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Who was Grandpa, and Why Did He Shoot All Those Movies?
It began when he was a kid, the son of a butcher, hanging around the movie studios in Queens, New York where he once landed a bit part as a boy on a schoolbus in a Mary Pickford movie. As a teenager he did chores for the studios, and when they moved to Hollywood they wanted him to come along. He would have - but personal matters forced him to stay at home, thus ending any chances he had for a future career in the film industry. What might have happened if Gustave had gone Hollywood? Lord only knows. I like to think that he would have wound up directing comedies for Hal Roach or Mack Sennett. Anyway, that missed opportunity did not kill the movie bug in him. Sometime in the 1920's, as he settled into the College Point section of Queens, married his sweetheart, and began raising a family, he started his lifelong avocation of shooting home movies - lot's of them! By the mid-1960's he had shot close to 50 reels' worth of 16mm footage. At a capacity of 400 feet per reel, that's over 4 miles of film! Gus filmed everything - not just your typical birthdays and parades but also the 1939 Worlds Fair in color, vintage aircraft, mini-comedies starring his neighbors, Shriner conventions, Florida and Long Island before development, Christmas before commericalization, households before television... Today his movies have transcended their amateur status to become valuable little documentaries of how life in America used to be. As home movie-makers go, he was among the best. He had a natural knack for composing his shots, understood the technicalities, and wasted no shots. More importantly, he had a congenial, often jolly rapport with all his subjects so that nobody ever considered him an intrusive, annoying "camera bug". He really would have made a fine director. Before his death in 1977 he entrusted his celluloid treasures to my brother Daniel, who has since overseen their storage and protection. By the time Daniel loaned them to me for this project the oldest reels were 70+ years old and none of them had been projected in more than 30 years. Grandpa would be happy to know that most of his movies, thanks to Daniel's protection, have survived in surprisingly good shape with minimal loss of color or detail. I've started this website with the goal of keeping his legacy alive not just for family members but for all those who respect and wish to preserve America's home movie heritage. To them and in the memory of Gustave A. Martens I dedicate this project. - Robert Martens
TECHNICAL NOTES on the PRESERVATION and DIGITIZATION of HOME MOVIES
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Gustave
Albert Martens (1900-1977) was my grandfather, and he had this passion...
