Scanners
Ebertfest 2008: The year without a Roger?
View image The eponymous Roger Ebert.
I’m in Urbana. My bag isn’t. (It’s an old canvas backpack thing that I never should have checked anyway. Now I’m paying for it.) I’ll be reporting from Ebertfest this week, but I’m heartbroken that, for now at least, Roger won’t be here. In case you haven’t checked out his brand new, under-construction blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, please do so. Roger writes:
The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip….
Still hungry? A Feast for the eyes…
Let us give thanks for Matt Zoller Seitz, who cooked up this luscious banquet — entitled “Feast” — for our delectation in this season of gustatory revelry. It is available on the Moving Image Source site in two flavors — straight up and annotated. Matt writes:
Writer-director Paul Schrader has said that sex and violence are the vicarious pleasures that drive the vast majority of commercial films, and he’s right. But food is arguably just as alluring, and in its way, its appearance on screens — and when it does appear, it’s often as lovingly lit and framed as a reclining nude — might be even more revelatory and pleasurable, because its appeal isn’t solely based on unattainable fantasy. It’s not bloody likely that any of us will ever be able to bed a movie star or save the universe from evil. But if we study and practice the culinary arts (or are lucky enough to know somebody who’s already an expert) we can experience delights that are as astounding as any mouth-watering scenario that food-obsessed filmmakers can devise. Every plate of food that appears onscreen is a dream that could come true.
Altman’s Dangerous Woman Speaks
Robert Altman on the set of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Photo by Virginia Madsen.
At RogerEbert.com, Virginia Madsen has written a lovely remembrance of playing the “angel of death” in “A Prairie Home Companion,” the final film directed by Robert Altman, who died two years ago this month. An excerpt:
He never knew where or when the “angel” should appear to haunt or float. Sometimes he would just look at me for a long time. I always held his gaze and often wondered what he was thinking. these were always quiet moments, in the midst of all the fun and chaos of a working set. He would sometimes hold my hand and then let it go as he went on to direct. […]
… [He] always wanted me to move in such a deliberate way.There would be take after take sometimes, with Bob saying, “Do it again but this time even slower” Not an easy task for me because my physicality and that of all the other performers was so animated! He even briefly entertained the idea of having me pulled along on wheels so I would really appear to float. He also designed my big hair and white trench. Guess that was angelic to a man like him! Or film-noir angelic anyway. He gave me a copy of “The Long Goodbye.”
Along with a few anecdotes, she offers her thoughts (and remembers Altman’s) on the gorgeous photo above. Read the whole thing here.
A few of my own Altman memories, and an appreciation of Madsen’s final moments in the film here . I think I know what I’m going to be revisiting tonight….
Wither While You Work
View image: The cubicle jungle. From “Office Space.”
Just published at MSN Movies (which reportedly recently passed Yahoo! as the highest-trafficked movie site on the web — even more than IMDb!): my survey of ten movies about the tortures and triplicate-tribulations of having a job (or not), called “Wither While You Work,” from “Modern Times” to “Time Out” to “The Office” (BBC). Please check it out and let me know what you think — especially if you’ve ever been accused of suffering “a bad case of the Mondays.” Here’s the intro, to give you a taste:
“When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself: ‘What would General Motors do?’ And then I do the opposite.”
— Johnny Case (Cary Grant) in “Holiday” (1938)
On my right calf is a tattoo of a UPC code that expresses far more concisely and profoundly than language how I feel about doing a job just for the paycheck. It’s the bar code from Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album — you know, the one with the naked baby boy swimming after the dollar bill on a fishhook. It’s my little private joke — and constant reminder — about feelings of depersonalization I felt at old jobs. And if you’ve ever been employed at a place that made you feel like a shrink-wrapped product, or like you were just treading water until the next paycheck (and who hasn’t?) … well then, you know what it’s like.
Movies and television usually deal with work in generic ways: The characters have jobs, and we sometimes even accompany them to work, but we rarely get a feeling for what it’s like to actually do their jobs. That’s why Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” (and now its sequel, “Clerks II”) connects with many people who have spent (or spend) so much time in tedious drudgery at low-level jobs where they are forced to interact with extremely unpleasant people — either the unwashed public or nut-bag co-workers.
