Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter
how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter
whether your friends and your sister star in it.
Put your name on it as director. Now you’re
a director. Everything after that you’re just
negotiating your budget and your fee.
James CameronMYfather rarely used the ancient Pocket Kodak I described in the last chapter. It might have been the cost of film.
He was notorious in most of the stores and restaurants on San Antonio’s south side for his reluctance to part with
spare change, much less a couple of bucks. But I suspect that he was still looking for the right instrument to match his
artistic temperament, and the still camera just wasn’t it. He was in his 50s when he finally found it—an 8mm
Keystone movie camera. That’s 8mm film, not 8mm magnetic tape used in some digital video cameras today. The
frame on 8mm film is smaller than the nail on your little finger. The film is shot at a jerky 18 frames a second. One
roll of the film was good for five minutes. My father edited four rolls into a single 20-minute reel. (“Edited,” I’m sure,
suggests to you the kind of editing that creates pacing, tension, and moves the action along. My father’s editing pro-
duced one roll of film out of four, it only took him three splices to do it, and that was all.) He showed the consoli-
dated reels using a projector that clattered and whined and regularly deposited on the floor a snake’s nest of film
that had missed the take-up reel.
People today who carry around better video cameras in their cell phones will wonder how that Keystone could rouse
anyone’s muse. It had no microphone because you couldn’t record sound on 8mm. The lens didn’t zoom, although
later my father traded up for another Keystone with three lenses mounted on a turret. In the middle of a scene, he
could stop filming, give the turret a twist, and resume filming with a wide-angle, telephoto, or normal lens. This was
not as disruptive as it sounds because there was never anything going on in front of Daddy’s camera that was more
interesting than anything that might interrupt it.
This was because my father saved the movie camera to use at our family’s equivalent of affairs of state, when my sis-
ter’s family—eight kids—would crowd into my parents’ two-bedroom house for Sunday dinner, Thanksgiving, Easter,
or any holiday that culminated in the opening of presents or eating bodacious amounts of food. My father was best
known for his oeuvrethat includes “Xmas 1971,” “Xmas 72,” and “Xmas 73 and 74.”(His titles were always ren-
dered in crumpled aluminum foil twisted into letters and numbers that were glued to some suitable object, such as a
grandchild.)
CHAPTER 2 INSIDE DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERAS^15