Bootlace Cinema Volume Two

Boot Suites

Bootlace Cinema Volume Two
by Mark Williams
Tree Frog Publications
ISBN 9798243641975

Following on from the first book in this series (reviewed by me here) and subtitled ‘Collecting All Kinds Of Movies On Super 8’, Mark Williams gives us his first sequel tome, Bootlace Cinema Volume Two and, as did the last one, doing very much what it says on the cover. 

The foreword on this one is by Allan Bryce, a guy who writes amazing editorials I read every month on his two excellent magazines, The Dark Side and Infinity. He’s always witty and charming and he gives his usual spin on this subject, which I know was a hobby of his as I am reading through, little by little, his 1968 diaries through Teams every night to my better half in Switzerland. We then get a nice introduction to the book by Williams himself, filling us in about details of his early life when he was, amongst other things, a messenger for the film company CIC in London at one point. And, frankly, anybody who mentions, as he does here, my favourite shop of all time, the sadly now extinct Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, gets an extra gold star. 

The previous volume gave us a lengthy overview of the various companies putting out all these Super 8 digest versions back in the day and, rather than repeat all that (and I’m glad he didn’t, we already have that stuff in the first book), he has a small section devoted to... something that very much took me by surprise. Three new companies, from different countries (including the UK) which have now recently started making these things today for modern and presumably deeply nostalgic collectors of the Super 8 digest versions. Those companies being Dave Film in the US, Dorun Films in the UK and Ultra 8 in Spain.

Then comes a lengthy stand alone section, contributed to by Andy Allard, all about the many and varied films in the Lemon Popsicle series. Now, okay, it’s not my thing and I haven’t (I would say somewhat gladly) seen any of these movies (nor the American remake of the first) but it’s a nice addition for people out there who are as enthralled by this stuff as the author, for sure.

And then we get the same format as the last tome... 

Lots of colour pictures of, not just the box art in various languages but also various trade and commercial adverts of some of the films or packages covered, which in this case is a big look at films alphabetically from Airplane to Yeti. 

So each entry will start with a summary of the main plot of the film followed by, in some cases, some interesting and often informative stories from behind the scenes... and then the technical details of the various Super 8 cut downs which found their way into the market place (including the odd airline versions of the films), not to mention details about censorship cuts and sometimes the lack of, therein. 

And the book has value not just to collectors of these things and for people who want to see the artwork but also because there are some things revealed that somehow had managed to escape me and maybe other film friendly readers too. For instance, I didn’t realise that John Carpenter’s Dark Star wasn’t released in UK cinemas until it had already played on television back in 1977. Or that the first and last days of the shooting of the Charlton Heston disaster vehicle Earthquake were hit by actual earthquakes. 

I also didn’t know that Michael Caine had turned down the role of the serial killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy or that, on the set of Shout At The Devil, Lee Marvin got into a fist fight with Roger Moore and Moore definitively won, leaving Marvin to comment that “The guy is built like granite, nobody will ever underestimate him again.” 

There are a few mistakes in the book too such as saying the score for Live And Let Die was composed by John Bary (nope, it was George Martin) and, although he says the third Battlestar Galactica film, Conquest Of The Earth was never released in UK cinemas well... all I can say to that is, I definitely saw it at my local cinema and that was in Enfield Town in the early 1980s (and I don’t care what the IMDB says either, it was in my local flea pit on general release and the film was a real head scratcher continuity wise, in the way it didn’t really follow on logically from the first two theatrical releases, for sure). 

I did also take umbrage at his dismissive description of the first two scores in the original Planet Of The Apes series of films, by Jerry Goldsmith and Leonard Rosenman respectively. The Goldsmith score is especially a masterpiece and if you ever get a chance to hear it performed live, definitely get yourself along to that. 

The author also, sadly, confirms the bad news that there seems to be no negative of The Day Of The Triffids in existence. So that long desired Blu Ray upgrade will probably not come to pass anytime soon (or ever, is my guess). 

All in all though, this is a good little book and I especially laughed at the snippet of information that the first film in the Star Trek franchise had been re-christened Star Trek The Slow Motion Picture by discerning critics (yeah, we all thought it at the time... those effects sequences were way too long). So if you liked the first volume of Bootlace Cinema then you should be very much into this, perhaps slightly superior, sequel book and, I heard it on the Twitter grapevine (and I hope this rumour is true because I will be first in line to buy a copy) that there will possibly be a Bootlace Cinema Volume Three at some point in the future. Good stuff and worth more than just a peek between the covers.