This is 13 yr. old Timmy Page. I spent a day with him in 1967 filming at his house in Storrs, Connecticut while he directed one of his grand movie adventures in 8mm. When I was done, I thought but it would make a humorous short subject but had no idea that I was capturing a moment in time in the evolution of amateur video/filmmaking-really the dawn of the RU-vid creative video maker. The film won 30 Blue Ribbon film Festival awards and helped advance my career as a documentary filmmaker. Timmy & I appeared on national television. A Kodak commercial was made with Timmy-I made it.
I was a young documentary film maker in 1967. At the time, there were new opportunities to film everywhere as hardly anyone had ever been filmed and television was just beginning to show ordinary people's lives rather than just "big-time news." I had a grant from the United States Information Agency (the USIA) to travel around New England and capture little stories of American life. The agency would then show them across the globe at various film festivals etc.
Timmy (Tim) Page called for a "film shoot" and my cousin was one of the characters who got together at his house to make movies. 8 mm silent films that Timmy created, directed, scripted, and edited. He was extraordinarily verbal and seem to have a very deep understanding of himself including his high level of anxiety and peculiar hand movements and facial expressions.
One of the reasons that my film was so popular 1968 and 1969 is that it revealed a movement in our communications history when thousands and then tens of thousands and now with RU-vid, tens of millions of creators made user generated films - now user generated videos. It didn't take much to begin - creativity and a camera and audio recorder and an editor, and you could make movies. That is partially why touch so many - because what Timmy was up to matched what others were up to at exactly the same time. And it is surprising how many of the up and coming young filmmakers at that time producing films of all styles from pure art to super realism, were under the age of 20 years old.
Background:
Tim Page struggled in school even as his musical abilities matured and his interests in literature and film, especially silent film, deepened. He recruited his siblings and classmates in his early efforts in filmmaking; in 1967, Page and his films were the subject of my documentary titled A Day With Timmy Page. It was screened at the opening of the 1968 New York Film Festival.
The adult Tim Page became an American writer, music critic, editor, producer and professor who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism for The Washington Post. Other notable writings by Page include his biography of the novelist Dawn Powell, which is credited for helping to spark the revival of Powell's work, and a memoir that chronicles growing up with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder.
Page revealed in a 2007 essay for The New Yorker that he had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, "in the course of a protracted effort to identify - and, if possible, alleviate - my lifelong unease." The essay led to the publication of his book-length memoir Parallel Play, published in September 2009. In a review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that the book is "not about Asperger's, but it is intensified by the peculiar nature of Mr. Page's Asperger-governed perceptions. Tirelessly logical, sometimes agonizingly so, he lives life in an extra dimension, with a sense of time that irrevocably links past and present, living and dead, ardent love affairs and broken ones."
I was very fortunate to be there that day with my wife at the time Iris Hoffman (who tried her best to record the audio) and, after a short meeting, just roll film - 16mm black and white film - of Timmy and his classmates creating another movie.
My film, "A Day with Timmy Page" won more than 30 top awards at American and European film festivals including Chicago and New York. Timmy/Tim went on to become a nationally recognized music critic and author. I went on to make hundreds of other documentaries. Tim has shown this film to his grandchildren and I hear that they found their granddad fascinating. That satisfies me.
Thank you Timmy Page.
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Thank you for the consideration
David Hoffman filmmaker
6 сен 2024
