Eliotic Cinemantics

The camera's eye pans over the ravages of a Lost Weekend in Eliot House, as seven bleary-eyed dissipates scratch their navels, belch, and squint unbelievingly as an elegant figure, clutching a Neville Chamberlain umbrella, hoists himself through an upper-story window into their midst. And so begins "Three Giant Steps," a 21-minute silent comic film which opens tomorrow night in the Eliot House dining hall.

The local Eisenstein behind these antics, which include a brilliant parody of the Dance of Death scene from Bergman's "Seventh Seal," is Paul Morgan, a senior, who started it all in January with an idea and a $50 shoestring.

"Running, Jumping, Standing Still," an improvised short with Peter Sellers, provided Morgan's inspiration, and from there it was only a matter of money, time, patience, skill, and luck. The seven loosely strung together episodes which make up "Three Giant Steps" were conceived and ironed out in countless dinner table conferences in Eliot House, bginning last November, after Morgan had seen the Sellers film at the Brattle.

Morgan, along with an anonymous student angel, who threw in about $100, formed Paul c. (that's how he spells it) Morgan Associates, and tapped two friends to be his stars.

Tom Babe, who had appeared with Morgan in "Caucasian Chalk Circle" earlier in the year, and John Casey assumed the leads. Their characters provide the film's continuity, as they stroll around Radcliffe and later along the bank of the Charles, hamming their way through all of the essentially unrelated scenes they stumble upon. All of the cast worked without pay. At Morgan's request they also signed a Model Release form waiving their rights to sue the producer for anything in the movie which might subject them to "ridicule, scandal, reproach, scorn and indignity."

Morgan then completed casting for the various sketches: John Nathan, looking like the Wild Bull of the Pampas, in an old vaudeville bit set along the river bank; Dan Seltzer, a chalk-faced Death directly out of Bergman; Madeline Rosten, as a frowsy, hip-scratching housewife; Steve Aaron, who bests the Devil (Seltzer) in a game of Monopoly; and Jack Daniels, who doubled as technical director. There is also an unidentified couple making love near the John Weeks bridge.

Ivy films provided Morgan with a 16 millimeter camera and some lighting equipment; Mother Nature was somewhat less generous, raining out half of the scheduled shootings; and MDC police were sometimes hard to shake.

One illuminating example of the trials of movie-making is the bit in which Casey and Babe are seen peering through an open window as Miss Rosten prepares her breakfast. Actually half of the shooting took place from inside the kitchen of Gilman House at Radcliffe. The street-view shots of the Peeping Toms, however, were taken outside the Owl Club, because the first-floor level there made peeping somewhat easier than the greater height from the ground of the Gilman kitchen. When Miss Rosten seems to be pulling the shade on her uninvited guests, the shading is actually being performed from inside the club by an Owl.

Morgan is showing "Three Giant Steps" at 8 p.m. and again at 9:30 tomorrow night in Eliot House and is negotiating with Masters in the hope that he may be permitted to screen it in the other Houses. Hopefully he will have success. Seeing Messrs. Nathan, Seltzer, Aaron, et al. prancing over Fresh Pond hill in the Dance of Death as the dusk of sunset closes in, is a vision of joy.