Movie Review, "Super-8": 1970's Nostalgia Lost In 2010's Commercialism

A couple of weeks ago, amid all the excitement surrounding the release of J.J. Spielberg's "Super-8" (no, that is not a typo) I wrote a personal essay about what it was like for kids to make Super-8 movies in the 1970's
(Recollections of a Super-8 Filmmaker, June 18). 

As my enthusiasm grew, I shared another story about the making of one film in particular (The Exorcism: Our Super-8 Masterpiece, June 20).

So naturally I was ready to be entertained and have a nostalgic laugh or two at Steven Abrams' (that's right) new "Super-8", a film that so ineptly failed to explain its title, that some (mostly younger) viewers still don't know what it means.  While the filmmakers may have thought that using the name of the old home-movie format would lend a "District 9"-like gravity and mystique to this film, they missed out on an opportunity to tell a great story about a group of kids having the time of their lives in an activity as simple, yet fraught with drama and humor, as making an amateur movie.

I don't understand why this movie was set in 1979: apart from some period music and styles, and the fact that this is an homage to 1970's sci-fi movies that we were all supposed to have loved, very little is done with the era.  It seems to exist in that time because "ET" and "Close Encounters" were from that time, and because super-8 film was used then. 

"Super-8" could have been updated with the kids using a digital video camera, and it would have been a better fit with Abrams' contemporary filmmaking style here, with wisecracking, loud youngsters running and shouting and puking, overblown explosions, a score that invades one's consciousness without one memorable tune, and lackluster CGI that already looks inauthentic.

I don't want to trash this movie, because the inner child in me was entertained by some of it, and compared to a lot of the supernatural slam-bang blockbusters marching lockstep across screens this summer, this at least has an original premise.  I liked some of the performers, and a few of the set pieces were interesting, if typically overdone.  And of course my favorite scenes were those in which the kids were working on their zombie movie for a film competition.

If I could have retooled the script, I would have made the kids' filmmaking the focus of the whole picture, and jettisoned the sci-fi aspects, or at least toned them down somewhat.  Their finished movie, shown over the end credits, is far and away the most entertaining scene in this entire picture, and "Super-8" deprives us of participating in the making of most of it.

True, "Super-8"was not the movie I would have made, and it's unfair to hold it to my own image of what it could have been.  But even within its own logic, it goes off the rails as spectacularly as the train that carries a horrifying secret early in the movie.  It's little more than a checklist of Speilbergian elements as a sap to the baby-boomers in the audience, buried in a preposterous suburban humans-vs.-alien-in-peril scenario that, too, is a Spielberg mainstay.

The plot's "checklist" introduces so many elements that "Super-8" nearly doubles over on itself resolving them all.  There's the boy in conflict with his father, the girl in conflict with her father, the fathers in conflict with each other, and of course boy and girl defy their fathers and remain friends.  There's the overweight, bossy kid (who directs the zombie film), the nerd with braces who blows things up, the nerd with glasses with the weak stomach, the likable protagonist, and the girl all the boys like.  There's the scientific secret gone awry, the evil authoritarian military figures, and the precocious kids who solve everything.  There are the unexplained phenomena, the mysterious blue lights streaked across the lens, and a creature that turns out to be benign, to ensure a lump in the throat when the earthlings help it get "home". 

Scriptwriting 101, even in a tribute to films of this genre, dictates that it would be impossible for the characters, let alone the audience, to form a bond of affection with a creature as ugly as this one, one without human facial expressions, that is seen for barely five minutes. 

The movie is at least 30 minutes too long, and trades on noise and mayhem to cover up the plot holes and resolve all of the conflicts that are set up.  The parent-child conflicts to me were always the weakest aspects of the Spielberg blockbusters, and here they serve merely to drag things out.

The kids who form the core of the film are generic movie goonies, with two notable exceptions.  Joel Courtney is fresh and honest, and has a cute pixie face and is skilled with dialog. (Watch him deliver the stilted lines in the "zombie film"...it takes real talent to play it this badly). He is terrific.  Elle Fanning is pretty and emotes well.  She is excellent in her scenes in the zombie film.  Much as I liked her, though, it would be a very weak year indeed if this   performance is held up for award recognition.

