It took time to use an 8-millimeter home movie camera effectively. Time and experience. Not just anyone was qualified. I think it was something of a calling.
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Not every movie was properly labeled or in the right box, but somehow it never mattered. As kids we knew that the film on the cracked blue reel showed summer 1962 at Christmas Lake. Or the silver reel with the rubber band around it was the one where my eldest sister led a tour of our then new house–a concept inspired, I’m sure, by Jacqueline Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House. We loved that one. While mom was continually making new movies, we liked the old ones best. The younger we were in a film, the more enamored we were with it.
More often than I’d like to remember, movie nights ended all at once with an accident that emerged from the same conditions: it was late, my father had drunk too much Scotch, my mother was tired, and the projector, overheated and exhausted, began chewing up pieces of our beloved films. Everything was going along smoothly, Burt Bacharach still playing on the stereo, my little sister snoring, when suddenly the story stopped in place unnaturally–a frame knocked off the sprockets–and imploded. Faces melted ghoulishly on the screen. We could smell the film burning.
In their eyes, my life imploded, broke apart–two separate pieces of film, irreparable, “before” and “after”–never to exist on one reel again.
“No. And they don’t ask.”
When one of our movie nights ended, following dad’s dramatic exit, the kids would file out in defeat and go to sleep. I remember getting up the next morning to find the living room spotlessly cleaned, the films hidden in the movie hutch, as if the night before had been erased.
