Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1949)

134 WHERE ALL ARE ACTIVE Filmers like to film, figured this pioneer president, and proceeded to save his club with a field day program Photographs by Long Beach Cinema Club CLARENCE ALDRICH, ACL, left, briefs part of cast for Powder Puff Pirates. Mildred Caldwell, FACL, director of cameras, is left of center, with Kyle Holmes, assistant director, at right. jpi SOUND VERSION, recorded on RCA single system camera, adds to production problems on The Pirates. Other setting was on ship. HUNDRED MILE trip into the mountains for He's A Furriner set brought out thirty five members and seven cameras for outing. CLARENCE N. ALDRICH, ACL Founder President, Long Beach Cinema Club THE time was February, 1938. The place was Long Beach, California. And the problem — which faced me as newly elected president of the fledgling Long Beach Cinema Club — was that of heading a movie group already beginning to disintegrate from inactivity. Our membership stood at thirty. We were about evenly divided between 8mm. and 16mm. filmers and, if able to work together as a unit, we should grow into a healthy, well established club. But, even as I took office, there was talk among the 8mm. boys of dropping out to form their own group. Something had to be done. . . . I was prompted to these reminiscences recently by an article, Aids for the Ailing Movie Club, which appeared in the January issue of this magazine. The central theme of this discussion was that "an organization is not one man holding the world on his shoulders, like Atlas. It is rather a working group where each individual plays a part." No truer words were ever written on club affairs. We figured it out this way. Every movie maker likes primarily to make movies. Why not work up a simple outdoor filming plan, announce a club field day and invite each member to shoot the story with his own camera? To do this would require a production staff of several committees — scenario, properties, makeup, production, directorial, etc. These committees would at once involve many of the members in activity. Then, as a final political move, we would appoint as heads of these units the ring leaders of the 8mm. faction. The field day idea caught on at once. Ten individual cameramen (besides all of the eager-beaver committeemen ! ) turned out for our first production. Called Danny's Mistake, it was a short-short running only one roll of film, either 8 or 16. We completed it easily and with a lot of incidental fun in less than one day. Since that first tentative effort in 1938, we have run through nineteen club productions in all, averaging two a year. Our most ambitious was Happy Landing, produced in 1940 and runing 800 feet of 16mm. film. Our most successful (or at least important) picture was Fire From The Skies, running 400 feet of 16mm. sound Kodachrome. Completed in 1942, it was designed and used as a civilian defense training film against fire bombing and it was chosen by Movie Makers as one of the Ten Best amateur films of that year. The concrete results of this program? Our membership in 1938, as stated, was around thirty and becoming divided. Our membership today has been purposely limited to seventy five active (camera-owning) members. Meeting with them are forty seven associate members ( generally wives of the camera owners), eight dealer members and seven honorary members — for a total of 137! Running one of these production junkets today verges on big business. The club has a standing scenario committee, and each member is urged to submit to them his or her ideas for a coming story. If it has cinematic merit, the committee will rough it out in script form and the first draft is then discussed and revised in club meeting. Preparation of the final draft of the script and an accompanying shooting schedule is then dropped in mv lap. This, I suspect, happens [Continued on page 149]