VLVL2 (10) 24fps, 194-195

[Paul Nightingale]

(194.30-32) "Ditzah led them across the patio to a workshop in back, with a
Movieola machine and 16mm film all over the place ..."

More "seedy and picturesque":

"When veteran editor Billy Williams first started cutting commercials and
film projects, he invested in a standard Movieola. 'I took the first 10
grand I made and bought that machine,' Williams says. Then, in 1993, when
Avid Technology became the standard for state-of-the-art editing, Williams'
old 'upright' became obsolete."

[...]

"Williams was surprised when he found some of his younger editors gathering
in the lobby around the Movieola. They were studying it. 'Believe it or not,
they didn't know what it was exactly,' Williams says. He talked with his
editors and discovered that he had people working for him who had never
worked on an upright before. 'I have all these young people in my office,'
he says of his staff, whose average age is about 25.

Continues at:
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0DUO/1_40/54067600/p1/article.jhtml

(194.34) "... the old guerrilla movie outfit."

The chapter begins with a reference to outlaw film production, c1910.
Cheaper (and lightweight) equipment from the 1950s onwards liberated
production from the studio.

>From the 1910s to WW2 16mm production was either marginalised or suppressed.
In the 1920s and, in particular, 1930s it was associated with 'amateurs' or
documentary film-makers (and the technology was also used by the police for
surveillance of those who require it). In the 1960s it becomes associated
with radical film; in the US, a key moment was the formation of New York
Newsreel at the end of 1967, in the wake of the Washington demo against the
war in Vietnam. See John Hess, "Notes on US Radical Film, 1967-80" in Peter
Steven ed, Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics and Counter Cinema (1985). Also:
Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and
Television (1996).

"The main impression you get from seeing Newsreel films are both their great
excitement and energy and their poor technical quality ... Unsteady handheld
shots, poor focus, grainy and cloudy images, sloppy framing, unconventional
and often confusing editing, and indistinct soundtracks often make watching
them a real burden" (Hess, 142).

Hess says this quality was the result of the production situation and also
"a strong desire to shock bourgeois notions of taste". Given the response in
some quarters to VL, (some of) the same might apply to Pynchon's novel.

On the politics and economics of radical film-making in the 1960s and 1970s,
Colin McCabe's new biography, Godard, A Portrait of the Artist at 70, is
highly recommended.

(195.2-3) "... they kept in touch by CB radio, still then a novelty on the
road."

"Small two way radios were first used in World War II. The citizens' band
(CB) radio was born out of the idea that there was a market for inexpensive
two way radio service for private aircraft, boats and businesses. As
businesses and individuals became licensed to use the frequency by the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they found that there were all
types of people, including truckers, interested in using the frequency. CBs
evolved into a mass market product in the 1970s during the oil crisis,
independent trucker strikes, and it was popularized by TV, movies and song."

Continues at:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_101.html

And see, eg: Sam Peckinpah's Convoy (1978). Perhaps not surprisingly, the
film isn't so well-regarded:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/1912/convoy.html