A family moviemaking tradition comes to an end.
There were never any compliments on the production values of the films.Illustration by John Gall; photograph courtesy Brian Lee (boys)

Sometime in the early eighties, when my wife, Alice, and I and our daughters were about to leave New York for Nova Scotia, where we spent our summers, I was asked this question, point-blank: “Is it true that in Nova Scotia you lock people in your barn and make them watch your home movies?”

“You’re close,” I replied.

But I would submit that there’s more to the story. The term “home movies” conjured up in those days the rough equivalent of today’s cell-phone videos on Facebook or YouTube: the toddler making his unsteady way across the back yard, the new kitten doing something excruciatingly adorable with the old dog. The movies being shown in our barn had plots—not terribly believable plots, I’ll admit, but plots nonetheless. There were costumes—some white lab coveralls, for instance, and a 7 UP deliveryman’s shirt and a pair of nurse’s scrubs and a witch’s hat and a Bad Boys Bail Bonds T-shirt that bore the motto “Because Your Mama Wants You Home.” There were actors—our daughters, Abigail and Sarah, and neighboring kids and the kids of guests. Adults appeared briefly in bit parts, often doing something humiliating, in the tradition of physical comedy that scholars of the dramatic arts can trace from the ancient theatre to, well, “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” The adults’ most sustained appearance, in “It’s So Crazy It Just Might Work,” was a series of painfully untalented hopefuls trying out for a talent show—acknowledged in the credits as “a supporting cast of oppressed grownups.”

Also, it’s a bit harsh to say that the audience was locked in the barn. It’s true that we invited people to our barn every summer to see the movie we’d made the previous summer—or maybe the movies we’d made the previous two or three summers. Refreshments were served. People were free to leave. They might not be invited back the next summer, of course, but they were free to leave. We were confident that nobody would, in fact, leave. For one thing, refreshments were served. For another, many of those in the barn had appeared in our previous summer’s movie themselves. That made the gathering something like one of those Hollywood premières that include the movie’s stars in the audience. Those watching Manford Blacksher as a South Shore fisherman do a showstopping rendition of “By God Those Tourists Are Some Dumb” (sung to the tune of “The Lady Is a Tramp”), for instance, would have included Manford Blacksher himself. Also, Manford Blacksher’s parents.

So I’m not going to claim that those in attendance were in our barn because they had reason to believe that they were about to be exposed to a brilliant piece of cinema. We were never complimented on our production values. Sometimes a scene would be inexplicably dark, so that you couldn’t tell for certain which character was talking—or maybe even which characters were in the scene. Sometimes the wind blowing through the microphone made the dialogue difficult to understand. Sometimes mumbling made the dialogue difficult to understand. Sometimes the accompaniment for a song, emanating from a cassette tape recorder hidden in a nearby bush, could not keep the singer precisely on key. Sometimes a movie that ran fifteen minutes or so seemed much, much longer; one viewer’s remark about “It’s So Crazy It Just Might Work” was that it “tested the boundaries of eternal.”

The summer movies began when my daughters, who are in their forties now, were six and three. We were in the West of England, visiting our friends the Jowells, who have a farm in Somerset. For those early movies, we had only a silent Super 8 camera. On a cassette, I’d record narration that was often out of synch with the action on the screen. In other words, I was what passed for the screenwriter, and took the abuse associated with that lowly calling. Eventually, we bought a sound camera. In either case, Alice was the cinematographer, handing over the camera now and then when she was needed for a bit part. In what I’m tempted to call postproduction, she would do some editing with two film spools and a razor blade and Scotch Tape. One of the most intense disagreements of our marriage occurred during editing, over the question of whether to include frames showing a sheepdog in a chase scene that featured a herd of sheep. I can’t remember who was on which side. I can’t remember why, in the spirit of a Hollywood screenwriter who knew his place, I didn’t just give in.

The plot of our first movie was simple: a golden egg, belonging to a haughty princess (played by Josi Jowell, then seven or eight) and being guarded by her dumb stableman, is stolen by a robber with a foxlike grin (Josi’s little brother, Danny). As it turns out (spoiler alert), the egg was laid by the dumb stableman, a character played by Jeffrey Jowell, a law professor who happened to have in his cinematic bag of tricks a wicked chicken imitation. (Lest I leave the wrong impression of Jeffrey, I should mention that when he was knighted, some years later, suggestions that he do his chicken imitation when he was presented to the Queen fell on deaf ears; the man has a serious side.) I played a police constable. Alice played a nurse. Jeffrey’s wife, Francie, played a French maid named Giscard d’Estaing. My daughters were folded into the plot as “two lovely little girls.” Was I concerned about reviewers criticizing me for that obvious bit of typecasting? For our movies, the only reviews that count are by parents.

