Riverside

RIVERSIDE

– Black & White / Color, 4 minutes, 16mm, Sound – 1973

<- Click image of Roger Junk to see a crude VHS copy of the film

After graduating from high school, four friends and I hiked up into the Olympic National Forest on the Enchanted Valley Trail for a week. The spectacular beauty of the sun streaming through the trees, the virtually untouched forest, icy cold rivers and majestic mountains rising around us, made me want to some how capture it’s splendor on a film. The group AMERICA had just come out with a song called RIVERSIDE, which kept going through my head while I was in this rainforest. I planed another hike into the forest with my roommate Roger Junk (who did not go along with us on the first hike), bringing all my 16mm equipment (tripod, Bolex Camera and rolls of Kodachrome movie film to capture the lush greens of the forest). We camped up there for 3 days and not only shot footage of Roger running around through the trees, but we also fished for trout (cooking it over our portable stoves) and we sang Beatle songs as we hiked the 7 miles into the forest.

The story line: The film opens with an animated asteroid flying through space and each time it pasted through the screen, a title would appear. I took one of the instrumental interludes from Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ LP and recorded it at ½ speed for the background music. I decided to try to mimic the Disney Multiplane animation setup. In my parent’s basement, I suspended 2 panes of glass from the ceiling and draped a black cloth below them. (Mom, I’m sorry about the big holes in the ceiling….) I then took white plasticene clay and rolled it into varying sizes of balls and placed them on the three surfaces. For my Asteroid, I took tin foil and crumpled it into a large ball so that it would reflect the light in different ways as I animated it moving across and down the 3 levels.

After the last title appears and fades out, I cut to Roger walking down a city street and then I have the asteroid come out of the sky and hit him, at which point he disappears from the shot and the Pink Floyd music stops. All of this was shot in Black and White. The film then jumps to a glorious color shot of the Rainforest, with sun streaking down through the trees. All of a sudden Roger appears in the shot looking confused. He has long blond hair down past his shoulders and looks sort of like Christ wearing old blue jeans and a tee-shirt. There is no sound at first as Roger looks around, then the song RIVERSIDE starts up and he starts to run through the woods, running towards the music. This music has a long instrumental opening and just as the lyrics start, Roger finds that the music is coming from the river. At this point, I cut to a sequence of shots of just the river. To end the film I decided to have Roger jump into the river and rise up out of the water with his hands up in the air on the last note of the music. Roger had a couple of problems with this ending. He did not realize (until we got there) how icy cold the mountain river water was. “OUR” other two problems where that the river current was very strong in most of the river, and there was not many pools of water deep enough for him to dive in head first. I told him that I really needed this shot and that we can’t do all this work and not get that shot. We eventually found a deep enough place and Roger got butt naked. I told him that when the film was rolling and he had 10 to 12 seconds to jump in before the camera wind ran out so he had better jump when I said go. He jumped and I got that shot, but the current deep down was so swift that he could not come back up in place where I needed him. As I was filming, I saw that he seemed to disappear out of my frame as the film wind ran out. I looked up to see Roger being dragged down river toward some rapids. He was franticly trying to swim upstream away from the rapids. I either yelled at him to swim to the riverbank or he figured it out on his own as I ran down stream with towels to meet him. After several hours of trying to convince him to get back into the water so I could get the last shot of him rising up, I was able to find a pool of standing water that he agreed to get in.

I cut the film using Paul Dorpat’s editing bench and he helped by teaching me a few tricks when I found that I had not shot enough footage of the river for the whole song. He taught me how to cut out a section of the song to make it shorter.

The film was rejected from the Bellevue Film Festival but it did win an Honorable Mention from the Seattle University Library Film Festival (judged by Seattle Times film critic, John Hartl) of that same year.