Lenny Lipton pictured with a state of the art 3D motion picture camera.
From lennylipton.com (used with kind permission) On December 18th, 2009 James Cameron’s new Sci-Fi epic
Avatar will hit theatres worldwide. This long awaited 3-D animated film with its huge multimillion dollar Hollywood budget, completely made with computer generated images, has been all the Hollywood buzz since James Cameron inked the deal several years ago. The director of Titanic does not do anything, “ small”. Little do most people know the technology behind the creation of Avatar started with Super 8! The smallest film format and one of its greatest advocates has become a Hollywood player! Sort of!
Lenny Lipton has had success in very different careers; he has been a song writer, technical writer, filmmaker and most notably inventor! In January of 2004, NASA successfully landed two twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on the surface of Mars. For five years these twin exploration rovers have been beaming back to Earth more than 100,000 spectacular, high resolution, full color and 3D images of the bleakly beautiful landscape of an alien planet.
Lenny Lipton, author of the 1975 book
The Super 8 Book, took a deep sigh of relief upon hearing of the successful landings that January. After the stress of contributing to this difficult mission, it was time to celebrate. He was relaxing with the mission’s success and public popularity. The Martian rovers and orbiters have been a monumental success for both NASA and a once obscure Super 8 filmmaker named Lenny Lipton.
Lenny Lipton had designed and invented
CrystalEyes, which NASA had selected to pilot the Martian rovers and Mars orbiter. The 3D panoramic images so many of us have seen of Mars are a direct result of Lenny Lipton’s Super 8 filmmaking 3-D experiments. By the late 1970’s and early 80’s Lenny Lipton had radically revolutionized 3D technology by meticulous experimentation with Super 8 filmmaking, detailed in
Lipton on Filmmaking published by Simon and Shuster.
The success of
CrystalEyes and the work he has done with the company,
REAL-D (he was its Chief Technology Office for four years) has thrust Lenny Lipton on to the international stage. He has been recognized by the Smithsonian Institution for the “first practical electronic stereoscopic product for computer graphics and video applications.”
CrystalEyes technology is being used in medicine, molecular modeling and detailed 3D aerial mapping, and it all began within Super 8 filmmaking.
Lenny Lipton is known for perfecting the current state of the art 3D cinema technology used in such Hollywood blockbusters such as: Caroline, U2-3D Live, Beowulf, Monster House, Chicken Little and The Nightmare before Christmas. He is currently involved with James Cameron’s science fiction animated film Avatar.
Lenny on the cover of 'Super 8 Filmaker' magazine in 1977.
Perfecting 3D film with Super 8!
Despite all his 3D technological and Hollywood success, he still remains, to many in the Super 8 community, the colorful counter culture figure who wrote
The Super 8 Book, Lipton on Filmmaking, and Independent Filmmaking, Lenny Lipton was frequent contributor to the magazine
Super 8 Filmaker. Despite being long out of print, all of Lipton’s books are highly sought after on EBay and Amazon. Independent Filmaking was in print for more than 20 years and was used nationwide as a textbook in many university and college film programs. His most sought after book these days may well be Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema published in 1982 by Van Nostrand.
Lenny Lipton graduated with a degree in physics from Cornell University in 1962. Lenny expressed an interest in understanding how things “work” from early childhood. As a youth he used to make his own projectors and was kind of a tech geek in high school where he discovered photography.
In 1964 Lenny landed a job with Popular Photography. He was assigned the job of editing the part of the magazine devoted to home movie equipment and independent film. Little did Lipton’s boss realize, the young technical writer was already developing an interest in the burgeoning underground film movement gaining popularity and momentum in New York City, largely due to the work of artist Jonas Mekas.
Through Popular Photography Lenny Lipton helped brought much needed national attention to filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, the Kuchar brothers, Stan Vanderbeek and Jonas Mekas. Jonas Mekas later founded Anthology Film Archives, where he remains to this day in the position of Artistic Director.
“Through the endurance that can only come with clear vision,” says Lipton of his colleague, “Jonas Mekas influenced me and, as if this isn’t enough, I believe the entire course of the history of film. A person with clear vision is a rare and wonderful thing.”
In the mid 1960’s, Lenny Lipton went further than just writing about underground, experimental film. He became a projectionist with his friend, the music critic Bob Christgau, organizing underground film screenings at the Eventorium in New York City. He met and befriended many amateur filmmakers, who, like traditional artists such as painters and sculptors, devoted their lives to individual artistic expression in film. Lenny and his friends were pioneers of personal cinema that would go on to be called “The New American Avant-Garde Film.”
The films Lenny was showing were pure art, films made by artists with no interest in commercial success. Lenny wanted in and was soon shooting and screening his own pieces of film art. Lenny had become a filmmaker.
Like many of his generation, Lenny Lipton was hearing the psychedelic siren song and soon left New York City for California. Lenny Lipton was on the corner of Haight Ashbury by the summer of love.
