Wiggle Wiggle Woo

 

A long time ago, I don't know how many years ago it was, when I first started making gifs for my blog (which now seems like a very long time ago), there was a fad: 3D gifs (or GIFs, as they are usually called - I just use lower-case letters because "GIFs" is so bleepin' ugly). The 3D gifs were just what you see here - two very slightly different views of a scene which were rapidly wiggled back and forth to make them sort of look 3D. Technically it's a gif, but a very inadequate one because gifs usually express movement, and these look like the participants are either experiencing a mild earthquake, or sitting on jell-o.

The 3D effect is there, kind of eerily, not unlike the stereoscopic images from my Grandma's old viewer (and didn't YOUR Grandma have one of those, too?). These are a little more disquieting because they just won't stop moving. I'm not sure of the age of them, but it's well over 100 years, so that the pictures would likely be hand-tinted. As a matter of fact, it's very likely these gifs WERE made from those old stereopticon cards with the double image on them. I'm not sure what else they would use.

So what does this prove? Anything? I just analyzed one of them using my gif-making/editing program, and they each have exactly two frames. I don't know why the eye is fooled into thinking it's 3D, when it most decidedly isn't. 

Then people started making their own, and this sort of thing was popular for a while, though I guess you had to have the right equipment to take the pictures. This one has not two, but six frames, but is still limited by that incessant (pointless?) back-and-forth movement which makes the subject of the picture seem so utterly frozen.

I had to try slowing this one down. Not very exciting, is it? But it's typical of the kinds of images I was seeing back then. I remember all sorts of excited entries on web sites with a kind of "WOWWWWW!!!" tone to them: NOW YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN GIFS IN 3D! Even ready-made ones were considered the marvel of the age. Look! Oh wow! They're in 3D! Just like in the movies! All I could see was a lot of jellylike shaking.

Speeded up, you can see that everything seems to be moving in the picture except the main figure, who is just hanging there. The effect is more disquieting than ever.

WOW.

Or. . . not.

This turned out to be a fad which fizzled very quickly, mainly because it just looks so DUMB and not really 3D at all, just annoying. All the images I've gathered here are from posts from 2011, so my guess is that 2011 was the height of the fever. 2011 now seems like approximately one billion years ago. Six years is a long time, and on the internet it is an eternity. 

I can't leave this topic alone until I present a couple of truly hideous historical ones I found. I don't know how these were made, but probably with a double-sided stereoscope image. I just wish they hadn't done it at all.

History comes alive.

It's lies, I tell you! Dirty, filthy lies!

I will confess to one thing: I stay up late at night, and look for photos of - two! Two things I confess to. I stay up late at night and look for photos of Harold Lloyd - THREE! Three things I -

Sorry, I've just been in a Monty Python mood lately. It's the silly season, and I want to coast along and not put in the usual feverish effort that makes this blog so totally obscure, not to mention primitive to look at.

I found this lovely shot of HL, obviously a candid photo. I love the quality of light in it, sifting down as if some sun or moon dwells in the corner.  Someone is wearing a silk top hat, which is not something you saw every day even back then (likely in the  mid-1930s). Harold is wearing very fancy evening wear and, as usual, looks splendid in it (and as he said himself in his Nebraska-born way, "Well, some say I don't clean up too bad"). This was a  gentleman to the manor born, but what's he doing here? Who is the blonde, and why does Harold look just a tad guilty?

As you can see here, the private Harold looked very different from the Glass Character who propelled him to fame. He was better-looking, for one thing, with the clean Gregory Peck jawline that makes male movie stars so photogenic. He carried himself differently. He rocked a tux like no one else. But what's going on here - just the usual social whirl he was obliged to engage in (not always happily, as he was essentially a family man)? Then why does it look as if the attractive, willowly blonde, dressed to the nines, is signing a hotel register? Is it just too hazardous if HE signs it, even if it's Mr. and Mrs. Smith?  He might as well relax, because his fans won't recognize him anyway.

The faces in the background look vaguely familiar to me. Can you make them out? So could this just be one of those elegant Hollywood soirees that - no. Harold liked women, and he sort of liked them in bulk. Skimming through the photos, some of which I'd never seen, there were several of him as an older man photographing female nudes, his favorite of his many hobbies. Nudes, as in women decorously draped below the waist, but with mammoth breasts and considerable curves elsewhere. To his credit, Harold would not photograph a skinny woman and liked bodies that were not so much modelled on Monroe (whom he photographed, though clothed) as Jane Russell, practically exploding out of her Howard Hughes-designed bra.

These photos of the photographer make me uneasy, for obvious reasons. Some of them are plain bizarre, with oddball props that make you wonder just what is going on. The family released a coffee table book a decade or so ago featuring the best of these nudes, so obviously they're not trying to hide anything. Some of them are in 3D, a technology which Harold may not have invented (that was Grandma's old Stereoscope that you held away from yourself like a selfie stick), but developed from its primitive William Castle roots to something that could  be seriously used in theatres. In an interview late in life, he claimed that in the future every movie would be shot and shown in 3D, and the interviewer made sure he mentioned in his writeup that Harold had gone a little crazy in his old age.

