NEWS

By Guest Writer, Robert F. Doares

Shot with Kodak B&W Super 8 mm film. Run-time 18 min 3 sec
Winner: FilmSouth Intercollegiate Competition, Converse College, 1976
Robert F Doares, Davidson Class of 1976: Screenwriter, Photographer, Director, Editor

A 50TH ANNIVERSARY CURATED EVENT WITH ORIGINAL CAST AND CREW
AND LIVE BLUEGRASS FROM THE SOUNDTRACK

2:30-3:30 p.m., Saturday, 6 June 2026
Tyler-Tallman Hall, Sloan Music Center, Davidson

I grew up in Lumberton, N.C. and entered Davidson College in 1972 planning to spend my junior year in Germany. Upon returning to campus from Marburg in autumn 1975, I had completed all requirements for graduation with a German major. This afforded me an idyllic senior year of elective classes and independent studies, including a self-designed filmmaking project under art professor Doug Houchens. “Art of the Film” appeared on my transcript that fall, probably the first academic credit in filmmaking that Davidson awarded.

In that era before the advent of videography, students sometimes filmed for fun with the ubiquitous Super 8-millimeter home movie camera that Eastman Kokak debuted in 1964, but the College had never offered a film course. The art department did own a little equipment—a silent Super 8 camera, a Super 8 sound projector, and a Super 8 analog audio-editing machine―kept in a large storage closet in the Cunningham Fine Arts Building, which doubled as a film room.

Professor James Purcell’s class in Southern literature exposed me to Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor and inspired the making of a screen adaptation of my favorite of her stories, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1955). Since the College’s Super 8 camera had no sound capability, we first set out to make a silent film from my screenplay, which reduced the story’s dense dialog to a minimum, to be inserted as printed intertitles. I could manufacture these in the print shop in the Student Union―housed temporarily in the old Carnegie Library that year―which I operated as my work-study job. There, on a vintage roller press, I blocked and inked lead type by hand to produce poster-board notices for films and other campus events.

From the beginning, we wanted to shoot the Southern Gothic story in black and white. Eastman Kodak sold monochrome, Super 8 black-and-white film for years but had recently ceased manufacturing it altogether. By searching numerous shops in Charlotte and beyond, we acquired just enough discontinued 3½-minute black-and-white Super 8 film cartridges to do the job. Mr. Houchens suggested that we ask Kodak in Rochester, New York, whether they could apply to the final copy of our film an oxide magnetic recording stripe, technology the company had developed for the release of its Super 8 sound camera and film in 1973.

This would enable us to add a musical soundtrack to our silent short. However, learning from Kodak that the magnetic stripe consisted of three separate recording tracks, which facilitated the overlay of multiple audio elements, opened the possibility of converting our silent footage to a full-sound movie.

To accomplish this, we had to record two types of sounds on reels of magnetic tape―live music and ambient noise―and use our editing machine to apply these to two of the magnetic tracks on the sound stripe. The remaining third track would receive dialog that the actors spoke into the microphone of the editing machine while watching their silent performances on the monitor. This would eliminate the need for printed dialog intertitles. Since our equipment did not permit correction of errors in mixing the three audio tracks, mistakes would become permanent imperfections.

The story required a cast of three: (1) a widow woman, Lucynell Crater, who resided on a tumble-down farmstead; (2) her cognitively challenged daughter, also Lucynell; and (3) a onearmed, itinerant handyman named Tom T. Shiftlet. There were no auditions, just informal discussions with likely candidates in my purview. Ellen Winkler, wife of our German Department chairman, played the mother. As a community theater enthusiast, Ellen could handle costumes and makeup. A good friend, Ernest Glenn, took on Shiftlet―despite Ernest’s having two arms. The role of young Lucynell went to physics major Nancy Petrowski (Quist), one of the limited number of women on campus in those last days before Davidson implemented full coeducation in the fall of 1976.

Neither Nancy nor Ernest had acting experience. My own 1962 Chevrolet Bel Air two-door sedan performed admirably as the old car of the story. We enlisted classmates Kevin Walsh and Merl Ferguson to provide high-powered bluegrass music for the soundtrack. As screenwriter, photographer, director, and editor, I was a complete neophyte.

