They are snippets of forgotten times, lost memories, and private escapades in the lives of LGBT people. Many of the reels of film have been collecting dust in attics, closets, or basements.
It is likely few, if any, of the people filmed thought the home movies they had captured were of any relevance other than to themselves, their friends, and family. Yet the celluloid time capsules provide a unique glimpse into an era when being gay was a crime and there was no social media to document everyday moments.
Next month more than 60 people's home movies will receive a big screen debut when the film Reel In The Closet has its premiere Sunday, June 21 at Frameline, San Francisco's LGBT international film festival. Director Stu Maddox has spliced together snippets of the found footage into a 68-minute documentary about why it is so important to safeguard these oft-forgotten reels of film.
"I think people are going to see themselves back then," said Maddux, a gay man who lives in Novato and has been working on the film since 2012. "All of a sudden you are seeing shots of someone I could see walking down the street today and moving the same way."
Maddux, 49, whose company is called Interrobang Productions, LLC, scoured the archives of 17 organizations in search of a diverse collection of home movies to shine a light on what life was like for LGBT people dating as far back as the 1930s. Featured institutions in the movie include the GLBT Historical Society based in San Francisco, the Latino GLBT History Project in Washington, D.C., and the Lesbian Home Movie Project overseen by Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine.
"The stuff that is the most interesting is day-to-day life, which is harder to come by," said Maddux. "We wanted to make a loose chronological look at kind of a gay life through the eyes of a person who lived it in the 1930s on."
When the Bay Area Reporter first wrote about Maddux's film in the summer of 2013, he had hoped to release it sometime in 2014. But its debut was delayed as Maddux looked for a more diverse collection of home movies to feature.
"It is still not super diverse. We plan to treat it as a crowd work in progress," said Maddux, who will also be showing the film in late June during Helsinki's Pride celebration. "We know people are going to come up after screenings and say, 'I have this wonderful material.' We want to be sure to include that in future versions of the film."
In the film he submitted to Frameline, Maddux said gay white men account for the majority of the home movies featured. Through screening the film, Maddux is hopeful audience members will come forward with home movies featuring women, people of color, and transgender people.
"I know it is out there," he said. "It is just a matter of getting out there with this film and getting people aware of what is in their closet and to realize this is important for everybody to see."
He was able to track down the home movies of Christine Jorgensen, a former U.S. Army private whose sex change surgery in Denmark in the 1950s made national news upon her return to America in 1955. They are housed at the Royal Copenhagen Library, which uploaded the footage via file servers at Maddux's request.
"She was a really big home movie maker," said Maddux, who learned about the films from a fellow filmmaker using it in their own project.
His film cost roughly $100,000 to produce, with $60,000 raised through crowdfunding campaigns. Many of the donors will receive tickets to screenings of the film in cities near where they live.
"There are 100 tickets owed, we don't anticipate everyone attending the world premiere of Reel In The Closet because many live on the East Coast and abroad," Tish Gettys, administrative producer of the film, told the B.A.R. "However, we hope they will take advantage and use their free tickets when the film premieres in their town."
Preserving old movies
The inspiration for Maddux's film came from his learning about John Raines, a volunteer who has been digitizing old home movies in the archives of San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society so they are more accessible to researchers, documentarians, and members of the public.
Profiled by the B.A.R. two years ago, Raines has processed more than a thousand hours of old home movies, television station news reports, and other audio-visual archival materials of LGBT historical significance. To assist with the work, Maddux's company donated equipment to the local archival group that allows it to process its 8mm collection of home movies.
"We were able to transfer these films at the GLBT Historical Society's archives for the first time into HD and really look at them for the first time," said Maddux.
Another San Francisco-based film preservation group, the Metro Theatre Center Foundation, is also working to save old home movies. This year it purchased its own high definition film scanner that can scan 8mm, super 8 and 16mm films.
"We did a round of fundraising in the past three months to raise the funds needed, and I'm happy to report we were successful, and that the film scanner is on order, and will arrive at the end of June," Ron Merk, a gay man and San Francisco-based film producer who is director of film and cultural programs at the foundation, told the B.A.R. in a recent email.
Since the B.A.R. first wrote about the foundation three years ago, it has acquired more than 2,000 collections of important home movies through its initiative called the Preservation Project Partnerships.
"What never ceases to amaze me is what has been sitting in a closet (no pun intended), an attic, a basement or a garage, which is just waiting to be discovered," wrote Merk. "We have been thrilled with our many finds of unique views of our lives 'way back when,' and how wonderful it has been to save them for future generations."
Merk singled out "two tantalizing pieces of gay life, a 16mm early 1930s black and white film of a gay man swimming nude in a lake, and a 16mm color film of a bunch of WWII soldiers romping buck naked in a river and having a grand time."
He added that they recently "struck gold" with a 16mm color film of 1946 New York Times Square that includes footage inside a Broadway theater where Ethel Merman is standing on stage in Annie Get Your Gun, "belting out one of her signature tunes, 'There's No Business Like Show Business.' Just a treasure for everyone!"
One of his more significant film finds came in 2012 when Merk bought on eBay a batch of old film reels that had belonged to David Eugene Bell, a famous home designer at Bloomingdale's who in the 1970s took up needlepoint and became a celebrated artist. He lived in Connecticut with his partner, Donald Cotter, and died in 2006 in his mid-80s.
Efforts by Merk to raise upwards of $20,000 from crowdsourcing campaigns to restore the cache of 50 reels of 8mm and 16mm film were unsuccessful. But he told the B.A.R. that the foundation was "lucky to license some of the footage that we have transferred to a film called Tab Hunter Confidential (which will screen at Frameline Saturday, June 20), and this provided us with money to pay our preservation team members to fully clean and inspect all the material."
The film, noted Merk, "was badly affected by mold due to poor storage. The mold was literally eating the emulsion (which carries the images) right off of the film base. Luckily, we have arrested the mold."
Once its HD scanner arrives, the foundation plans to scan the complete seven hours of the David Eugene Bell collection. But it is looking for donations to cover the cost of the labor required to do the scanning and make the films available for viewing and research.
"For that we need to raise $5,000, and of course we hope that the community will help with donations, or that we can find one sponsor for the full amount," wrote Merk. "This collection is a very rare look at gay life when most gay people did not photograph their lives due to fear of prosecution, loss of family or jobs, or worse. This collection of films that goes back to the 1950s provides a unique view of gay history, culture and lifestyles that is rarely seen."
Donations can be made online via the foundation's website at www.MetroCenterFoundation.org.
For more information about Reel In The Closet , visit http://closetreel.com/.