12/30/22
Newsletter #204
The Crack of Dawn
Now for the completion the epic saga of the 15-minute film, Firefight. So, Sheldon shot the film in 16mm and was now going to have it blown up to 35mm. That had been done with Evil Dead, which was blown up by Duart Labs in NY. I had blown up Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except at the lab in Detroit. None of the labs in L.A. did blow-ups — blow-ups were for indies and Hollywood didn’t do indies — so Sheldon was weighing the possibilities. He and I were walking across the parking lot of little strip mall at the Sunset and Vine when who should we run into but Mike Jittlov, the Wizard of Speed and Time.
Mike was easily recognizable since he always wore his wizard outfit – a green, pointy wizard hat and a green cape. Mike Jittlov was the mad special effects man of Hollywood who was so smart, talented and weird that no one would work with him (he had done a stint at Disney, but didn’t last). Mike created special effects that nobody understood. This was long before digital effects when effects were done optically – adding layers of mattes and superimpositions. But Mike Jittlov didn’t achieve his effects optically; he somehow did them in the camera in a way that no one could comprehend. [His two best short films are: The Wizard of Speed and Time and The Time Machine, both available on YouTube]. Sheldon asked Mike if he knew of anybody who could do a good 16mm to 35mm blow up? Mike said, “I know exactly the guy.”
Mike led us to the tiny office of an older fellow with a graying beard right nearby on Santa Monica Blvd. Most of this guy’s little office was filled with an optical printer the size of limousine, plus several tables with rewinds, and hundreds of cans of film. An optical printer was the expensive piece of equipment used to perform optical effects – like the parting of the Red Sea. It only made sense that Mike Jittlov, the mad, in-camera FX man, would be friends with the mad optical effects man. This guy immediately pulled a lens out of the printer, held it up for me and Sheldon to inspect, and said, “George Lucas borrowed this lens to do the effects in Star Wars.” We didn’t doubt him. Sheldon hired the guy on the spot – his rate was very reasonable – and the two of them went right into a several hour conference about the specifics of Firefight. I sat there bored out of my skull.
Finally, this optical effects madman saw my plight and took pity on me. He handed me an old 35mm film can and a pair of white gloves. He said, “These are some of the original nitrate outtakes of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1932 film, Que Viva, Mexico. They are extremely precious, and highly flammable. Don’t smoke.” Que Viva, Mexico is a legendary, uncompleted film by the Russian master filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein. It was his one and only production out of Russia, and it went completely to hell over the course of many months of shooting in Mexico in 1931-32, and was ultimately abandoned. A cobbled-together version was finally released in 1979.
So, as Sheldon and this guy talked shop, I went through a hundred short film clips, most about a foot long. I was seated at a light table with a magnifying glass and really got to inspect these sharp, high contrast, black and white images of Mexico. The next thing I knew it was hours later and Sheldon wanted to go.
The blow up of Firefight looked great. Sheldon just told me he had it retransferred to high resolution digital and will be posting it on YouTube.
And that’s the whole story.