In These Home Movies, Orange County Grows Up
In a large room at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film archive in Hollywood, where prints of “Gone With the Wind,” “On the Waterfront” and “Casablanca” are kept in a controlled environment for their protection, rests a collection of home movies shot by James Irvine II.
Irvine’s movies of beach picnics, vacations and life on the ranch offer a rare glimpse of a family known for building one of the nation’s largest agricultural empires yet one also steeped in privacy.
The home movies, shot more than 40 years starting in 1912, also capture a long-ago time when Orange County was relatively unspoiled -- a rural paradise where farmland stretched to the horizon and the seashore was largely untouched.
The academy archive is primarily a repository for all the movies nominated for a best picture Academy Award. It also holds the personal films of illustrious directors and celebrated actors. So how did Irvine’s home movies, with such scenes as tomato plants being gently tucked into the ground, wind up in the same collection of Bogey and Bacall sitting poolside?
They almost didn’t.
The long-forgotten films were uncovered while Eric Jessen, a director of the Orange County Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department, was working on the centennial celebration of Irvine Park, land that James II had donated to the county in 1897.
A local-history buff whose family roots in Orange County go back to 1869, Jessen spent weeks going through thousands of Irvine family photos that would make up a slide show and exhibit at the celebration.
“A member of the family happened to casually mention that ‘Oh, by the way, I think in the basement we have some old family movies that my grandfather made,’ ” Jessen recalled. “And I gulped.”
About two weeks later, Jessen was handed a canvas bag filled with about 20 films in 16 mm format.
He brought them to BC Space, a Laguna Beach shop that does archival work for museums and galleries.
“Some of them were in cans, some weren’t; some had a heavy odor of deterioration,” said studio owner Mark Chamberlain. “Some of them we caught just in the nick of time.”
Some were so brittle that just running them through a projector could destroy them. “In fact, some did die,” Chamberlain said.
Copying all the footage to video took more technical resources than Chamberlain had access to, so he turned to the academy archive, which agreed to do the work on the condition that the originals be stored there for historic purposes.
With the footage now on video, Chamberlain and Jessen spent months on editing, whittling it down to 95 minutes.
The finished product is a collection of scenes fascinating in their everyday quality -- such as Myford Irvine, Irvine’s youngest son, and friends in white tank tops playing their own version of football in freshly furrowed fields, kicking the ball, throwing the ball and collapsing in a roughhouse tackle.
Although the film isn’t readily available for public viewing, those interested may make an appointment with Jessen’s office to do so.
Overall, the films demonstrate a technical and artistic proficiency that was remarkable for the time, experts say.
Home movies were reserved for the wealthy or movie insiders who had access to the expensive equipment.
The make of camera Irvine used is unknown, but it undoubtedly was hand-cranked, which stored tension in the mechanism. When the photographer was ready, he hit a switch and the crank slowly unwound.
“He really did a wonderful job in the filming,” Chamberlain said.
The scene of Irvine and two field hands planting tomatoes captures his painstaking efforts at cinematography. At first it appears that Irvine is showing the farmhands how to do their job: Take a long stake, drive it into the ground and twirl it in wide circles, drop the plant in, etc.
But the scene only sets up footage of Irvine’s New Idea Machine, a contraption hooked up to a small tractor. As the driver steers, two workers seated low in the rear place the plants in trenches dug by the machine. It then waters the plants and backfills the trench, in a swift and methodical fashion.
Irvine has a notation in the film explaining the superiority of the New Idea Machine: “With this new machine, three men plant nearly 8 acres a day,” he states, a giant step from the 1 acre of planting two men could typically handle in a day.
It’s the Industrial Revolution unfolding before the viewer’s eyes, Chamberlain said.
Shots taken from a biplane piloted by Glenn L. Martin -- namesake of Martin Marietta Materials -- over the ranch in 1912 show endless orange groves bisected by dirt roads, and then the landing at Eddie Martin Field, or what is now John Wayne Airport.
Again and again, the films open a window to an Orange County that seemed fresh and aglow with promise.
At a Fourth of July picnic at Irvine Cove, the camera catches a cruise ship as it steams toward Newport Beach. As the day winds down from playful romps in the surf and sand, the family gathers for a feast on the beach, the waves crashing behind them.
That quality of the films as well as their historic value are what appealed to the academy, said Michael Pogorzelski, director of the archive.
“Whenever an academy member or someone in the film community donates their papers to the library, they often have a sizable film collection,” he said, citing Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah and John Huston.
Many of those films are as valuable for their depiction of life in Southern California as they are for who is in them. But among the 70,000 or so films stored at the archive, few depict Orange County.
“It’s amazing looking at seemingly endless fields,” Pogorzelski said. “It’s all farmland as far as the camera can see.”
As they edited the films, Jessen was mindful that what he was preserving was more than just a period of history. It was a family’s story as well. “We were able to provide the family with copies ... so they could give them to their kids, so they could see their grandfather and great-grandfather.”