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 someone 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. 

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.