Girls On Film

I'm watching "Brother Outsider: Life of Bayard Rustin", and one of the first things they show is some film of him playing high school football. What? He was born in 1912 - meaning that AT THE LATEST, his senior season woulda been 1929. And there's footage of him playing!!!! I played 60 years later, and I promise there's no fucking footage of me floating around there. 1929. Good lord. Who was filming this shit? Who could've had that equipment - was Elia Kazaan hanging around black high school football games?

But this always drives me crazy. There's always some bio about a dude or a family, and the first thing they always talk about is how poor they were. "We had to eat the cat for lunch and then throw him up to eat him again for dinner, boy we were poor." And then they cut away to home movies. How did this happen? Hey, maybe if Pops hadn't dropped $34,000 to buy the camera from NASA, you could leave the cat alone. There are no such films of me growing up; hell I didn't know ANYbody who had any sort of movie camera back then. Any biopic of me will hafta start in like 2008, now that digital video cameras come free with two boxtops of Tide. The previous years will hafta be claymation dhiaramas I guess.

Capturing shit on film is kinda weird anyway, isn't it? I mean, who knows where you might be in a picture somewhere. Some family from North Dakota get their picture taken on the Boardwalk, you happen to be walking behind them and there you are, on some mantle in a room in a house in a town you'll never even know exists. Maybe in 1983 you took a picture, and beside a tree in the picture happened to be a girl you end up meeting and marrying 20 years later. Same with movies - e.g. the last scene of "Valley Girl," when the camera pulls away, showing the LA freeway packed with cars. What if you were in one of those cars? There you are, on film forever. Kinda creepy. Hell, there's even shots of unknown people that have become "standards", shown anytime there's a show about some subject. Like the girl screaming into the fence while the Beatles played Shea in '65, or the girl running to her father coming home from Vietnam. Anybody in the Zapruder film. We see these shots over and over; whatever happened to these people? They alive, dead? What's their story, what'd they go through in the ensuing decades? Become anybody, have 5 kids, date Tony Basil? The teenagers cracking eggs on the heads of the SNCC protesters in Woolworth's (or Montgomery Ward?) - what become of them? Would they do it again if they could, or are they ashamed of their actions of that moment? Somebody needs to find all these people, the people on the periphery caught forever, caught as part of history. Find these people, tell us about them. Now that would be a coffee table book I'd read.