The filming proved memorable. After a few rehearsal days, we shot the story in a couple of weeks. Much of the camera work occurred at the Barger Farm on Concord Road, not far from campus. The place featured an unoccupied two-story, white frame farmhouse and an old barn; at its core, the dwelling sheltered a Revolutionary-era log cabin. We filmed the wedding segment at the Lincoln County courthouse and shot the piteous finale at Neil’s Drugs in Huntersville. For traveling shots, I lay on my belly on the hood or trunk of the Chevy as Ernest and ladies barreled down the road. The cast delivered their lines from memory throughout, though the camera could not record them. We captured ambient sounds on a tape recorder at each location.

After shooting and developing the film came several weeks of editing, physically cutting the celluloid and piecing together the final version with adhesive splicing tape. I inserted footage of several opening credit titles printed in white ink on black poster board in my shop at the Student Union. When we sent the 18-minute spliced cut to Rochester for printing as a smooth copy, Kodak said that no black-and-white film stock remained at the factory. They would have to print on Super 8 color stock, which would impart a slight greenish cast to the final product. Given the dark nature of the subject matter, we welcomed this unexpected “ick” factor. When the smooth copy with recording stripe arrived, it indeed appeared a tad green in the viewing.

Turning the film into a talkie proved dicey. Using the audio mixing machine, we first applied the live-recorded bluegrass to the magnetic stripe, modulating the volume as required to prevent the music from overpowering the dialog. The second track of recorded ambient noise (farm animals, street traffic, door slams, etc.) required similar manipulation. Aware that the final step of dubbing the dialog could make or break us, we transferred the celluloid reel with music and sound effects to the Super 8 sound projector to view on the studio wall.

During several runs, the cast practiced their lines from memory as we watched, lip-synching themselves in real time. When they declared themselves as ready as they would ever be, the reel went back on the mixing machine for the voice-over. We four huddled around the tiny monitor and microphone as the actors delivered the dialog live on top of the other two tracks. Re-doing unsatisfactory results in a couple of spots was not possible. We had taken our one best shot and were done.

When the cast, musicians, professor, and I gathered to view "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," we could hardly believe that we had succeeded in creating a full-sound picture. That we had brought the thing into existence engendered much pride. Mr. Houchens submitted it to the upcoming FilmSouth student film competition at Converse College in Spartanburg SC. In the spring, news arrived that our movie had taken the top prize. In the award letter, the judges commented that, despite imperfections, the film stood out as a scrappy tour de force. They had reacted with astonishment, as did Davidson audiences, that something so engaging had been cobbled together by folks with no film experience and utterly inadequate equipment.

The Class of 1976 graduated on the first Sunday in June, and we offered a Saturday showing for the benefit of guests in attendance. After graduation, I left my copy of the film in a closet in my parents’ home and never dabbled in filmmaking again. I thought of the movie on occasion but did not see it again for years. Back in the United States in the late 1980s after working for Davidson in Germany for a time, I was surprised to receive in the mail from Ernest a DVD of our prize-winning creation. We no longer remember which thoughtful person borrowed the College’s Super 8 copy to have it converted to the emergent DVD format and to send us DVDs.

It has been gratifying to be able to view the DVD version on a television screen over the years, but that first digitalization of the celluloid more than three decades ago distorted the quality of the original. The resulting DVD displayed the moving images and titles askew on the screen, obscuring perhaps ten percent of the left lower corner of every frame. Likewise, the already somewhat indistinct audio of the original seemed degraded.

At our fortieth Davidson reunion in 2016, several original participants in the project gathered with family and friends to watch the DVD in the Rotunda lecture hall in Chambers Building. After a showing at a private party in June 2022, a classmate suggested a screening at our fiftieth reunion in 2026, with members of the cast and crew present to share their recollections of making the film. Except for Mr. Houchens, all are alive and well and eager to participate.

In anticipation of a possible fiftieth-anniversary event, in 2024 we sent the original 1975 reel of film to Nostalgic Media in Atlanta for production of a new digital version of better quality than the early DVDs. In January 2026, music producer Zach Jones of Los Angeles remastered the audio from the 2024 digitalization, gently smoothing the rough spots. These efforts have enhanced the viewing experience without compromising the patina of the imperfect original. Viewers today may appreciate how, in letting the countryside around Davidson stand in for Flannery O’Connor’s mid-twentieth-century Georgia, we preserved moving vistas of some of the rural landscape around Davidson now lost to real estate development. Happily, the soft green hue from the 1975 color stock still manifests itself in the current remastered edition.