there, citing the Zapruder film as a “Texas home movie”!). Listen online.
And we also got a blurb on the popular local-scene blog, www.austinist.com. Headline: “Hey Bobby! Film my butt!” Guess they took the spirit of that John Waters quote to heart…and fortunately we didn’t have any Beavis and Butthead types show up on the strength of it.
Highlights of the films we showed: Footage of the UT campus in 1946, including shots of girls dashing for the campus boundaries, stripping off their coats to reveal the shorts that coeds weren’t allowed to wear on university grounds back in those days; several years’ worth of local parades, family Christmases and Easters brought by Austin filmmaker and artist Luke Savisky and his brother, in which their older sisters (who were NOT twins) could be seen wearing identical outfits and unwrapping identical dollies under the tree year after year; shots of the aftermath of a flood in Lampasas, TX, in 1957, which was one of those natural disasters that never made the national newsreels, but devastated the local community and lives on in regional memory; and another reel from the collection of the woman who took the UT-campus footage—one which she shot in November of 1963. That reel came back from processing with a note from Kodak saying that if the film included footage of President Kennedy’s assassination, the owner should contact the FBI immediately. Caroline Frick made a photocopy of the letter for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image’s files, and I’ll try to get a scan of that up for everyone to see this week…
The films that were brought were predominantly 8mm, with a little bit of Super8 and one or two reels of 16mm. No novelty formats for us this year, but perhaps the greatest part of doing a first-time HMD in Austin is that the local crew were already planning for NEXT year’s event before we’d even had this year’s. We’re thinking of things like a week of feature-film screenings relating to home movies, lectures, workshops, the whole nine yards.
This year I ended up being the primary projectionist, which was a new experience for me—having always been running around too much at the LA events to be in charge of a machine. Fortunately, we had NO technical difficulties this year (aside from a lack of regular 8mm splicing tape, which made things a difficult for the prep folks, who coped with the problem manfully!). It was truly cool to experience the magic of making pictures appear out of thin air, I have to say. And I realized that the projectionist gets the luxury of SEEING almost every film that gets shown, which is a treat!
All in all, this was one of the best Home Movie Days I’ve participated in, and I can’t wait for next year (but I guess I say that every year)…
Check out volunteer Bratten Thomason’s pictures of the event.