Home Movies (1950)

A REEL OF THE BIZARRE Under the title of "The Odd and the Unusual' 'I made a movie of strange places I have been and unusual things I have seen. Surprisingly a great many subjects fell into this category when I approached my filming with the odd and unusual in mind. The film is a Ripley's "Believe It or Not" of a sort with scenes showing curious phenomenons of mother earth or strange things people have done. I haven't gone out of my way to any degree to obtain these shots. It's a reel I add scenes to from time to time, with titles, as I run across something that might fit in. One of the sequences was made at Lassen Volcanic National Park and was extra footage taken from a previous vacation movie. It shows a few MOVIE of us drinking ice cold water from a spring a few hundred yards away from another spot where this same combination of hydrogen and oxygen, boiling hot, bubbles out of the ground and steam clouds fill the air. Another scene is merely a sign on a cemetery fence offering free dirt. Still another was an odd old Ford someone had built as a gag that had two front ends. All of us find such material as time goes on and if anyone was to begin such a reel they may be surprised how quickly it grows in length and how often it will be enjoyed by their audiences.— (By J. H. Clark, Los Angeles, Calif.) FOOTBALL GOES ON With my son in high school and playing football for his almamater, last year I began a record of this important activity in his young life. Introducing me to his coach I was able to obtain permission to film his team in action from training to actually playing a few games. On a couple of occasions last season, when I could afford the time, I even traveled with the team to the away-from-home games and filmed all of my shots from the side lines or the bench. Close-ups of his team-mates, outstanding plays, scenes of the coach reacting and views of the rooting section and spectators are all in the movie This semester he graduates and it will be his last term for football. Again by THE READERS I hope to spend as much time as possible completing this reel so that in the years to come he may in turn show his children how and with whom he played football in the same school where his father played the game before him. — (By Rich Dabney, Tucson, Arizona). A MODERN FABLE During the Hallowe'en season I bought my eight-year-old son a rubber mask resembling a wolf. From the moment I first saw this very unique disguise I began planning a movie idea that it almost automatically suggested. The plot was the very well-known fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and we comically burlesqued the original story somewhat as the animated cartoons have done in the past. Casting a cute seven-year-old blond girl friend of my son's in the starring part, her mother and my wife actually went to the trouble of sewing the child a glowing red costume for the part in my color movie. Using one of the parks in town for the locale of the woodland, and our home for a few of the interiors we kept the continuity simple but active. In the end Little Red Riding Hood recognizes her pursuer and informs him to remove his mask because he looks more like a wolf without it. This he promptly does, and the picture fades out with the wolf, a flagrant look in his eyes, giving Little Red Riding Hood a wild chase into the forest. — By Shannon Walker, Hot Springs, Ark.) DOWN RIVER ADVENTURE Instead of spending my vacation this year in the usual manner, namely that of driving somewhere in my car, two of my friends and I decided to boat down stream on the Rogue River as far as we could go in ten days. The idea began as a bet more or less and wound up making a wonderful movie and an unforgettable adventure. In order to show how we made the journey I took along my movie camera and a few extra rolls of film, no more than the camera case could hold however, since we would boat by many towns where I could replenish my supply when needed. The camera case was built especially for the trip, which was designed to float and keep the contents dry in the event of a mishap. Unfortunately I never appear in the movie because I was the one who did all the filming. But this fact kept only two people before the camera at all times. Scenes show only two boatmen riding rapids, fishing, camping, etc. Whenever we came to an interesting community we would stop for awhile and film a few scenes of my traveling companions visiting the sights, stopping to eat or sleep in town when on occasions we preferred this to camping out for the night. There were plenty of times when I was waist deep in water to get a shot of the boat coming towards me, and on one occasion in the Rogue River Canyon we had it overturn in the rapids just to make an interesting sequence in the movie. I climbed mountains and trees for high angles, made shots from the boat for close-ups as we journeyed along and recorded everything we did of interest on the trip. At the end of the trail, a phone call brought my wife to pick us up and we fished leisurely until she arrived some hours later with our car and a trailer for the boat. — (By Frank Speer, Minneapolis, Minn.) HATCHED FOR HENS Living in a small community as we do there are invariably a few busy body women who know everything that happens in town, as if our houses were made of glass or paper. This fact, however, gave me a movie idea which I called the Chatterboxes and when I showed it recently at a large party I A "These walls are like paper" was later told it would no doubt do much to curb some people's flowing tongues. The story was filmed, however, just 464