Hitler on Leno
Of this I do not tire. Go ahead and click. You know what you’re about to see — but the subtitles are exceptionally humorous.
Screwball Economics (with Preston Sturges)
NEW! Version 1.1. Now with easier-to-read captions!
Everything I know about economics I learned from the movies. (Collected knowledge after the jump.) So when times get tough, I consult Preston Sturges. Here, I have condensed the financial wisdom of a lifetime into less than five minutes — all of it distilled from 1937’s “Easy Living,” written by Sturges, directed by Mitchell Leisen, and starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, Ray Milland, Mary Nash, Franklin Pangborn, Luis Alberni and Andrew Tombes, among many others.
Sturges himself puts in an appearance to explain the key principle behind all successful investment strategies.
And in his movie, there’s a happy ending.
Emotional fascism — er, criticism
Ooops. “Emotional Fascism” was the original title of the third Elvis Costello LP, released as “Armed Forces.” What I meant to say was that, in my final contribution to The Movie Tree House over at SLIFR, I get all emotional about Mark Ruffalo’s teeth, Annette Bening’s face and a lonesome cowboy who gets choked up when he calls his mom. Those would be references to “The Kids Are All Right” (again) and “Sweetgrass” (again).
And I bring up the extremely mixed critical reception for “Black Swan” (which is Jason’s favorite movie of the year, and one of the ten worst according to the NY Mag/Vulture critics’ poll on the subject). Come see what Sheila, Jason and Dennis have to say about it all.
Meanwhile, I’m frustrated to report that, because of other personal and professional obligations, I haven’t yet been able to write about “True Grit” or “Sweetgrass” or “Another Year” or “Black Swan” or “October Country,” which are among the more intriguing pictures I saw in late 2010 (or the first couple weeks of 2011).
Raping Dakota: From the Sundance resumé movie to “Indie Guignol”
Raping Dakota and Feeling Minnesota: Despite all the publicity, “Hounddog” ain’t nothin’ but a dog, say critics. It’s not dangerous, after all.
“As its poster and advertising remind us, “Quinceañera” won both the jury and audience prizes at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and those honors are strangely indicative of its dramatic and stylistic limitations. If there was ever a movie that seemed precision-tailored for a Park City reception, this is it — the quintessential example of the festival’s favored brand of hand-crafted, slice-of-life, youth-oriented filmmaking that expresses affection for a nicely captured American subculture. In other words, it’s a Sundance specialty, right from the box.
“This is a shopping-list movie: A double coming-of-age story spiced with local color; a bittersweet portrait of a Los Angeles neighborhood in transition; a warm and soapy celebration of a Mexican-American community. “Quinceañera” is also a thoroughly predictable melodrama that’s both kitchen-sink and ‘After-School Special.'”
— from my review of “Quinceañera” last summer
One of the debilitating side effects of the pop-culture “mainstreaming” (if I may use an ugly marketing term) of the Sundance Film Festival brand over the last 20 years or so has been the over-glorification of what I call resumé movies. These are films, cobbled together from familiar elements designed to appeal not only to a Sundance jury (or audience), but with an eye toward getting the filmmakers some “Hollywood” money for their next picture. And that, in itself, is fine. Nothing wrong with trying to climb the ladder of success. But I don’t particularly want to watch somebody’s resumé on a movie screen, particularly when it’s sold to me as a “personal story” (or a “subversive thriller”) and plays like pure Hollywood formula schlock.
John Sayles admits that “Return of the Secaucus 7” was just such a resumé picture. After years of writing horror and exploitation scripts for Roger Corman (“Piranha,” “The Lady in Red,” “Alligator”), he wanted to start directing his own, more personal stuff. The reason there’s a basketball game in the movie was simply to show that he knew how to handle an action sequence. But Sayles was expanding his craft and moving from formulaic commercial genre filmmaking toward more personal projects, not the other way around.
Remember “Project Greenlight,” the HBO (then Bravo) series, produced with good intentions by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, with the Weinstein Miramax? The deal was that they would choose an unproduced first-time script and give a novice director a chance to make the movie, which Miramax would finance and distribute. By the third (and final) season, they joined forces with Wes Craven and were making a horror exploitation film for Miramax’s Dimension division.
