In the summer of 1960, my father won a contest based on sales commissions he earned while working at Dorn’s Department Store in Van Nuys. His reward was a complete package of Kodak Brownie products: a Hawkeye still camera with flash, an 8mm movie camera, an 8mm movie projector (model A15), and a projector screen.
Considering how erratic my dad’s employment was during his lifetime, this prize, especially the movie camera, was the best thing he ever got from any job he held, a godsend, enabling my father to chronicle our family life for the next dozen years. While no film footage exists of my parents’ first 12 years of marriage or the early years of my brother or sister, as the youngest, I can still watch myself at age 2 splashing in a kiddie pool (my sister was 8, my brother 11).
These silent films, each roll 2 and 1/2 minutes long, are a precious archive documenting a typical American family in the 1960’s. A stranger looking at these home movies would never suspect that lurking behind the smiles and hugs, financial ruin would soon obliterate the bank account of my parents, yet would not destroy the family. One cannot detect any visual evidence that would reveal when we lost our cars and our house. My dad still captured birthdays, graduations and random moments in the backyard. We all still smiled and waved at the camera. And really nothing was phony about it. It is a true representation of the family structure my parents built.
They were fully committed that no matter what was happening with their finances, that we three kids would live a steady and stable life. We didn’t go hungry, we didn’t become homeless. We still celebrated birthdays with cake and gifts, still watched TV shows together in the living room and still had presents underneath the Christmas tree.
Every time my father held the movie camera to his eyes, I was transfixed. I loved the look of it, a roundish rectangle of gray and black plastic that fit snugly into the palm of one’s hand. It made this lullaby-like whirring that required rewinding via a built-in crank on the side of its body which you pulled out and wound clockwise.
I admired how important it made my father appear as he brought the camera to his face, one eye looking through the viewfinder, the other closed. He was no longer Dad but Alfred Hitchcock. His deftness in loading and unloading the film, how easily he cranked the motor, then pressing the button that ignited the whirring of the camera—what magic!
Once in a while after pestering my father, yanking on his pant leg, to give me a chance to be the magician, he reluctantly would hand over the camera to me for a brief shot. He was protective of those 150 seconds and did not want me wasting precious celluloid. The stuff I shot featured unsteady panning that made the scene too dizzy to watch. Dad had good judgment.
Of all the dozens of reels of home movies, there are a bunch of them shot in 1964 when my brother made mini-movies using his stable of Crosby actors including our dog, Champ. Dad had no fear of his 15-year-old son operating the camera.
These flicks including colorful titles: “Time Waits for No Villain” had an old-fashioned damsel in distress plotline, “Ghoul from the Black Pool” was a monster movie with a dramatic death scene in our swimming pool and “Gidget Meets Spade Coolie” featured me as a sick child whose doctor hurts not heals, turning me into a dog (a comedy).
My dad would drop off the exposed film at Albin’s, the local corner drugstore, where it would take a few days to be developed.
This type of delayed satisfaction is something people under 50 would not understand having been spoiled with the instant gratification of shooting photos and video on one’s cell phone and immediately viewing it.
When it came time for Dad to pick up the film, excitement would build waiting for the sun to go down so it would be dark enough to show the latest Crosby production starring us. It was thrilling to see our images projected on the screen, literally larger than life. We felt like movie stars.
The family would gather in the living room as Dad set up everything. First, he’d put up the screen, extending the tripod legs down onto the floor, then lifting up the shush of the screen upward onto the small plastic ledge to keep the screen safely extended. The screen’s silver sheen created anticipation as my dad took the projector out of its yellow cardboard box, placing it on a TV tray. He would carefully thread the white leader that said KODAK multiple times and someone had the job of turning off the lights. No film premiered without all five Crosbys in attendance.
The images on the film could be of a day at Disneyland or a day in the backyard. It didn’t matter. What mattered was this was an activity that bonded the family. Often Dad would provide repeated viewings, then take special requests to show older home movies stored in shoeboxes in the hall closet.
Not until I got older did I realize how ingenious my father was in self-editing whatever event he was documenting. He knew he only had 2 and ½ minutes of footage per roll, so he had to economize what to shoot and what not to shoot, figuring out how long for each shot so that by the time he took the roll of film into the drugstore to be developed, the mini-movie was already edited. Another concept that would be hard to grasp for those under 50 who are accustomed to taking dozens of photos of one image and hours of video without regard to quality.
In the old days, limiting customers to a few minutes of movie time and 24 exposures for print rolls forced people to be selective. Ever since I switched over from film to digital, the vast majority of images rarely get seen. Unlike the older photo technology which was easier to share via photo albums, slides or movies, today’s huge inventory of material stored in the cloud requires someone to sift through it all and edit it down to a manageable viewing running time, an overwhelming task.
All the Kodak Brownie equipment, including the 70-some rolls of film, remain with me, in their original yellow packaging.
The final time we used the Kodak Brownie movie camera was in 1973, six months after my father passed away. The four of us took a driving trip along Highway One. It was the last vacation we took. Dad would have loved the trip and he would have been happy to see that my cinematography had improved.
Crosby Chronicles 