Home Movie Day News

Despite a wicked inner-ear infection that led him to hand over most of the day’s officiating responsibilities to Mayor Pro Tem Brewster McCracken, charismatic Austin, TX mayor Will Wynn personally stepped up to proclaim October 19th the official Home Movie Day in Texas’s capital city. Wynn declared, “We encourage all citizens to participate in celebrating home movies as a central component of our cultural heritage.” Local host Mat Darby accepted the fancy gold-stamped proclamation on behalf of the Austin HMD organizing committee, noting that “home movies and amateur films from Austin help show that history doesn’t happen just to famous people—it happens here, and it happens to all of us.” Video of the proclamation ceremony is available here.

Home movies aren’t the only images that, with careful handling, will provide a lifetime of enjoyment (or at least awkward questions from strangers who see them). Tattoos are forever, too. In that spirit, then, we’re pleased to announce that artist Graham Chaffee of Hollywood’s Purple Panther Tattoo shop has donated a $100 gift certificate for tattoo work to be awarded at the Los Angeles Home Movie Day event this year.

Whoever gets it, send us a picture so we can post the first official HMD skin art here! (Note: tattoo need not be home-movie related, but we’ll sure be tickled if it is.)

Thanks are due to our friends at Basement Films in Albuquerque for inspiring this special prize…

Six days to Home Movie Day, and the press coverage is starting to ramp up: there are articles and community-calendar blurbs and bloggings from Seattle, San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York and New Haven, Mobile and Miami, too.

Outside of the U.S., there’s been press for the Toronto event, which is shaping up to have another tidal wave of amazing stuff for 2008. This would be on top of the 500-plus reels that turned up last year…Hang in there, TIFFG folks!

The deluge of field reports from Home Movie Day events around the country and around the world this weekend will be coming in soon, so we’re going to catalog a number of the preview reports from newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other websites that appeared in the days leading up to HMD 2008 while we still have a chance.

• “Home Movie Day Tomorrow at Urbana Free Library: Dig Out Your Old Films” from “Smile Politely, Speak Directly. — A Champaign-Urbana Culture Blog.”

• Margie Compton and Ruta Abolins are featured in “UGA mines priceless historical nuggets from old home movies,” in the Athens Banner-Herald.

• Play New Haven features an interview with Molly Wheeler in its Home Movie Day Preview.

• The Examiner emphasizes “your most embarrassing moments” and how you can bring them to the public at large during Home Movie Day.

• Dr. Charles Tepperman talks up home movies for the University of Calgary Gauntlet:

“Home movies are really beautiful. They’re really surprising, there’s always unexpected things happening. Even though, when you think of these movies, you think of pretty typical kinds of things, one of the fun things about Home Movie Day is that you never know what you’re going to get. In addition to lots of interesting variations on the usual topics, we’ll also get some things that we couldn’t predict at all.”

• Skip Elsheimer goes on camera to talk about HMD 2008 in this News 14 Carolina interview, and check out the article (PDF link) on HMD 2008 in North Carolina in Our State magazine.

• Dylan Skolnick previews Home Movie Day in Huntington, New York, in a Newsday piece.

• Jimi Jones discusses Home Movie Day 2008 in Champaign-Urbana on WILL AM 850.

• West Michigan’s first Home Movie Day gets a preview in the Grand Valley Lanthorn, with words from coordinators Jennifer Proctor and Margo Greenlaw, as well as more info and a few videos in a piece on Viget.org, a Grand Rapids wiki.

As the field reports start to come in, we’ll lead off with a photo from Home Movie Day Los Angeles, which was actually held in nearby Culver City this year. And yes, that’s 9.5mm. Nice…

This photo is part of a set of Home Movie Day L.A. photos, which are in turn a part of the larger Home Movie Day Pool on Flick. If you have photos from this year’s event, please, add them to the pool - log in to your Flickr account and click here to contribute to the pool.