As I settled in with excitement at the start, and then saw the potential of "Super-8" fall away (why didn't we see what the camera saw immediately after the train wreck?  Why didn't we get included in some of the more hilarious scenes for the zombie film?  Why did the dogs run away in the first place?) I tried hard to abandon all of my expectations and just enjoy the explosions, and the score, and the kids, and the creature, and not take it all so seriously.  I came away having had a mildly good time, and forgot my troubles, but I wished someone would have honored the old activity of making super-8 movies just a little more.

This could have been something super.

"The Exorcism": Our Super-8 Masterpiece

In my previous outing, I tried to describe what it was like for us to make Super-8 movies back in the 1970's (see post below).  I am more anxious now to see the movie "Super-8", even though I suppose I'll have to endure a lot of modern-day action, while the charm and nostalgia of kids making movies will take a back seat.


During the height of my passion for all things movies and filmmaking, I was becoming fascinated with "The Exorcist", a film that I had not yet seen (and would not see for quite some time). But I read the novel, and two versions of the screenplay (William Peter Blatty's first draft would have made a nearly 4-hour film).  I thought it would be cool to do a version of my own, with sound and music and makeup and special effects.


Not only did I learn a lot about adapting another work into screenplay form, I learned how difficult it was to create atmosphere, to find ways to create effects under the strict supervision of nervous parents, and the thrill of exhibition and critical kudos, and even winning awards.


My poor sister was always my leading lady.  At two years younger than I, she pretty much agreed to whatever I asked of her.  In our movie called "The Exorcism", she was to play both Chris McNeill (the mother), and the little girl Regan, who would be transformed from a sickeningly sweet child to a pun-spewing monster.

My two best friends from school, Dan and Jim, agreed to play father Karras and Father Merrin.


The cast would be made up and costumed (fake cardboard priest collars, black shirts, and our fathers' overcoats and hats for the "priests", a nightgown for Regan, and a few smart blouses for Chris.) To make her look older, my sister wore my mother's wig.  I don't know why, but women wore wigs a lot then as fashion statements. Her hairpiece got a great workout that summer.


My version was to be played for laughs, not chills. We would set up a scene for a chilling payoff, and end it with a punchline instead of a scream.


I worked on the script during science and history classes. 


I retained the prologue, but instead of a big demonic statue, our befuddled Father Merrin would be hit on the head with a "devil doll" falling from the sky, an old teddy bear with "horns" attached. 


The setting was a typical suburban house; the basement doubled as a living room, doctor's office, and rectory. My bedroom was where the "fun stuff" took place.  Regan would be a sweet thing, until her transformation during the party scene, in which the only "extras" were my sister's best friend and our grandmother.


The possession occurred quickly, and then the priests would be called in to perform an uproarious exorcism ceremony.


We had a load of fun with the "demonic" stuff.  An alarmed neighbor almost called the police when Father Merrin walked down our street in a heavy winter overcoat and hat (it was a 90-degree day) carrying a "bible" and a suitcase with stickers from Disneyland and the Wisconsin Dells.


Regan's first sign of possession was doing "sit ups" in fast motion on the bed.  It is much funnier than I can describe.  Soon her face was covered in "hideous" lipstick sores and green lips.  She said the most "evil" things to "herself", mostly eye-rolling jokes and puns meant to induce mild nausea in the viewer (but no swearing...)....  During the possession scenes, we animated letters forming on her stomach that said "oh hell", and she only could levitate half-way, by raising her legs in the air (because "the forces of evil on the other side of the room are keeping her down".)


Soon Regan was cured, and hugged her mother (my mother with the wig on, filmed from behind.)  After Chris' final line and "moral" of the story ("There's a little bit of devil in all of us") I needed shots of the cast spinning their heads.  I filmed several scenes of each person turning their head in one direction, then reversing their shirts and filming the same motion from behind. I cut them to make it appear that the head had gone all the way around.


We were restricted form doing anything too messy, and spewing green bile was forbidden.  So I filmed a shot of Regan opening her mouth like she was going to spew.  When I got that film developed, I projected it onto a translucent glass screen, projecting it a frame at a time.  I animated some green goo (dish washing liquid) on the glass, and filmed it from the opposite side, frame by frame.  It turned out pretty well!