“The Bridge”: Legends of the Fall
This is the end.
“The Bridge,” Eric Steel’s chilling masterpiece exploring the yawning chasm between life and death, between the steel suspension of the Golden Gate Bridge and the cold hard surface of the water below in San Francisco Bay, is now available on DVD. It’s a film that goes deeper into that void of despair and self-obliteration than any film I’ve ever seen. I wrote about it several times in 2006:
A movie that takes suicide seriously, and considers the pain of the person who wishes to die as well as the anguish and guilt of the survivors, is a rarity. Over and over, survivors say they don’t understand why someone they knew and loved wanted to cease to exist; but a surprising number admit the agony that would drive someone to suicide is beyond their imagination. They have to accept, and respect, that it was real.
A father says: ““Some people say the body is a temple. He thought his body was a cage, a prison. In his mind, he knew he was loved, that he had everything and could do anything. And yet he felt trapped, and that was the only way he could get free.�? “The Bridge” makes the unthinkable, taboo subject of suicide real in honest and realistic ways that maybe even those who have never considered it can understand. The mother of a jumper recalls it took someone else to finally get her to realize: “It’s not about you. It has nothing to do with you.” That may be as hard for some to get their heads around as the suicide itself. Suicide is the ultimate solipsistic act; it’s not about anyone else.
The few, mostly superficial discussions of suicide we have in our culture (30,000+ in the U.S. in an average year; only about 25 or so off the Golden Gate, which is nevertheless the world’s leading suicide destination), tend to objectify the suicidal person and concentrate on prevention and grief and downplaying the reality out of fear that others may be encouraged to try it. Copycat incidents are real, but peer pressure is not one of the leading causes of suicide — particularly off the Golden Gate Bridge. It takes a certain kind of personality to choose such a dramatic, public exit, and the bridge is already famous as a suicide spot.
From my review in the Chicago Sun-Times:It’s an awesome sight from up there, the wind and dizzying height halting your breath as you gaze across the strait. The sun makes silver ripples on the churning blue-green water and the horizon glows blindingly bright at the time of day when the sky and the sea converge. The cliffs, crinkled with shadows, form a paradisiacal gateway. And then, in the periphery, there’s a tiny momentary rupture in the mythical postcard landscape. A small white splash flickers in the water. And in the great bright cacophony of the scene, Icarus disappears beneath the surface.
That’s a description of Peter Breughel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” and William Carlos Williams’ poem by the same name, intermingling with images from Eric Steel’s “The Bridge,” a film about 24 deaths and one survivor in a year in the life of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. “The Bridge” consciously invokes Brueghel, and after I’d watched the movie and looked up the painting again, hundreds of images of the Golden Gate from “The Bridge” (and my memory) came rushing back to me, as though projected at high speed over Breughel’s canvas. Each small white splash, of course, marks the end of a life. […]
Witnessing the last few moments of these people’s existence, I thought of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, which have followed the contours of a handful of lives for 49 years now, revisiting them at seven-year intervals. “The Bridge” views human life from the other end of the spectrum — showing the end, and then working back from there.
And because these jumpers chose such an open and public way to end their lives, I have no ethical problem with what the cameras observe; amateur photographers often catch the same sights inadvertently. One survivor tells of being interrupted by a German tourist who asked him to take her picture, just as he was preparing to jump.
Looking this closely and intently into suicide, you almost fear too much empathy, the way you dread the vertigo that accompanies acrophobia: What you’re afraid of is not so much that you might fall, but that impulse within you that wants to eliminate the yawning tension between you and the surface below….
“The Bridge” is brave and unflinching, unshakably haunting and deeply mysterious. I doubt I’ll forget it until the day I die.
“This is where we came in…”
I grew up in a time (the 1960s and 1970s) when commercial, technological and artistic conventions accustomed us to listening to music on LPs and watching movies in theaters. For the most part, we listened to one side of an album at a time (eventually, CDs — although more easily programmable — would play 70+ minutes of uninterrupted music, which changed song-sequencing priorities). And we saw movies from start to finish. I’m too young to remember the original ad campaign for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” in 1960, but later on (when I got my hands on some original lobby cards — those were the 11″x14″ images displayed with the posters at the entrances or in the lobbies of theaters) I noticed it was built around the apparently novel pitch that audiences had to see the movie from the start.