The sound camera led to musicals—first in Somerset (a musical sequel to “The Golden Egg”) and then, summer after summer, in Nova Scotia. Ordinarily, I lifted tunes from Broadway. I turned “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” into “Stealing Is Quite Nice Indeed” (sung by the robber with the foxlike grin, of course), and I turned “Always True to You in My Fashion” to “Uncle Max’s Kids Are Gross, Creepy, Dumb, and Yucky.” During a summer when we were visited by people capable of composing original tunes, I wrote the lyrics for the title song of “If There’s No Nova Scotia in Nova Scotia, There Can’t Be Any French Fries in France.”

Eventually, the girls got too old to be in kids’ movies. We weren’t through, though. For each daughter’s wedding, Alice and I had the films transferred to VHS tapes, hired a professional editor to stitch together clips, and made a documentary to be shown at the party held on the night before the ceremony—a further confirmation that parents will never run out of ways to mortify their children. Abigail’s film presented itself as an episode of a television show called “Eye on the Law,” investigating whether her movie career might prove an obstacle to her elevation to the Supreme Court. Would she be accused of practicing situational ethics, for instance, in agreeing to help the robber with the foxlike grin steal the golden egg in order to pay the mortgage on her poor mother’s wretched little farm? Or would she be redeemed in the eyes of the law-and-order crowd by her swan-song performance as Hercule Poirot’s niece, a detective carrying on the family tradition by solving the murder in “Yech: A Marvellous Mushroom Murder Mystery Musical Movie”?


Sarah’s documentary was in the form of a tribute by the American Film Institute’s Embarrassing Baby Picture Division. It talked about her range of roles. As a lovely little girl asking for help to get a knot out of her shoelace in the golden-egg musical, she had lured the dumb stableman away from the egg with a line that became a catchphrase in our family when asking for an inconvenient favor—“You’re so strong and I’m so small.” As an Upper East Side hostess named Melissa Gelt, who has “a little man” for every ingredient that earns a place on her elegant dinner table, she had sung “I’ve got a man who bakes a loaf that’s worthy of my riches. / I’ve got a man for fish and such a cute man for knishes.”

After those documentaries were made, we figured, all we had to do was wait patiently for our daughters to raise children old enough for speaking roles, and then start again. But for Alice that was not going to happen. She died in 2001, six months before our first grandchild was born. I still take out the movies occasionally and watch her—as the nurse, or as one of the hapless grownups trying out for the talent show, or as the poor mother with a mortgage on her wretched little farm. Just bit parts.

The grandchildren did come along—the arrival of each of them bringing joy that was tinged by sadness at the thought of what Alice was missing. In not many years, our daughters had produced what was potentially an expanded core cast—two girls for Abigail, two boys for Sarah. We still gathered every summer at the old Nova Scotia house; for our family, it was what people in the Midwest, where I come from, call the home place. It was the place where, every summer, Sarah made applesauce daily with apples from the same tree and where Brian, Abigail’s husband, was so persistent in the hunt for chanterelles that we were forced to compare him to a truffle-sniffing dog. A multigenerational home place has pleasures that I hadn’t foreseen when we bought the house. There can’t be many summertime activities more satisfying than foraging for wild blueberries with your grandchildren in the same place you foraged for wild blueberries with your children. A lot of land, mostly untended woods, came with the old house, and Alice, an only child who had grown up in chancy financial circumstances, used to fantasize about someday having something that resembled a family compound. I used to tell her that she’d read too much Edith Wharton, but my grandchildren do sometimes talk about where on the property each of their cottages will be.

By the time those grandchildren were old enough to handle speaking roles, Sarah’s husband, Alex, had acquired a video camera that would enable him to edit the footage on a computer and post the finished product on a Web site. He was prepared to take over as director and cinematographer and editor. My job was simply to furnish a script and prepare myself to see it trampled on by both director and actors. Thanks to the Internet, our movies could now be accessed with a couple of clicks on the computer—a great convenience, although I must say that I miss those movie nights in the barn.

“But feel free to eat of the shrub of delusion.”

Except for a group song at the end of each movie, we gave up musicals—partly because, as a family with no musicians, we found it difficult to provide effective accompaniment. Our plots varied widely. We made a movie about attempts to replace the old fishermen’s houses in a village like ours with a Justin Bieber-themed shopping mall. We made a movie about a dispute over a new motto for a South Shore village—“Art Colony by the Sea” versus “Slime Eel Capital of the World.” (With the depletion of the groundfish stock on the South Shore, there was a brief attempt in our village to make up for the loss of cod and haddock by catching slime eels, which don’t look any better than they sound, and shipping them to Korea.) We made a movie about beach access. (Friends of ours live on a beach where we often go clamming, and when we march across their yard carrying clamming equipment we always chant, “The beach belongs to the people.”) But, like the sequel-meisters who run Hollywood studios, we came back regularly to our most dependable franchise—the golden egg.