Now there is a Harold Lloyd Award for Excellence in 3D Photography. Martin Scorsese notably won it for - ironically - Hugo, where the main character dangles off the hands of a huge clock. Since he was a humble man, I think Harold would have been pleased by the respectful quote.

But getting back to it: Harold was human, but did absolutely nothing to attract women. They came to him. Flocked. It was wrong to say he chased them. He paid his models a flat fifty bucks, and the lineup ran around the corner of the block. There is a lot of evidence these bodaceously curvaceous women were quite willing to sneak into bed with the photographer.

I read part of a disgusting book called The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart. I forget who wrote it. I didn't buy it, folks, I read the "Look Inside!" excerpt on Amazon. It's one of the sleaziest things I've ever seen, so of course I had to read it (given my insatiable appetite for the tawdry). Pure fiction, so I should not pay any attention to the fact that there was a tell-all passage about Bebe Daniels, Harold's first leading lady in the 19-teens. She claimed that Harold was "proficient and good at" the sex act - well, my goodness! Hardly sweep-you-off-your-feet stuff, but BD then claimed she could expect to have at least three orgasms during these sessions.

It's lies, I tell you - a pack of dirty, filthy lies! But with HL's Nebraskan' thoroughness and his propensity for studying every facet of life until he WAS good at it, it may well be true. "Good at" means "satisfaction guaranteed, Ma'am", among other things.

Or so my wicked imagination tells me.

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What a hokey, impractical idea!

I was completely gobsmacked - though perhaps I shouldn't have been - when I found this tidbit on the Turner Classics site. Along with everything else, Harold Lloyd was a visionary who had a way of piercing the limitations of technology, simply because "no" wasn't in his vocabulary. Even if his view wasn't quite "yes", it always had the spirit of "let's try". He was the perennial boy genius who never stopped tinkering and exploring in every medium he could get his hands on: microscopy, oil painting, stereo sound, and the primitive 3D photography of the era. Speaking of which, his favorite photographic subject was buxom, Jane-Russell-like nude women. Harold always loved his work.

Many fans of Harold Lloyd think of him simply as one of the very talented founding fathers of cinema.  This is true, but Harold was ALSO one of the first proponents of 3D motion pictures!  In 1923 an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times visited Harold on the set of Girl Shy and they discussed Harold’s interest in 3D.  During this interview Harold is quoted as saying “I believe that the man who invents a means of producing a perfect stereo motion picture will have accomplished the greatest achievement since the first motion picture.”  He went on to say “Today, the motion pictures projected on the most perfect screen are lacking in solidity and relief.  If the characters could only be made to stand out as they do in stereopticon pictures, and still retain the action of motion pictures of today, I think the ultimate would be reached by the cinema.”

In his Columbia University interview in 1959 Harold discussed the early attempts at 3D movies.  Many in the industry had given up on the medium, as the results had not been great and 3D was viewed mostly as a passing fad. In the interview Harold says “I think if they’d handled [the transition to] sound as horribly as they did three-dimension, we wouldn’t have sound today.”  After this, he goes on to explain technically why the earlier 3D attempts had not been successful and how the technology would have to advance before the medium would take off.  He was absolutely convinced that once the technological advancements were made, the transition from 2D motion pictures to 3D would be unavoidable and all encompassing.

Harold’s interest in 3D manifested itself in his passion for stereoscopic photography.  From 1947 until his death in 1971, Harold Lloyd shot over 200,000 3D slides some of which featured celebrities of the day, scenic views of the United States and various countries around the world.  He was a member of the Photographic Society of America and served as the Inaugural President of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society.

The magnificent library of Harold’s 3D photography remains mostly unexposed to the public.  Suzanne Lloyd has published two books containing some of the images, but most of the 200,000+ slides have not been seen by anyone outside of the Lloyd family.  

(From the Turner Classic Movies web site)

Harold. . . are you there?

Do you see? Do you see now? Do you see why I'm going crazy?

Ever since I wrote my third novel The Glass Character, at the heart of which is the life and career of silent screen legend Harold Lloyd, I have been haunted. Or else enchanted.

I wrote recently about seeing a TV ad for Cover Girl cosmetics featuring a glamorous model hanging off the hands of a huge clock. Obviously a Harold Lloyd stunt.






And I've already told you, repeatedly because it scares me so much, about Lloyd synchronicity, the repetition of the name and image of Harold Lloyd which has been going on for a couple of years and is now a daily occurrence.

Just a little while ago I was meandering around in a good/bad site called, appropriately, So Bad So Good, mostly featuring oddball collections of photos. Boring, boring, flip, flip. I saved one or two. Then. My God.

It was a very strange, almost inexplicable picture of a man sitting on the ledge of a clock tower, with Harold dangling off the hands of a clock below. This was supposed to be part of a feature called 3D Images. The weird thing is, Harold Lloyd was one of the first 3D photographers, and in his lifetime took literally hundreds of thousands of shots (mostly of naked women). More convergence, or synchronicity, or whatever you call it.

But why. . . ? Is there really a Lloyd revival going on that I knew nothing about? Why does he so often pop up in pop culture, so to speak?

My knees have turned to jelly, and I have that plenty-weird, frustrated, almost angry feeling I get several times a day now. Tell me. . . what does it all mean?

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