My Home Movies

It doesn't work

Five hundred and seventy five years ago, Gutenberg invented the printing press. That technology has endured. It's a pretty good run for that technology. The history of moving pictures, or "Movies" goes back to eighteen ninety five when the Lumière brothers screened their first films in Paris. Basically it consisted of a bunch of sequential photos strung together that made it appear that people and things were moving. That basic idea was improved upon and continued to be used right up until now. Sure they added sound, color, and CGI, but it's still called movies. My problem with this technology is that they haven't kept it for consumers. In 1963 my dad bought an 8mm movie camera, projector, and a screen to show his movies. Which means we have a bunch of old movies rotting somewhere in my Mom's house. In 1969 I bought an 8mm movie camera, projector, and screen to show my movies. I took a lot of movies. Stupid, worthless, wastes of movie film, and because I was a shiftless hippie in those days, most of those movies are lost. However, about sixteen years ago I found some of those movies in my junk trunk. It's an antique trunk from the late 1800s that I've been dragging around with me for fifty years. Unfortunately the technology of home movies has changed drastically in that time. Nobody has a 'film' camera anymore. Nobody has an 8mm movie projector anymore. Nobody has a movie screen to project those movies on anymore. Nobody, but me. I acquired the movie projector about fifteen years ago in Florida. My intention was to convert the movie film to VHS tape. VHS tape went belly up before I could do the job. A few years later I acquired a digital video camera. I would now take video of those movies with the digital camera and transfer them to DVDs. But I needed a movie screen. Couldn't find one, until this week. I wanted a cheap one from a second hand store, but I ended up buying one on Amazon. Okay, so now I was ready. I had the old movies, the projector I had bought fifteen years ago, and a nice, new screen. Funny thing, Florida humidity does horrible things to machinery. It rusts metal, it rots rubber, and it clogs things that are supposed to flow smoothly. It turned out that my projector is now crap. I fed the first movie film through the thing yesterday afternoon and it jammed. It wouldn't reverse, it wouldn't go forward very far, and  the picture jumped and blurred. I fiddled, I twisted knobs, and I tried my best to make it work. Out of nearly one hour of home movies, this is all I got. One minute. Enjoy.