Now, if, like me, you were in college (or university, as they say back East) when Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in “Annie Hall” announced that he had to see a picture “exactly from the start to the finish,” and you thought that made perfect sense, it seemed bizarre to imagine a time when people had to be encouraged to show up before the feature started: “No one… BUT NO ONE… will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance…” (It turns out Paramount had done something similar with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” just two years earlier: “It’s a Hitchcock thriller… You should see it from the beginning!”) As the proprietor of the Opening Shot Project, which emphasizes the importance of the first shot in setting up and framing certain films, the idea that somebody would watch a movie without having seen the beginning is incomprehensible to me. Why cheat yourself of the joys of discovery and development? Or just knowing what’s going on in the story?
Star Wars: Episode VII — Resurrecting Mace Windu
View image
That’s what flashed through my mind when I saw this top image in an online ad, anyway. One of these pictures is from a “Star Wars” movie (I forget which one, but it was Episode I, II, or III, I can tell you that). The other is from “Resurrecting the Champ,” starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett. Can you tell which one is which?
(Hint: One of the movies does not, as far as I know, feature the Grand Master of the Jedi Order.)
View image
Answer: In the top image, Jackson plays an older Yoda. In the bottom picture, Yoda is played by a different actor.
And the Muriel™ for the Oscar™ for Best Picture goes to…
In case you didn’t know, the top five Muriel Awards for Best Picture of 2009 are:
1) Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”
2) Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker”
3) Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox”
4) Joel & Ethan Coen’s “A Serious Man”
5) Olivier Assayas’s “Summer Hours”
(Click titles above for mini-appreciations by Muriel voters.)
Surprisingly, three of those are among the ten Oscar nominees for Best Picture, too. I was honored to be asked to provide a Muriel blurb for the Coens’ existential comedy, my favorite movie of the year. It goes something like this:
Tony Soprano, Barton Fink & Charles Foster Kane: Whaddaya want?
“It goes on and on and on and on…”
It was 1991 and we were talking about “Barton Fink”:
Joel Coen: … I also don’t think it’s as difficult as some people think it is. I mean, some people come out going, ‘I don’t get it.’ And I don’t quite know what they’re trying to ‘get,’ what they’re struggling for.
Ethan Coen: It’s a weird story, but it’s a fairly straightforward story that I think can be enjoyed on its own terms… ‘Barton Fink’ does end up telling you what’s going on to the extent that it’s important to know — you know what I mean? What isn’t crystal clear isn’t intended to become crystal clear, and it’s fine to leave it at that.
Joel Coen: But we have had the reaction where people leave the movie sort of uncomfortable and befuddled because of that. Although that wasn’t our intention to do that. I was going to say that maybe our telling of the story wasn’t as clear as it should have been, but I don’t think that’s true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.
The question is: Where would it get you if something that’s a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn’t get you anywhere.
Where would it get you? That’s what I was thinking about after the “Sopranos” finale last night, and I remembered this conversation. What if Barton had opened the box? What then? I’ve mentioned the ways “The Sopranos” has paid tribute to the Coens’ “Miller’s Crossing” (particularly in “Pine Barrens,” the whacking of Adriana, the lawyer named Mink), right down to the ambiguous (and perfect) ending. Which is also in the spirit of “Barton Fink.” I can’t imagine anything more true to the show, or more dramatically satisfying, than what happened Sunday night. (I’m also reminded of those who were desperate to know, once and for all, if Julia Sweeney’s Pat character on “SNL” was a man or a woman — when it was perfectly obvious that the whole conception of the character was that there was no answer to that question. The question is the character. That’s not only the joke, it’s the punchline.)
What if you could open this? Then what?
So, for those who wanted to “know what happened” in Episode 86 of “The Sopranos” (and apparently there are lots of them — evidently casual “fans” of the show who haven’t been paying any attention to what it’s about for eight years), I have to ask: What did you want? If any or all of the things you expected happened, then where would that get you?
