It is not very often that a film has to wait 45 years to see the light of day. But for the recently rediscovered “Summer Children,” which features cinematography by Academy Award winner Vilmos Zsigmond that is exactly what happened.
Directed by James Bruner, “Summer Children” is a lost black and white treasure, a cinematic bridge between Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, Film Noir, and American youth movies that were so prominent in the 1960s. The film was made on a small budget, and features mostly student actors from UCLA. Of the main cast, only David Arkin, who has a minor role, went onto sustained success acting in movies, appearing in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” “Nashville,” and Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men.” Stuart Anderson, John Hanek and Valora Noland had minor roles in TV and films throughout the 1960s and not much beyond, while Sandy Gabriel had some success in soap operas. Bruner never directed another film, and his last credit is as production designer on “Blood Bath” in 1966. Writer Norman Handelsman never had another script made into a feature.
“Summer Children” revolves around a love triangle gone wrong against the backdrop of a yacht trip to Catalina Island. Shot on location, the set-up, and some of the sequences are distinctly of the American beach movie melodrama variety. But the execution shows Zsigmond’s knowledge and artistry, using minimal light and almost unheard of at the time hand held shots to create a unique black and white vision.
What makes “Summer Children” such an interesting, important piece of film history is the cinematography by Zsigmond. Although Zsigmond would go onto win a Best Cinematography Oscar for his work on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” as well as a long and illustrious career noted for work on such films as “Deliverance,” “The Long Goodbye,” and “The Deer Hunter,” in 1964 he was still a young cinematographer working on exploitation movies like “Nasty Rabbit” and the infamous cult classic “Psycho a Go-Go.”
After fleeing Hungary in 1956 during the Soviet invasion with fellow countryman and legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (who served as lighting director on the film), Zsigmond brought his European influences and cinematic eye to Hollywood, where eventually he would get to use his talents with natural light and color.
The film’s chance at initial release was botched by a distributor, who re-cut the movie, and then left the country with the prints, but losing the negatives by not paying the lab bill. Finding the actual film, the sound elements and securing the rights to restore and present the film was no small task, as copyrights had to be determined and clearances had to be obtained.
Overseen by original producer Jack Robinette and carried out by Edie Robinette-Petrachi, the restoration of the film also included the chance for Zsigmond, who was working on “Bolden” at the time, to color time and density balance the film for the first time. At first, Zsigmond said his memory needed to be jogged slightly when he received the call about restoring “Summer Children.”
“Jack Robinette called me, and I didn’t even remember his name,” Zsigmond said with a laugh. “I didn’t remember that he was one of the producers in the beginning. I didn’t remember any of the producers, but it turned out that I started to remember. It’s like a rebirth for the movie.”
For Zsigmond and an entire generation of cinematographers and directors that would spearhead the American New Wave, movies like “Summer Children” were the starting point.
“The story itself was in Europe in those days, what they were making, the Italian Neo-Realists and the French New Wave, and we were basing it, sort of started to create the American New Wave,” he said. “And this is the part of that movement, when this generation of filmmakers—Robert Altman, Brian De Palma…they were looking at the European movies which were not too popular in those days…we were trying to almost imitate the look of those European movies.”
One of the things that set the American New Wave apart from conventional movie making of the time is that they were not afraid to take chances, such as fast cuts, hand held cameras, and of course, shooting a film in black and white.
“We wanted to shoot it in black and white and not in color because we thought black and white was more artistic,” Zsigmond said. “It is easier actually, to tell a serious story. Remember in those days, those horror movies, low budget independent movies, we did not make the big movies. I think ‘Summer Children’ was a real gem for me, for me to be able to do a movie which was really looking artistic.”
A good portion of the film is set on the boat ride out to Catalina Island, which presented its own problems for the crew, seeing as they had virtually no time in preproduction for rehearsal or blocking for the actors.
“We didn’t have much pre-production. We read the script, and the boat was not available before. We could not actually have rehearsals on the boat, and part of the movie is playing on the sailboat,” Zsigmond said. “It was a beautiful, big sailboat. It was really hard to shoot on a moving boat. Some of the sequences you could stage it, the boat was not moving but a lot of them, we had to shoot while we were sailing, and that’s a difficult thing to do because a sailboat usually tilts, especially when the wind is blowing. You have to shoot almost like a handheld, because a tripod won’t help.”
In a black and white movie such as “Summer Children,” the use of light becomes a major factor in the look of the film, especially while shooting the boat scenes, with the sun and water serving as the primary backdrop.
“Being on the sea, we just tried to get the best out of the lighting and we hardly even used fill light because the moving water is always changing the actions around it,” he said. “It’s hard to use reflectors. We used a couple of lights, battery operated lights…and that’s all we could do, so maybe that was a good thing because it didn’t look over-lit. It pushed you in the direction that you don’t over-light something and it looks great.”
The varying moods of “Summer Children” are dictated very much by Zsigmond’s use of both the natural light at hand, and what little artificial light he decided to use. The movie begins on a bright, sunny day, and there are several sequences that are drenched in sunlight, giving the tone of the film an ethereal, dreamy quality at times. As night falls, and the tone of the movie gets darker, it’s Zsigmond’s decision to go with minimal light that mirrors the actions of the characters, as the battle between two of the male characters for the affections of Diana (Noland) take a turn.
“The filters I used actually I brought with me from Hungary, using a lot of light filters to make the sky dark in black and white,” Zsigmond said, “and graduated filters to make a more dramatic sky than it was, and the whole movie has this, I almost say a Film Noir quality, but a good black and white quality. I was amazed at the quality of what we got out of the movie because we didn’t spend much money, and what we did basically was we shot at the right angle which looked good.”
While the movie has been lost for 45 years, its recent unveiling shows a seminal cinematographer at an artistic highpoint, and the beginnings of a movement that would give important filmmakers—like Altman, De Palma and Mike Nichols—a platform that would last until the blockbuster mentality took over in the late 1970s.
Zsigmond, whose recent work includes “The Black Dahlia” and “You will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger,” is pleased that “Summer Children,” after a painstaking process, has resurfaced. For a man who has been director of photography on films that have secured his place in cinematic history, this small, unreleased black and white film also has its own place.
“I am happy to see this happening,” he said. “I’m happy. I invited a lot of friends (to the premiere) in film circles, and I’m sitting back and waiting how they like the film…I think it is an interesting film to watch.”
