Movies Mold Football Strategy; Gelotte is Crimson's Cameraman

Next to "You can't win 'em all," the favorite post-game platitude of the football coach is "Can't tell a thing until I see the movies."

In an ago when the gridiron has turned into a scientific laboratory, the modern football strategist does little more than got his hands cold of a Saturday afternoon. The real mental battle takes place several hours later in the warmth and quiet of a projection room. Here is where the coach sifts the men from the boys, and alibis vanish at 82 frames per second.

In this field of football movies as well as others, credit Harvard with a "first." For Claus Gelotte, Boston and Cambridge photo equipment retailer, started the business of capturing football contests on 16 mm. films 20 years ago on Soldiers Field.

Since 1928 Gelotte hasn't missed a Crimson home contest, and in the meantime his little 16 mm. gimmick has spread to football fields across the nation.

He Covers New England

For Gelotte it has been something of a business bonanza too. Last Saturday, for instance, he sent two cameramen and $1,000 worth of cinema machinery to Ithaca for the Dartmouth-Cornell fray, to two Boston area high school games, and to Worcester for the Holy Cross-Fordham game; and he sent four cameramen and $2,000 worth of equipment to Soldiers Field for two shootings of the Brown-Harvard encounter and to Newton for two filmings of the Boston College-William & Mary game.

All this peering at private football feats and foibles makes Gellotto feel a little like a house detective. Some sportswriters, he says, call him "a hated man," but he doesn't think he's that badly off.

"How they feel toward the photographer I don't know," he says, adding wistfully, "I don't think the boys object to having their pictures taken."

Deadline Rush

Whether the boys kick or not, the coaches, Art Valpey included, can't rest easy until Gelotte delivers the goods. Valpey wanted last Saturday's films, for instance, on the same night. So when the timekeeper waved goodbye around 4 p.m., Gelotte scrambled down from his 50-yard line press box perch, and rushed the films to a waiting local processor.

Then Gelotte darkened the developer's darkroom door for several hours, and when the last reel had been sweated out, he ran the original film--the one and only--to a waiting Valpey.

Celluloids Studied

Valpey and his staff then looked over the slow-motion pictures, taking notes, doping out how the celluloid results would affect next week's practice for the Yale game. When the coaches digested the contents thoroughly, they showed the Varsity how it behaved in the victory over Brown.

The black-on-white tells other tales as well. Hundreds of wrong rulings by referees in past Crimson games have shown up distressingly well on the screen. "Lots of referees would like to take the game over after seeing the movies," Gelotte comments.

But many doubtful verdicts on the field have also been upheld. Four weeks ago in the last minutes of the Dartmouth game the fans booed the head linesman for calling Crimson end Johnny Florentine off side on Chip Gannon's touchdown run. The movies showed the fans were wrong.

Gelotte and his cameras have been telling the fans where to got off ever since Gelotte and Richard Hallowell '20 showed Varsity coach Amie Horween in 1928 what could be done with a fast-moving shutter.

Horween got excited about football on films and arranged to have the two men shoot every game that season. Hallowell and Gelotte set up a method of consecutive photography that has been used ever since.

While one man grinds away with one camera, the other cameraman loads a 100-foot reel into the other camera.

When Night Falls

The system worked fine except for two obstacles. First, lenses and film worked slowly in 1928, and once the late afternoon shadows had set over the gridiron, movies were difficult to make. Modern technology cleared up this difficulty so that now even night game mov- les look like they were filmed at high soon.

This afternoon Gelotte and an assistant will set up shop high over the Harvard-Yale game to tell Coach Valpey what happened in thousands of pictures worth millions of words. The reels may go in moth balls soon after today's battle, but when Spring and pre-season practice call again, the coaches will once more study the movies, an indelibe guide to the football strategy of the future