Series creator David Chase obviously knew that if he provided one or more of the usual denouements, it would color everything that came before. So, Tony gets his comeuppance, by getting whacked, or losing family members, or going to jail, or going into the Witness Protection Program like that schmuck Henry Hill in “GoodFellas.” Aha! That’s what this has all been leading up to! What could be more anti-climactic than any of those trite outcomes? You’ve seen them all before in other movies, anyway. To me, they would have spoiled “The Sopranos” by arbitrarily assigning it a hackneyed and finite “moral lesson” end-point.
“The Sopranos” has always been founded on the proposition that human nature, character arcs (Christopher: “Where is my arc?!?!”) and narrative structures are roughly the shape of… I don’t know, onion rings. People have breakthroughs, illuminations (Tony: “I get it!”), vow to change their ways, think they have changed… and then fall back into their old ways. Because that, fundamentally, is who they are.
AJ winds up being the same spoiled brat he was in Season One. Meadow continues to be the mildly rebellious princess (and she’s the only one in the house who seems to unambiguously acknowledge and even accept what Tony does for a living — hence her not-so-subtle dig at her father about why she wants to become a lawyer), but within bounds that will still win parental approval. Christopher straightens out, and then relapses. Carmella leaves Tony on principle, and then succumbs to the same old pattern of denial and expensive kickbacks that formed the basis of her marriage from the beginning. Dr. Melfi convinces herself that she’s helping Tony, and then dumps him in an unprofessional huff when publicly exposed, simply because she got “caught,” as if she were one of his mistresses. Tony the sympathetic sociopath learns to blame everything on his mother as his latest way to avoid reforming or taking any responsibility for his own behavior… Will the circle be unbroken? No way.
Remember Charles Foster Kane. Thompson, the reporter (William Alland), gives his eloquent speech: “Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything… I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a… piece in a jigsaw puzzle… a missing piece.” And then, in the final seconds, we discover what “Rosebud” is, even if nobody in the movie ever does. And where does that get you? The real ending of “Citizen Kane” is Thompson’s speech. The revelation of “Rosebud” is great showmanship, the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, all right, but it doesn’t really explain anything we didn’t already know.
So, I ask you again: Whaddaya want?
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What the hell’s happening in The Happening?
View image Mark Wahlberg attempts to teach his Film 101 students how to craft a major motion picture.
The first sentence of “horror scholar” Kim Newman’s stirring Guardian film blog defense of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” is: “Here’s the thing: ‘The Happening’ is not that bad.”
After noting that the film opened to “near-universal derision in America and Britain,” and acknowledging that Shyamalan’s “scripts are sometimes mawkish, sometimes pretentious,” Newman defends the writer-director’s “knack for genuine ‘jump’ moments and whispered, intense conversations that raise a chill.” Newman concludes: “Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?”
Wow, so the best the “horror scholar” can muster on behalf of “The Happening” is that it’s “not that bad” — and the hostile reaction to Shyamalan must have to do with the filmmaker’s “funny name” or his race? That’s insulting. What about his Philadelphianism? Maybe that explains it.
You don’t dismiss the dean
Andrew Sarris — dean of American film critics, leading proponent of the auteur theory in America, author of the essential The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (and equally praiseworthy review and essay collections such as Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969, Politics and Cinema and The Primal Screen), senior critic of the Village Voice for decades, co-founder of the National Society of Film Critics — has reportedly been let go by cut from the staff of The New York Observer.
UPDATE: Dave Kehr has a clarification from Sarris’s wife, critic Molly Haskell: “Andrew, along with a dozen other writers at the rapidly sinking weekly, was taken off staff on Monday, but he will continue to write on a freelance basis, exactly as Rex Reed does currently. Not great news, but — particularly in the current context — not a catastrophe. Andrew’s day job, teaching at Columbia University, is not in danger.”
Sarris, who turned 80 last October, was along with Pauline Kael the most influential film critic of the 1960s and 1970s. He was also the titular target of Kael’s infamous attack on auteurism, “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris” (1963) — ironic, since Kael was patently an auteurist through-and-through, even if she failed to recognize herself as such. No one has done more than Sarris to make the case that “Hollywood movies” were worthy of serious critical attention, every bit as much as “art films,” no matter where they’re made.
