About The Director
From a very young age I had always felt I was a film-maker. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a camera.
My first summer job was as an usher at the Fabian Theater in Paterson, New Jersey, sadly, now demolished.
Thus it was that just as TV viewers in the the1950’s were able to watch the popular show, The Million Dollar Movie, which played the same film every day for a week, I was able to watch movies over and over, but with the added advantage of seeing everything on the big screen!
Years later, living in San Francisco, I had the good fortune of falling into an active film scene. I joined the SF Film Workers Union, a politically aware group of independent film makers whose core group went on to create Cine Manifest. In addition, I had the opportunity to work on my roommates’ films and was able to enlist them to work on The Pleasants Effect.
The film was shot in 1973. What I did not know at the time was that I would end up carrying the raw footage with me for over 40 years, carefully transporting it from apartment to apartment and town to town because soon after shooting it I realized that I had neither the resources nor the courage to commit myself to the monumental task of physically cutting and splicing the reels of 16mm film and magnetic tape.
It’s likely the suitcase which housed those aging reels of celluloid would have morphed into their coffin had it not been for what was, in my mind, the unexpected and miraculous advent of digital film editing.
But even then I was slow to get up the nerve to tackle this project.
Finally, in 2019, just as some of the 46-year-old celluloid reels were starting to release their first whiffs of vinegar, a tell-tale sign of disintegration due to age, I decided the time had come to digitize everything and get this film made!
Using the only video editing software my low-powered PC could handle I began to craft my film. With my background as a software engineer, I took readily to it. It allowed me to experiment and freely make edits in a way I found really gratifying.
In late August 2020, the ancient film which once languished in that old dilapidated leather suitcase, now interspersed with vintage images and music to better tell the story, came to life on the small screen of my laptop.
If I have any regrets about taking so long to complete it, it is only that the Pleasants family, to whom this story meant so much and to whom I dedicate this effort, are no longer with us to see it.