Watching Blackhawk Films

Last Sunday evening my family did something that is now an ancient, archaeological event to most households. I stood up something known as a “movie screen,” threaded some 8mm movie film into my built-like-a-tank, all-metal Wollensak projector, hung a towel over a shade-less window, and watched some home movies. Well, somebody’s home movies: we haven’t a clue who these people are or where they’re from, but we entertain ourselves with vintage views of holiday trips to Seaworld and Las Vegas, vignettes of grandmas hamming it up for the camera, and posed portraits staged by someone that doesn’t understand the difference between a movie camera and a still camera. Sure, at times we spend most of our energy mocking the fashions and the goofiness of candid family films, but the rest are spent taking in the culture of the time, without the sanitized or story-centric world found in period sitcoms and films of the same era. We viscerally recoil at the surprise inclusion of grandpa gutting pheasants. The things we’ve known our whole lives — tractors, tail-finned cars, cast-iron toys — as chipped, rusted, and dented, appear on the screen as brand-new.

On Sunday, we went through all the 8mm film I had — but, of course, not all the movies I own. The Wollensak isn’t a dual-format projector. Original 8MM film has one sprocket-size, but in later years Super8, with its larger frame-size and wider-spaced sprocket holes, was more prominent. An 8mm projector like my Wollensak won’t do Super8, and it was awfully late that night, so my small Blackhawk library had to sit idle until the next Movie Night. Blackhawk Films was a distribution company with thirty years of supplying old films to people in need of entertainment.

Blackhawk Films was originally the ‘bargain basement’ business of Kent Eastin, a film developer and distributor who had set up shop in Davenport, IA in the 1940s. With direct mail expert Martin Phelan, Eastin Pictures slowly saw its business supplanted by television and other newer technologies, and opened up its distribution wing as a mail-order source to consumers. Blackhawk Films licensed numerous classic films, from old shorts to newsreels, and performed archive-quality restoration and reproduction to produce the best quality copies for their customers. In the time before videotape and cable TV, the opportunities to see these films was mostly limited to weak-performing timeslots on local television stations or cheap movie theatre matinees. I remember, when I was quite young, my parents and their friends checked out a projector and a stack of 16mm movies from the library — there wasn’t such thing as a video rental place nor HBO. Blackhawk Films had a catalog full of old films in a variety of film sizes and formats, both silent and with sound, and their high-quality duplicates of fifty-year-old films provided all sorts of entertainment for families across the country.

Eventually, those other technologies that we rely on degraded Blackhawk’s market. Cheap, more-resilient VHS videotapes took hold quickly, and the expansion of cable television provided plenty of other opportunities for people to see these old movies and otherwise occupy family-time viewing. Although Blackhawk Films closed up shop in the very early 80s, their library eventually passed on to former Blackhawk Vice-President David Shepard. Shepard now operates Film Preservation Associates, which still restores old film, but also licenses those high-quality masters restored by Blackhawk to DVD producers.

While I’ve owned more in the past (and sold them off on eBay), of the thousands of movies in the Blackhawk Films library I only own four today: Our Gang/Little Rascals short Uncle Tom’s Uncle, Buster Keaton in Cops, Charlie Chaplin in The Immigrant, and Laurel & Hardy in Two Tars. The last three are each noted throughout the internet as a masterpiece of their respective stars, which should make them a nice primer for the kids’ ongoing lessons in appreciation of classic art. Me, I’m just entertained anyhow — a couple weeks ago, the kids rolled their eyes at me as I laughed out loud at Saps At Sea (not one of Laurel & Hardy’s best) on Turner Classic Movies. They were crafting at the kitchen table, unable to see the TV from their seats, but I’m sure their reaction was because they just didn’t know what they were missing. The Uncle Tom’s Uncle film might be a bit more than the kids can handle, though — not because of it’s racial overtones, but, between my wifey and I, we provide lengthy history lessons whenever appropriate…I don’t know that the kids would be willing to watch any more old movies after getting a lecture on the impact of post-emancipation politics and the history of minstrel shows. Better start simple, probably with Buster Keaton to appeal to the 8-year-old boy’s inherent love of people falling on their butts. If they like what they see, I don’t doubt we’ll run across more Blackhawk Films reels in the future.