I edited the film in increments, after each cartridge was developed.  After the film was finished, we shot the credit sequence, which was so ridiculously long for so few actual cast and crew names that it created laughs on its own. 


We dubbed the sound through the projector. I found the album by Mike Oldfield called "Tubular Bells", a small portion of which was used in "The Exorcist".  A small piece edited for radio was a big hit.  We used a lot of the music from this album, a new-wavey, jazzy 30-minute instrumental piece.  Regan's voice was my own, recorded at fast speed to sound comically deep slowed down to normal playback speed.



During the filming, we had few histrionics, but we still learned a lot about each other.  My sister was a tireless performer, and was better than she even expected she would be.  My friends were great sports and very supportive.  I was very shy in school and knew few people. I was unprepared for the acclaim and recognition "The Exorcism" would bring my way.  And I enjoyed it!


When word got out that the film was finished, I was invited to show it in a few classes. Soon I had to get permission to leave several classes to show the film, always to roars of laughter, always to applause and questions from classmates who rarely spoke to me before.

At the end-of-the-year Academic Awards ceremony, I was stunned to find my name called as the recipient of the English Award.  Before my name was called, the school Principal introduced me as "The guy who would have become famous for 'The Exorcist', but Hollywood released their version while his was still at the Fotomat."

Some day I will upload this epic on this site.

Thank you for coming with me on this journey of a once-aspiring filmmaker,  who had huge dreams,  before life intruded....

Recollections of a Super-8 Filmmaker

I want to share some stories about my own experiences making Super-8 movies years ago.

First a disclaimer: I have not yet seen the new J.J. Abrams film "Super-8". At first, I wasn't sure I wanted to;  I felt certain, based on the reviews I read, that it would completely miss the wistful charm of creating movies on this format, with a few friends, limited budget, and lots of heart and imagination.

But then I heard an NPR interview with J.J. Abrams, whose story retained some of the hilarity of what kids would do to get a scene right, and the pride of fooling your friends and family with home-made special effects.  Abrams even recounted an anecdote about how Dick Smith, the makeup artist, mailed him the black tongue worn by Linda Blair in a demonic sequence in "The Exorcist" and my feelings of fellowship were complete...because my High School Masterpiece was a satire based on "The Exorcist."

If I made a movie called "Super-8", there are certain elements that would have to be included.  First, I would devote a humorous and loving tribute to the format and the equipment we used.

For those who are not familiar with what super-8 refers to, it is the width of the film in millimeters.  Most independent film and advanced amateur movies were shot on 16-mm film, and of course theatrical films were usually made on 35mm. 

8-millimeter film was the first format for home-movies, created during the Depression, as a cheaper alternative to 16-mm.  After a few years, the technology evolved to allow for the "sprocket holes" (what the projector "teeth" used to pull the film through the projector) to be smaller, and the actual image area slightly bigger.  Film stock with this enhanced image due to smaller sprocket holes was thereafter known as "Super-8", created in 1965.

Super-8 film came in cartridges that ran about 3-1/2 minutes.  So a lot of cartridges would have to be purchased, exposed, and developed, to make a film of substantial length (if not depth). It took at least 3 days to develop a cartridge into a spool of film ready for editing, and projection.

Kids like us (and I would guess in the world of the movie "Super-8") would need a good allowance, or an understanding parent, to purchase a constant supply of film cartridges, not to mention a camera, and if you were sort of serious, an editing bench.

These were hand-cranked. You spooled the film through the viewfinder and you could watch the movie frame by frame.  There was a marker which punched a hole into the frame where the film was to be cut.

Then, the two ends of the film would have to be joined together.  There was a special "splicer",  which used either a special editing tape (with sprocket holes) or cement.  With cement, the emulsion (printed portion) of the film had to be scraped off, then the cement applied, and the ends joined together, overlapped slightly.  The cement actually melted the film for a stronger joint.

The splicer often cut one extra frame from each end of the film before scraping, so an editor had to mark each end of the film with an extra frame remaining.  It was a tedious and scary process, especially if you were editing your only print (copies were EXPENSIVE).  A wrong cut forced me to re-think the whole sequence!

