I approached Marah Strauch's exhilarating new bio-documentary Sunshine Superman with a certain amount of mixed feelings and downright confusion. For as long as I can remember, I've been anxious about achieving any heights beyond the reach of my kitchen stepladder. Even approaching the boundaries of danger, like once on the rooftop of the Davies Medical Center parking garage, would give me the shudders. And there's the fact that the title Sunshine Superman has for me always been reserved for that great 1960s drug anthem from Glasgow-born singer-songwriter Donovan Leitch, whose #1 single clung to the Top 40 charts for 13 glorious weeks in 1968.
"I don't want to grow old or grow up." �" Carl Boenish (April 3, 1941-July 7, 1984). Strauch's Sunshine Superman (opening Friday at Bay Area theatres) focuses on the natural highs achieved by a kind of free-fall or BASE jumping, whose modern father Carl Boenish doubled as a cinematographer, and who seems to have considered himself less of a Guinness Book of World Records exhibitionist than a sports pioneer who wanted to make the joys of recreational jumping available to the average person.
Strauch, who gained access to Boenish's archive of great jumps and hypnotic free-floating moments from his widow Jean, notes that Boenish had accumulated some pretty spectacular bullet points on his resume. In 1978, he filmed pioneering jumps from atop El Capitan using state-of-the-art "ram-air" parachutes. He published BASE magazine as a way of promoting safety in a sport that he knew could take its practitioners to a jump too far. Boenish's parachuting cinematography also provided some awesome visual thrills for the 1969 John Frankenheimer aerial classic The Gypsy Moths, with Burt Lancaster and Gene Hackman.
Spoiler alert: the Boenish legend came crashing down to earth in 1984 in a fatal BASE leap from Norway's Troll Wall, only a day after he filmed a spectacular double-BASE jump with his wife Jean for the TV show That's Incredible! Sunshine Superman is, in short, a leading candidate for this year's "mixed message" bio-doc Oscar. At a time when nonfiction filmmakers are avidly competing for paying audiences who will line up for real-life thrills, this film seems to deliver the goods, as indicated by this fan posting on the Internet Movie Data Base: "I saw the film in Atlanta with a crowd that gave it a standing ovation. It is a crowd-pleaser, yet also something deeper. The film explores themes of mortality, faith, inspiration, and what it means to be fully awake in the mad world."
Queer filmgoers may find some ironic overtones in another IMDb posting from a fan who caught the doc in Toronto. "This film made me cry, and I am a man!" This fan goes on to say that Sunshine Superman made him want to take his own leap into the void, which is exactly why I'm so reluctant to give it both thumbs up.
But as they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and perhaps wiser. Just don't expect to find me up there along for the leap. I'm still clinging to the top rung of my kitchen stepladder. If I'm feeling especially brave, maybe I'll whip out my special edition DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, where the height-fearing Scotty (James Stewart) remains forever out on his own scary ledge.