Sid Laverents, 1908-2009

Sid Laverents, who was a unique and inventive amateur filmmaker for fifty years, died on May 6. Here is his obituary from The New York Times. A ten-minute piece featuring his multi-part magnum opus, The Sid Saga, was presented on Egg (PBS) in 2002.

Sid Laverents, Auteur of Homemade Films, Dies at 100

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: May 16, 2009

Sid Laverents, who started making movies in his Southern California basement after he turned 50 and became perhaps the most celebrated hobbyist in the amateur film world, his resourceful and dryly giddy work chosen for the National Film Registry, died on May 6 in Chula Vista, Calif. He was 100 and lived in Bonita, Calif., near San Diego.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Charlotte.

Mr. Laverents was a jack of many trades, a perpetual self-inventor. He played a dozen instruments and supported himself through the Depression as a vaudevillian one-man band; he was also a sheet metal worker who helped build World War II airplanes, a self-published writer, a Fuller Brush salesman, a sign painter, a carpenter and an aircraft engineer.

But he was best known for the more than 20 movies he made from 1959 until his death, as a member of the San Diego Amateur Moviemakers Club. They included nature films (one about snails, filmed in his backyard), goofy comedies ( “It Sudses and Sudses and Sudses,” a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”-like tale about canisters of shaving cream run amok in the bathroom) and deadpan autobiographical stories, including “The Sid Saga,” a four-part look at his own life, completed in his 80s.

Mr. Laverents had long been known to cineastes, members of amateur film clubs and other connoisseurs of noncommercial filmmaking, but in 2000, at 92, he got wider recognition after his “Multiple SIDosis” was included in the National Film Registry, a list of movies selected for preservation in the Library of Congress by the National Film Preservation Board. It is one of a handful of amateur works so designated, including the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

“We selected it to honor all the many terrific films produced by amateur ciné club filmmakers throughout the U.S. over the years,” said Stephen Leggett, project coordinator for the preservation board. “The film is technically quite adept and inventive, amusingly droll and quite mesmerizing to those who see it.”

And so it is. Nine minutes long, “Multiple SIDosis” stars Mr. Laverents himself, and it begins as he opens a Christmas gift from his wife at the time, Adelaide: a recording device. For the rest of the film, Mr. Laverents puts to use not just the recorder but also his background as a one-man band, knitting together a soundtrack of several separate recordings of himself performing a jaunty Felix Arndt tune called “Nola.” He whistles, hums, blows across bottlenecks and plays instruments, including a banjo, a jew’s-harp and an ocarina.

It’s a witty performance, but what is really unusual is the imagery that accompanies the music. Using repeated exposures of the same piece of film, Mr. Laverents kept adding different shots of himself playing the different musical lines. By the end, there are 11 different Sids on the screen, including a couple wearing Mickey Mouse ears and fake whiskers.

The skill, patience and fastidiousness of the filmmaking is extraordinary. Not only did Mr. Laverents perform all the individual parts beautifully, but because he was re-exposing the same piece of film again and again to layer on the next part, if he made a mistake on the eighth run-through, say, he had to begin again. This 1970 film took him four years to finish.

“What raises his work to a higher level is the deep ingenuity he brings to the minimal tools he has,” said Ross Lipman, a film restorationist at the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, which is in the process of preserving Mr. Laverents’s films, including “The Sid Saga.” “He designed and hand-built his own equipment that allowed him to synchronize the sound and the pictures while he was doing all these backwindings and rerecordings.”

Sidney Nicklas Laverents was born in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Aug. 5, 1908. His father, Paul, was a real estate speculator who moved the family frequently in search of a boom; young Sidney graduated from high school in Florida, where his father, at one point, operated a theater. His mother, Edith Davis, taught him piano. He also took drum lessons, and by the mid-1920s, he had taught himself ukulele, banjo and harmonica and had devised ways to play pie-plate cymbals with his elbows and a woodblock using a string, meanwhile strumming the banjo or the uke. He became a traveling musician after he met a father and son who did an escape act at his own father’s theater.

Mr. Laverents moved to San Diego in 1941 and did sheet metal work at Consolidated Aircraft. He was drafted in 1943 and sent to Calcutta to build and repair planes. He returned to Consolidated Aircraft after the war (it later merged with Vultee Aircraft and became known as Convair) and continued working there through 1967. He also studied engineering at San Diego State College, and in 1959, Charlotte Laverents said, “he was bitten by the film bug.”

Mr. Laverents was twice divorced and once widowed. Mrs. Laverents, whom he met through a personal ad and married in 1991, is his only survivor.

His impulse to create lasted nearly until his death. Last August Mr. Lipman and others held a 100th-birthday celebration in Los Angeles for Mr. Laverents, who worried that his declining health would keep him from attending. It didn’t.

“But he made an apology video,” Mr. Lipman said. “In case he couldn’t make it.”