By Bill Creed Sitting in the century-old Colonial Theater in Phoenixville Pennsylvania waiting for my documentary Beware the Blobfest! to screen I realized that a fifty year old film – The Blob – had taken me on a journey across the country and then all the way to the Cannes Film Festival. And here I was back where it had started showing the film to the group of people who had fascinated me two years earlier. In the spring of 2008 I read a New York Times article about Blobfest a film festival that celebrated the 1958 film The Blob. Although I can’t say I was really a fan of the film the story appealed to the movie history lover in me. I like many baby boomers had seen The Blob. It existed for me like all those other fifties black and white horror films sitting locked in my subconscious – something I could reference if needed but not a film I would readily call up. As a Steve McQueen fan it was one of those films one had to track down to see: most people know it best as Steve McQueen’s first film. That The Blob really wasn’t his first film is just one of many Blobfacts I learned. McQueen’s first feature film performance was his in 1956 in his un-credited appearance as Fidel in Robert Wise’s biopic of Rocky Graziano Somebody Up There Likes Me which starred another young actor on the rise Paul Newman. But I had other memories of The Blob the most vivid being the creature itself oozing through the projection room windows into the movie theatre an image I imagine still scares many a movie fanatic. The first thing that surprised me was The Blob was in color. All my memories of it were black and white. Then I realized that I probably first saw it on television before color TVs were the norm. What intrigued me was the idea that fifty years after being made people actually celebrated the film. It’s not a great film or even a huge pop cultural moment but something in it does strike a chord now. So I tracked down Dr. Frankenstone aka Shane Stone and Dave Lentz two of the Blobfest organizers. I learned the festival centered on the Colonial Theater looking the same as it did fifty years ago when the Blob oozed out of those projection windows. And after talking to Shane and Dave and doing some research I became fascinated by the film’s production story; the people who made it – a frustrated film distributor who really understood marketing and a Christian film company that for some reason decided to branch out into the teen horror market. And I wanted to explore what makes the film live on; is it a metaphor for the Red Scare the era’s growing Communist threat or a powerful example of teenage empowerment? Whatever it is the Blobfest shows just how powerful the film medium is at creating moments in time that last forever. Unfortunately the article came out only about a month before the Festival and my wife and I were going to Poland that summer to research an idea for a documentary she is producing. A year later I was working on a broadcast television program My Generation a magazine format show produced by the AARP broadcast department. I still wanted to document the Blobfest so I pitched the idea as a short feature for the program. They went for it and suddenly I had a crew for the festival. We shot the film on HDCam with a two-person crew in Phoenixville at the Blobfest itself. My cameraman was Scott Bartlett and the soundman was Steve Bartlett. Both Scott and Steve work as contractors for AARP and their time and equipment were both provided by the broadcast department. The rest of the film was self-produced. Overall I imagine the production including edit time ended up in the twenty-five thousand dollar range. Scott was instrumental in the final film. He is a creative cameraman with a great sense of story-telling who constantly made me think about the shots: how they should be framed what was going on in them. We spent quite awhile trying to come up with things that would make the film seem a little off a little disconcerting. For example we shot the interviews with the subjects facing out of the screen as opposed to the more normal way of facing into the screen. Most of the film was shot over the three days of the festival. We had two cameras – both Sony 750s – mainly so we could shoot the infamous run-out on Friday night from two angles. (Steve Bartlett our soundman did double duty as second unit camera.) Later I traveled to Los Angeles to interview the film’s producer Jack Harris hiring a local L.A. crew. David Collupy filmed that interview with a Panasonic camera recording on P2 cards. The first edit a five and a half minute piece for the My Generation program was done on AARP’s Avid HD Adrenaline and took about a week. At the time it was the longest piece the show had broadcast and while I had pitched and always assumed the segment would be the cute closer at the end of the program it became the feature story of that episode and I even cut a second shorter piece on the festival’s tin foil hat contest for the cute show closer. I had always wanted to make a longer documentary about the festival. But how long? As practically every documentary filmmaker these days does I first thought of the film as an hour long documentary since that seems to be the only way to get your film shown on television. Going the feature documentary route would be difficult financially – way out of my price range. Plus I had seen way too many feature length documentaries that should have been shorts. The main difficulty I had videotaping Blobfest was exactly what to shoot. On one hand AARP was paying for the shoot and expected to get a short three-to-five minute piece. So we had to think about getting the footage needed to tell that story. On the other hand I had wanted to focus on a couple of characters to build a film around. And those two ideas didn’t really mix especially with only one crew. Following one person around to create a profile would mean not getting enough of the overall event. I ended up not getting much of the profile footage. I believe longer films especially feature docs need strong characters. And while there were strong characters at Blobfest I didn’t have the footage or the time to get the footage to thoroughly develop them. That was when I realized I had enough for a really good short film. I transferred the footage from the Avid using exported QuickTime movies to my FCP to finish it on my home edit system. It took about three weeks to finish the twenty-four minute film. To master the film on HDCam I had to re-import the finished Final Cut produced QuickTime movies into the AARP Avids and transfer them to HDCam tape. Since finishing the film I’ve entered it into several festivals. As of now it has been shown at three: The Philadelphia Independent Film Festival The Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival. It will be shown in October at the Tacoma Film Festival and the SSG Short Film Festival in Beverly Hills where it was took second place in the Audience Selection Awards. The coolest moment though was showing the film to more than 100 people at the 2009 Blobfest in the Colonial Theater where it all started. Whether they were among the organizers who took part in the film or simply fans of the Blob and Blobfest that audience understood the movie from the opening frame. They were attentive throughout and laughed in all the right places. And when the movie was over the rewarded me with a long and warm round of applause.