If you do not have a copy of The American Cinema — from which, coincidentally, I just quoted a few indelible paragraphs a couple days ago — do yourself a favor and buy it now. It’s the best guide to approaching American movies that there is, beginning with Sarris’s celebrated “pantheon” directors (some of whom were not, strictly speaking, “American” — though they all worked in the US at some point): Charles Chaplin, Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, Josef von Sternberg, Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. (Later he added Billy Wilder to the pantheon.)
Glenn Kenny simply quoted Jean-Luc Godard on Orson Welles: “All of us will always owe him everything.”
TIFF 08: What are you looking at?
A winter afternoon. A man walks down a muddy village backstreet with his shoulders hunched against the chill, accompanied by what could be industrial noise or a string score. Whatever it is, it evokes tension and anxiety. The catches the attention of a passing German Shepherd, who strains on its leash to keep an eye on him — all the more so when the man attempts to conceal himself around a corner. In a small general store, he buys an axe. The clerk wraps the blade neatly in crisp brown paper. The camera tracks a slow-moving car that is being pushed along by several other men, the “driver” looking behind him through an open door. The man places the axe against his side, facing us, to shield it from their view.
What are we watching?
Later, a man enters a flat. The door of a small refrigerator is ajar, the light glowing inside. The man grabs an object from a white plate sitting on top of the fridge. It is a woman’s black shoe.
So, what is this? A horror movie? A crime thriller? A macabre mystery? Sure. But I think a more accurate genre description would be romantic comedy.
Best Mel Gibson joke yet
One person’s public relations screw-up is another’s inspiration. This mash-up (on YouTube and iFilm) is the most inspired thing to come out of Mel’s sordid episode.
(tip: David Poland, a mensch among men)
The Watchmen dilemma
But I just had to look,
Having read the book…
— John Lennon
Really, I just wanted to point out that a glowing blue naked guy is the hero of one of the most anticipated mainstream movies in years. Did you know that? Seriously, though, I do have a dilemma: “Watchmen” opens March 6. I read the compiled comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons back in the early 1990s, I think — just around the time Terry Gilliam was attached to make the movie version. Here’s the poser: Having read the book so long ago I’ve forgotten it, should I read it again before seeing the movie?
“Watchmen” is something many fans know practically by heart. I know one who attended an early screening of the movie and said it was one of the best adaptations he’d ever seen. An already notorious Nerd World post by “Simpsons” executive producer Matt Selman (“My Own Private Watchmen”) broke the review embargo by proclaiming that he didn’t consider himself “press” and wasn’t actually reviewing the movie, but couldn’t control the 14-year-old still living inside him: “Someone took the most special personal thing of my adolescence and put it on a movie screen.”
Making movies in your head
I started making movies before I was a teenager. Making movies on actual film, that is. I was always making movies in my head, but it wasn’t until my dad lent me his 8mm Kodak Brownie wind-up movie camera and a light meter that I and some friends started actually putting things on celluloid. Our early efforts had titles like “Gores Galore” [sic], “Land of the Giants,” “The Murderer” and “Potpourri” (a title we took from “Laugh-In” for a hodge-podge of stunts and gags we just made up as we shot them). For special visual effects we used a lot of extreme camera angles (low and high), miniatures (Matchbox cars, army men), smoke bombs, fireworks, dummies stuffed with newspapers, red food coloring, Vampire Blood™, and cooked spaghetti for innards.
If I remember correctly, the total running time of one exposed reel was about three to five minutes. You bought the film in double-width form and loaded it into the camera, then had to go into a dark room (or deep shade) and flip the reel to re-load halfway through shooting. The lab would cut it down the middle when you mailed it in for developing and send it back to you as an 8mm reel with one glue-splice that strung it all together. (This was not the new Super 8, which was too fancy and expensive, even though it was only one millimeter wider.) They were all silent, of course, though we made syncrhonized 3-inch-reel tape recorder “soundtracks” with music and narration by simply running the film, playing records, and speaking into a microphone.
