Jeffrey Wells

I Dream of Spielberg in Dealey Plaza

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The late Abraham Zapruder was a good fellow and family man who, through sheer happenstance and an odd quirk of fate, captured the most famous home movie footage of all time.

But in my heart of hearts I can’t help regretting that Zapruder was the one who happened to be filming from that Dealey Plaza slope on 11.22.63. In my heart of hearts I wish that a more devotional movie nerd had been standing there instead of unexceptional, penny-pinching Abe.

8mm home movie cameras were the default choice for tens of millions of families in the mid 20th Century, but the 8mm images were jumpy and hazy and basically looked like shit compared to 16mm, and Abraham Zapruder KNEW that.

Did Zapruder care about the difference in quality? Above and beyond being a decent man who loved his family, I’ll tell you one thing Abe cared about. Like most responsible-minded fathers and business owners, he cared about SAVING MONEY.

You know who cared much more about visual values and cinematic quality? 17 year old Steven Spielberg, a fledgling filmmaker who in late ‘63 was living in Arizona with his family (and who shot his first feature, Firelight, the following year).

If only Spielberg had somehow made his way to Dallas (a school trip? a special family adventure?) and shot the assassination footage in 16mm color instead of Zapruder with his boilerplate 8mm family-man camera!

On top of which Zapruder’s amateurish eye for framing was atrocious. He allowed the Kennedy limo to sink to the very bottom of the developed image during the low 300 cycle of frames (the final 15 or 20 before the explosive head shot). 85% to 90% of these frames captured almost nothing but green grass and a few spectators.

The truth is that unexceptional, well-meaning Abe almost managed to eliminate JFK and Jackie plus John and Nellie Connolly altogether, but they clung to the bottom of the frame for dear life.

So Zapruder earned two failing grades — one for using a vagueiy shitty 8mm camera when he could have bought and used a vastly superior, professional-grade 16mm device, and the second for exhibiting piss-poor visual framing instincts.

I know this article sounds a bit silly, but imagine what the JFK assassination community would have had to work with if a serious cinema worshipper, a devotional, Gregg Toland-like crazy man with a 16mm Arriflex or Bell & Howell, had been standing in Abe’s shoes.

The Hell You Say

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This morning HE commenter Dean Treadway wrote something curious in the thread for “Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach.” He wrote “you must have been a terrible bully in school.”

Au contraire — it was often the other way around. During my horrible gulag youth I was occasionally victimized by bullies, both in fraternal and official realms. I was a provocateur, true, but the social punishment measures were brutal, even fiendish.

“Hardly a bully,” I replied. “I frequently felt alone and isolated and picked on. Mainly starting in my teens. Not always but often among rancid, herd-instinct groups in junior high and senior high (i.e., mainly in toxic New Jersey, hardly at all in Fairfield County).

“I consequently withdrew to some extent. I felt much more attached to movies and TV shows than to real life, which struck me as characterized by tiresome duty and drudgery and regulated boredom with very little in the way of discovery and adventure or, as Jim Morrison put it, “true sailing”.

And yet I had a perverse streak from an early age, rarely adhering to the straight and narrow. An instinctive oddball contrarian thing. Perhaps on some level an anarchist instinct, but more simply a healthy anti- authoritarian urge.

The first long word I learned to spell was anti–disestablishmentarianism.

Example: My Cub Scout group was hand painting fake-leather folders for personal diaries — we were simply supposed to try our hand at stylized caligraphy with the word “DIARY”’ front and center plus our names and birthdates at the bottom. I wrote the word “DAIRY” because I found it amusing.

I’m still pushing back against the bullies, except now they’re mainly from the ranks of Millennials and Zoomers.

Saving Newspapers for Headline Value

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Earlier today I paused in front of these newspapers, which were displayed upon a cardboard newsstand inside a CVS. “Hmm,” I wondered, “should I save these for posterity?” Then I figured “naahh.” Then I thought “no, maybe I should.”

The last N.Y. Times dead-tree edition I saved was when Obama was elected — 11.5.08. I also have JFK’s assassination (replica), Marilyn Monroe’s death (replica), JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, Nixon resigns, Reagan shot, Gorbachev toppled by coup, Yeltsin takes power.

Hedren on Downslope

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I was so disengaged during my one and only viewing of Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong (‘67) that I can’t remember Tippi Hedren’s cameo performance as “Martha” — her first post-Hitchcock gig.

She had a more substantial role in The Harrad Experiment (‘73) as a married sex instructor, although her cool and somewhat icy manner in The Birds and especially Marnie made that kind of character a difficult sell. Her Harrad husband was played by James Whitmore…go figure.

Speaking of icy I was surprised to come upon this Coppertone ad the other day. I honestly didn’t think the mid ‘60s Hedren, who began as a model, was capable of wearing a two-piece bathing suit, much less posing in one for a magazine ad. The frigid-chilly Marnie persona had really sunk in by that time.

I’m trying to think of another actress during that era who conveyed such anxiety or acute discomfort with any sort of erotic presence or expression. She was like a brittle nun of some kind, tense and guarded and buttoned up.