A friend of many of the 1960’s counterculture leading figures like Harvard psychologist and LSD guru Tim Leary, and Ken Kesey, novelist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and founder of the Merry Pranksters, Lenny bore witness to the turbulent times of his generation. Much of this experience would become the drive behind his first serious full-length super 8 documentary,
Children of the Golden West.
Lenny Lipton’s 16mm documentary film, Far Our, Star Route, was shot documenting the alternative lifestyle of a hippy commune in Oregon.
Lipton's seminar Super 8 BookIn September of 1975 (just after the release of The Super 8 Book) Lenny Lipton spent about a month or so living with the famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Lenny had been asked to be the sound man on Lawrence Halprin’s Le Pink Grapefruit, a documentary film about Dali. Lenny often reminisces of his meetings with Dali and has even blogged about it!
Lenny Lipton’s first sound sync Super 8 film, Revelation of the Foundation, was begun in 1974. Lenny was using the earliest super 8 sound film equipment available to the consumer market.
While writing The Super 8 Book, Lenny received a $10,000 grant from the American Film Institute to complete Revelation of the Foundation. His approach to editing super 8 sound film described in The Super 8 Book remains the standard for those not using computers.
Like many of the unsung filmmaking heroes of Lenny’s generation, other more commercially available, i.e. “Hollywood,” filmmakers would eventually take credit for independent filmmakers’ pioneering cinematic styling. While every artist is thief, those who fail to give credit to their influences are little more than frauds.
Lenny Lipton’s documentaries, seen mostly by film students in distant university film programs, possess a paradoxical presence and intellectual disengagement. The documentaries present themselves both as unbiased documents of persons, times and places as well as social commentary.
Lipton’s most famous Super 8 documentary, Revelation of the Foundation, like Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, is shot P.O.V., point of view style, a style of cinéma vérité that recognizes the “invisible camera.”
Lenny Lipton’s films are available to rent on Super 8 prints through Canyon Cinema Co-Op in California. In the 1960’s, Lenny Lipton was one of the earliest San Francisco Bay area filmmakers to get actively involved with the fledgling independent film distributor. Canyon Cinema is now considered one of the two most important personal cinema, independent film distributors in the country, the other being Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Lenny’s film are distributed there as well.
As passionate about filmmaking as he was, Lenny was just as passionate about the person behind the camera. His tireless work helped to found, promote and preserve The New American Cinema.
Super 8 living legend Lenny Lipton says, “It’s been a hell of a trip, my life has been strange and wonderful. I’ve been really fortunate to have been in the right places as the right times. I was really taken by the underground film scene when I was young.”
“In the early 60’s while at Cornell University I got turned on to experimental films. You know, just really great experimental film, really pure art, like Mothlight and Dog Star Man by Brakhage. At first I hated this stuff, I didn’t get it. It was too choppy. I was at this private screening of Brakhages’s Prelude to Dog Star Man. My head opened up, my field of vision expanded, I got it. This film experience began a new transcendent insight into film as art. My perception of film, like it or not, had been forever altered.”
Lenny’s technology can bee seen in the
REAL-D system, the Beverly Hills based company behind today’s wildly popular 3-D pop culture sensations showing at your local multi-plex cinema.
Lenny Lipton still makes art work, not in Super 8 film sadly, but in oil paintings. Lenny Lipton’s paintings can be viewed at
LennyLipton.com. Lenny Lipton is also on Facebook, He frequently blogs about his early counter culture experiences and today’s rapidly expanding computer technology. Incredibly busy with his much deserved success, Lenny Lipton was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call from Super 8 Today magazine.
He is still as passionate about Super 8 filmmaking today, as he was 34 years ago when he authored The Super 8 Book!
By Don Ramirez:
This article was written for Super 8 Today magazine issue # 16
Labels: in depth
Just a quickie...
photo: Ulla A.Wyrwoll
If you're looking for a piece of small film history, Ingmar Bergman's Canon 814 Auto Zoom is up for auction as part of an extensive lot of furniture and personal effects from his estate. 
A quick call for entry reminder from the guys at 8 Fest...
From the astonishing astonishing 312 Super 8mm submissions, to the 60 or so films selected for screening, the 8th International Super 8mm Film Festival judges in Szeged, Hungary made their final choices last weekend;
We've absolutely no idea what's on this Japanese small film blog but the stripped down pictures of a Canon Auto Zoom seem to imply some sort of repair wizardry going on (Update: It's a time lapse modification). Sadly it won't translate via the usual online robots.
The music ain't really our cup 'o tea, but the HD transfer of the Ektachrome E64T by Uppsala Bildteknik looks brilliant. Click the image to watch in full (via YouTube) over at the Echo Empire site.
onsuper8.org has teamed up with Flicker Los Angeles and the Sheffield Doc/Fest to bring together a very special Super 8mm documentary filmmaking event.