And I loved it!! There is nothing like editing a film by hand, the satisfaction of getting the cut exactly on action, seeing a rhythm develop.  Editing my blog provides similar satisfactions (and it's a lot easier), but sitting at my bench with a mountain of "spaghetti" around me waiting to be shaped by my hands...it was one of the happiest activities of my life. 

Super-8 film was shot silent...we could not afford any sync-sound recording equipment, so we invested instead on a sound projector.  A finished film would be returned to the lab so that a magnetic recording strip could be added to the edge.  The projector doubled as a "tape recorder" with a microphone and a stereo input.  Music and sound effects were laid in first, and then voices were dubbed while we watched the film on the screen.

This is what my projector looked like:

Kids like us had heroes who were movie directors, editors, etc.  My heroes were Bob Fosse and David Bretherton, L.B Abbott, Stanley Kubrick...and I wanted to imitate them. 

If I made a movie like "Super-8", the kid behind the camera would obsess about his favorite movies and would attempt in a loving way to recreate the look and the effects.  ("Super-8" was set in 1979 and had a huge Spielberg influence and homage; I wonder if the kids in the film made a deliberate attempt to emulate actual movies?  In my film, they would).

We had to be creative.  We did our best to be "realistic", but sometimes we understood the charm of a certain amount of artifice.  As I got more comfortable with cutting my exposed film, I shot more...as much as our budget would allow.  We started to do more takes, more angles.  It sucked when the cartridge ran out in the middle of a perfect take. 

Interior shots were tough, because low-light film was grainy and poorly balanced for color. Plus, we had not experimented a lot with lighting, and had one flood light, which cast awful shadows.  We preferred the natural light of outdoors, and developed our material accordingly.  Also, our parents would have killed us if we re-arranged a room or created a set like Abrams did in his youthful movies.

And it was a process sometimes shrouded in secrecy because we didn't want to spoil the surprises of what we were doing.  Sometimes, though, we were ostentatious, because we felt so important as budding young filmmakers, and we wanted to be noticed.  We thought it might be our ticket to the big-time, to 35millimeter!

In my movie entitled "Super-8", I would remember.....

...Mounting the camera on a tripod and creating my first animation...credits forming out of Lego blocks.  What a thrill to see it actually work on the finished film

...Attempting to turn the basement over a la "The Poseidon Adventure", as I "animated" my sister in a chair sliding along the floor as I shot frame by frame and turned the angle of the camera slightly each time...Of course, we only managed to have her slide off the frame, as we were not allowed to drop furniture, etc, from the ceiling...

...Our first narrative film....my sister coming home from a vacation and everything going wrong, with Chaplin-like slapstick...

...Painstakingly cutting hours of footage of intramural football games, and using the "Clockwork Orange" soundtrack for a score, the synthesized Beethoven's 9th Symphony making a perfect background to rapidly paced runs and tackles, cutaways to a tense sideline audience, and a crescendo of quick cuts with the symphonic finale at the end....

...Editing many of my films, even vacation movies, with shock cuts and arresting angles, like Fosse did in "Cabaret"....

...Directing 15 school chums in a riotous chase film in the style of "the Sting".... costumes and everything, and taking over downtown to the amusement of passers-by.

...A "mood" film, which is what aspiring filmmakers did when their friends weren't available to appear as on-screen talent... I was just awakening to films from Sweden, turning on to Ingmar Bergman as taught by Roger Ebert on a show on our local PBS station before he got famous on "Sneak Previews.....Lots of light filtering through trees, slow panning shots, tracking shots achieved with the cameraman (me) sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon while a colleage pushed me....

Some day I will convert these vaulted films to digital format, and post them here....

And best of all, our summer re-doing "The Exorcist"...which was a huge hit in school, and even won an award.....

More about that in an upcoming post!

Coming Up: Super-8 Memories, and Paris in the 1920's

With the release of the heavily-publicized new film "Super-8", it will be fun to share with my readers my first-hand accounts of making Super-8 movies. 

I have not seen the film. But if I were to make a movie titled "Super-8", there are a few things I would have to include.  That will form the basis of my next two posts: how we made movies then with the spare and simple equipment, and the saga of our masterpiece, a satire on "The Exorcist" called, of course, "The Exorcism".

Speaking of looking back into the past, my  review of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" is coming soon.  In short...Witty and Terrific Fun.......

See you all this weekend....