Home Movies Go Hollywood

On Saturday morning, Preston Neal Jones was looking through some fliers he had picked up at the Egyptian Theatre and found one announcing International Home Movie Day, set for this very day.

Jones wasn’t sure he even had them anymore, the three 16-millimeter home movies taken by his father in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. However, he found them in a storage area near his kitchen. So he wiped off the dust, put them in a green canvas tote, and caught the Vine Street bus to the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study.

The 58-year-old author was one of the first in line at the third annual festival in Hollywood. It is an event at which ordinary people can see their families’ unguarded pasts displayed on the big screen where members of the motion picture academy screen Oscar-nominated movies. The Pickford Center was one of three local venues for the event; the others were in Irvine and Newhall. In all, more than 50 films were screened.

“This last time these were in a projector was 1972,” Jones told a young volunteer who delicately unwound one of his reels in the lobby, to see if the film could safely be used in a projector. “They’re of me as a tot.”

The only clues he had to the reels’ specific content, he said, were the cryptic, thumb-smudged labels affixed by his long-deceased parents. “I’ve been concerned for some time because I haven’t looked at them in so long and I was wondering if they’re still good. I just remember it was us in our backyard, just us kids romping in the sun with the grown-ups. It’s probably got my mother and father and aunt and uncle, and maybe even my grandparents. So this may be a very emotional experience for me.”

Snowden Becker, public access coordinator for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which provided the venue for the Los Angeles event, said the purpose of Home Movie Day was grander than the mere exposition of private lives. “I try to get people to shift gears and not think of this as just family history, but also as history of a certain place and time -- not just personal history, but cultural history.”

Inside the center’s modern Linwood Dunn Theater, documentary filmmaker and editor Dave Strohmaier, 55, showed a movie of a 1961 office Christmas party in the art props department of a Disney animation studio. On the screen, young men with crew cuts and inch-wide neckties and women peering through glasses shaped like cat’s eyes clowned silently for the camera. Everyone smoked. A nude Tinkerbell dangled from the ceiling.

Afterward, documentarian Randy Gitsch, 48, screened a home movie, made in 1948 by his Iowan grandfather, of a family vacation to Badlands National Park and the Black Hills in South Dakota.

Gitsch’s father, then a spindly 16-year-old, hopped onto a Badlands sign and cavorted bare-chested near Mt. Rushmore.

Then grinning family members in plaid wool jackets skittishly held out candy and potato chips before the muzzles of erect, tiptoeing bears. “Now we’re in Yellowstone -- let’s feed the bears,” Gitsch wryly intoned into a microphone. “I don’t think they allow this anymore.”

When it was his turn, Jones took up the mike and settled into a front-row seat while his home movie filled the screen. “These are my father’s parents, and that’s Lucky, our English setter,” he began as an elderly couple made their way to the foreground and a dog frisked about them. “I used to get scared at night and my mother would let Lucky sleep in my bedroom.... This is Stamford, Conn. That’s my brother, and that’s my mother and that’s my grandfather, Preston Z. Jones -- I’m named after him.”

Jones himself came on the screen, a happy, moon-faced boy of about 4 in a blue hooded jacket. An uncle tried to show him how to swing a baseball bat, but young Jones missed a pitched ball, then missed again and again and again. “I’m no better at baseball now,” Jones said, to the laughter of about 30 viewers scattered about the theater.

“This is the street where Jackie Robinson lived, a few doors down from us, in the mid-1950s. The people next door moved out after he moved in. They were from the South. He was a wonderful gentleman. They filmed me riding a bicycle into his garage on NBC television.”

After the screening, Jones said he was relieved the film had held up to the projector. Now, he said, he would get copies made of it and the two others, and perhaps donate the originals to the academy’s 1,000-plus home movie archive. “And, yes,” he said, “I was very moved by it.”

Through the day, until 5 p.m., the home movies succeeded one another, 16-millimeter films glaring down onto the full screen from the house projector, 8-millimeter and Super 8 turning on a portable projector that ratcheted in the dim quiet: a late-1960s parade at a defunct West Virginia military academy, a view of the not-yet-completed World Trade Center towers taken 34 years ago from the deck of a transatlantic steamer, a 1965 wedding reception in Bay Head, N.J.

The latter was brought by Candace Lewis, 34, the coordinator of UCLA’s Moving Image Archives Study Program. It depicted the celebration that followed her parents’ wedding. Her father, she told the audience, died this past Father’s Day, a week after they marked their 40th anniversary.

Later, she said that she had seen the movie for the first time earlier in the week. “I knew I had six cans, but I didn’t know what was in them,” she said. What she elected to show was not as emotionally evocative as some of the earlier films, one of which depicted her grandmother pregnant with her father. “That cycle-of-life thing was just a little too much for me,” she said.

Home movies, Gitsch said, “are historical documents: images of people who are no more, places that are no more, things you can’t do anymore.”

Accordingly, Becker said, people should take care to find reputable companies to transfer their films to video and DVD for frequent replaying. Above all, they should not discard the originals, but keep them properly stored, away from dust, light and fluctuating temperatures.

Original images on film, she said, are of higher quality than those transferred to other media. Moreover, the technology of projecting film essentially hasn’t changed for more than a century, whereas those of video and digital recording are constantly evolving, meaning that many years hence it may be difficult to display the latter.