Bootlace Cinema

Lace With The Devil

Bootlace Cinema
by Mark Williams
Treefrog publications
ISBN 9798333275219

Subtitled Collecting Horror, Science Fiction & Exploitation Movies on Super 8, Mark Williams’ new book Bootlace Cinema starts off giving an overview of the phenomenon of buying and collecting Super 8 cut down/condensed versions of movies on the format in the UK, before the home video boom ushered in by VHS (and technically also by Betamax, I guess), effectively killed the phenomenon almost overnight. That is, as I learned from this tome, except in Germany, where home video Super 8 cut downs were an ongoing thing right up until 2003, with the last release in the format over there apparently being Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The book starts off with a few essays detailing the rise and fall of the format and highlights the main players, such as they were, in terms of the companies putting out this stuff. So the likes of Castle Films/Universal 8, DVR Films, Derann Film Services, Fletcher Films, Mountain Films, Perry’s Movies, PM Films Limited, Ritz Films and Walton Films are all given their own mini section, giving some information about them, with some of them detailing the history of each company and, of course, a lot of the information throughout the book relies on the memory and expertise of the author... as this new tome appears to be the first of its kind in terms of covering this once popular secondary market for what were, in a way (and due to their mostly incomplete nature of the product into very condensed, short run time highlight reels), a high end piece of cinematic merchandise. This stuff is not forgotten by the people who used to buy this kind of thing though and, relatively recently, the art form of editing these things down into these bite sized (for the most part) reels has come back into vogue with Blu Ray purveyors such as British boutique label Indicator including these cut down versions in their extras on some of their releases.

After these opening sections the book starts proper with an alphabetical list of many of the films falling under the auspices of the book’s subtitle, each having their own entry comprising of (for the most part) a short summation of the movie, some interesting history of the film in question and the details of the various cut down versions of the film released into the ‘bootlace market’ at the time.

Now I’ve never gotten into this particular hobby myself (although I believe my dad has some old Hal Roach shorts in the loft) so I found this mostly fascinating in terms of the various versions of the films on offer and what shape they were in. I also found a parallel to the early days of DVD purchasing in that the US imports I used to get before a film even hit UK cinemas is similar to many of these cut down films being released before the film was even shown in the cinemas here... and in some cases with footage which was censored out in the UK by the BBFC as part of those condensed reels.

I also, as it happens, picked up some interesting information about some films in general which had somehow managed to escape me before now (don’t ask me how). Such as the UK theatrical release of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century being cut for violence. Or the fact that, when he starred in The Omen, Gregory Peck took a huge cut in salary but opted instead for 10% of the film’s profits. The Omen was, of course, very successful indeed and so it actually ended up as being Peck’s highest paid role. I also didn’t know that, while David Cronenberg’s Shivers was passed as an uncut X certificate in the UK, it was actually banned in Hampshire, where the town’s council decided it was too much for the sensibilities of the locals.

I also found it interesting in terms of the extra work the UK collector would have to do if they wanted to get their product in a more palatable shape. Sometimes a few different condensed reels of a film would be released into the market and some of the companies had a rule in their contract with the films’ original distributors that each reel would be able to make sense as a self contained story... which meant some repeat footage to contextualise the rest of the contents. Which meant that many collectors would go to the trouble of splicing and re-editing their purchases together, to get a presentation closer to the original version of the film (even if a couple of reels combined would only come to about a half an hour).

And that’s me pretty much done on this, pretty much invaluable tome on the subject of Bootlace Cinema. With the annoying caveat that the writer seems to not know the difference between there, their and they’re... using the first spelling for all the many instances of the other two in the book also. Which, I confess, irritated me no end but certainly not enough to fail to recognise the hard work and the enlightening information which has gone into this feature presentation, so to speak. And if you’re on the fence about it, please know that the book is chock full of colour representations of the original Super 8 box artwork (including many of the German releases), along with various print adverts for these items so, for that reason alone, the book is more than worth the price of admission.