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Captain Celluoid and the Film Pirates
Topic Started: Jul 4 2017, 12:23 PM (383 Views)
copperhead
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Members, A short serial from 1968 by Allan G. Barbour[serial historian]. Its very representative of the old republic serials like Spy Smasher/Captain America/Daredevils of the Red Circle /Fighting Devil Dogs. A great deal of fun!
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turan38
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copperhead
Jul 4 2017, 12:23 PM
Members, A short serial from 1968 by Allan G. Barbour[serial historian]. Its very representative of the old republic serials like Spy Smasher/Captain America/Daredevils of the Red Circle /Fighting Devil Dogs. A great deal of fun!
The film was produced by cinematographer Lou McMahon. Alan Barbour, William K. Everson, et al, only performed in the film.
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The Batman
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Copperhead, great to see ya back!

Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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riddlerider
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Don't know what suddenly brought Captain Celluloid to mind, but I don't think we ever discussed the passing of its producer-director, Lou McMahon. He died early last year after spending the last few years of his life in a New Jersey nursing home. He was 96 or 97.

Lou began making home movies with a second-hand 16mm camera in 1937. He stored them carefully and screened them at periodic intervals for friends. The first was a version of Jungle Jim inspired by the Universal serial, which he loved. In 1940 he made a silent Western that was close to feature length (about 40 minutes, as I recall). Titled The Black Rider, it won an award from a magazine catering to home-movie makers. Lou shot it in his native New Jersey, turning a chicken farm and its out buildings into a Western town. In those days it was pretty easy to find horses, and somewhere he dug up some old revolvers that fired black-powder cartridges. Actually, it was pretty impressive.

The most polished of Lou's home movies made before Captain Celluloid was a short serial that starred his kid sister and was titled The Perils of Elaine. Lou shot it in the late '40s IIRC. He liked to do stunts and for this film actually jumped from a trestle onto a moving train below. It wasn't moving very fast, but I was still shocked that he made the leap.

I don't think most Captain Celluloid fans realize that the serial took years to complete. I believe the first scenes were taken in 1962. Since the "actors" were friends doing the film for the fun of it, Lou had a lot of trouble getting everybody to show up for scheduled shooting days. There was also a lengthy "layoff" period that lasted a full year or more. It's a tribute to his professionalism that you'd never know to look at Celluloid that it was so long in the making.

Lou took cinema very seriously and as a young teen began making notes about the films he'd just seen every time he came home from the theater. He wrote his opinions and observations in marble notebooks, which he kept practically his whole life. He filled dozens of them. I remember looking through a 1932 notebook in which he reviewed White Zombie, Mystery Ranch, and Chandu the Magician, among many others.

Lou was a good friend for many, many years. I used to drive to his home in Cresskill, New Jersey, and watch movies in his basement screening room all day long. I miss him.
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The Batman
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Great tribute, RR. Condolences on the loss of your friend, and a champion of the film community.

I gotta ask: Is there a book waiting in all those marble notebooks? I'd buy it.


Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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riddlerider
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The Batman
Jul 5 2017, 02:44 PM
I gotta ask: Is there a book waiting in all those marble notebooks? I'd buy it.



My recollection is that the entries in Lou's books varied wildly in length and substance depending on how he felt about each picture. Those he didn't especially care for were dismissed with a line or two. ("Didn't care for this one. Too much talk, not enough action.") Those he liked got more space, and his favorites got a paragraph or more in which he'd list everything he liked about the picture, including descriptions of individual scenes.

I suspect the notebooks were trashed when Lou's house was sold to pay for his tenure in the nursing home, where he had a small room. What I'd really like to know is who, if anybody, got all the films he made. I have an idea but have never followed up on it.

I wish now I'd made more of an effort to visit Lou in the nursing home. Early on I spoke to him there by phone, and Sam Sherman and I always talked about going up there together, only to cancel when one of us wound up having a conflict on the date we'd picked.
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The Batman
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Thanks, RR, a shame if they were trashed. I wouldn't mind knowing what happened to the films, either.


Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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AndyFish
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Anyone have a recommended source for this one? Sinister Cinema had one at one time if I'm not mistaken.
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AndyFish
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And never mind, found it.
www.andytfish.com
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