In all of the sequels, my older grandson, Toby, played the robber; he had developed an effective foxlike grin, perhaps from years of watching Danny in the role. My older granddaughter, Isabelle, often played the proprietor of a snooty inn. A couple of the other parts were cast against type. In an early sequel, my youngest grandchild, Nate, not yet five, played a Mob enforcer who, in questioning people about the egg, used phrases like “unless you want your face rearranged” and “unless you’re looking for a knuckle sandwich.” Isabelle’s little sister, Rebecca, played a U. S. marshal who always got to the dock just in time to see the robber’s boat pull away. That was because I liked the way Rebecca delivered a line that she had originated as an evil witch in her first movie: “Rats! Foiled again!” I had liked that line even better before she’d managed to assume complete control of her “r”s, but you can’t fight progress.

There was a U.S. marshal in those movies because someone had given me a U.S.-marshal baseball cap. I also happened to have, as souvenirs from a bar mitzvah, three red-and-blue yarmulkes bearing the University of Kansas Jayhawks logo, so three rabbis from Kansas were among the snooty inn’s guests. Mao Zedong made a brief, Hitchcock-like appearance in many of our movies as a result of my having come away from a photo shoot in Chinatown with a life-size cardboard cutout of the Chairman. In other words, our movies have always been what a film-studies major might call prop-driven. During what I’m tempted to call preproduction, one or two of my grandchildren and I would take out the prop bin (too full by now to close properly) and do an inventory—an inventory that often altered the plot of the movie.

Someone would go through the bin while someone else would tick off the inventory list: Several fake noses. Even more fake mustaches. A couple of pounds’ worth of costume jewelry. A few fake beards (making the Kansas rabbis appear even more rabbinical). A selection of horrifying masks. Two sets of grotesque teeth. Two rubber chickens (not the sort served at political dinners; two chickens made of rubber). An extendable fork. A duck call (to lure the rubber chickens close enough to be shot out of the sky with a Super Soaker water gun). A policeman’s hat, and three badges of varying sizes. A tiny noise machine capable of emitting twenty-four sounds, including glass breaking, applause, and a burp. And, of course, after twenty or thirty other items had been ticked off, the golden egg.

This summer, when my granddaughter Isabelle and I went through the prop bin, we were particularly pleased that the golden egg—a rather large plastic egg that had originally held some sort of toy—was safely in hand. Over the winter, it had been decided that another golden-egg sequel would be appropriate for this summer. Why? Because there was general family agreement that this would be our final movie. Isabelle had turned fifteen. My grandchildren were aging out. Any lingering doubts about that ended when they made a movie of their own, on an iPad—a sort of issue-advocacy commercial arguing that the barn, where three of them had been stashed, should be equipped with Wi-Fi. I have to say that I admired the production values.


Driving through Maine this July toward the Nova Scotia ferry—past our favorite clam shack, past the outlets where we used to top up the girls’ school wardrobes on the way back to New York in the fall—I was mindful of the fact that I wouldn’t be making precisely that trip again. I had reached the age at which one’s children begin sentences with the phrase “You are no longer allowed . . .” This phase of selective prohibition began a few years ago with my adventure on an exceedingly long, steep slide near Abigail’s house, in San Francisco. Another visitor to the slide had presented my grandchildren and me with some waxed paper; sitting on it, she said, would enhance the experience. When I gave that a try, I found myself hurtling toward the bottom at a speed I later estimated to be between sixty and sixty-five miles an hour. My landing didn’t seem to cause any injuries, but I understood for the first time what the football announcer means when he says something like “Manning was shaken up on that play.”

When we returned to Abigail’s house from the slide, she said, “You are no longer allowed to go down slides sitting on waxed paper.”

“How about not on waxed paper?” I asked

“No slides,” Abigail said. That is the sort of hard-nosed attitude I’ve been up against.

I’m grateful for my daughters’ concern, of course, and I’m grateful that they turned out to be the sort of people who remain good-humored about being referred to by me as “the nursing staff.” After some protracted negotiations with the nursing staff this spring, it was agreed that this would be the last time that I made the long drive from New York to Nova Scotia by myself, instead of taking a plane to Halifax and renting a car. With the encouragement of the nursing staff, I would also be getting rid of the boat that Alice and I and our girls (about as many people as the boat could hold) utilized to go on island picnics—the boat that has often appeared in our movies, delivering characters to the dock or facilitating their escapes. Though small, the boat is so heavy that extracting it from the water means having to organize the sort of event inspired by Tom Sawyer’s fence-painting scheme. My daughters and their husbands have little interest in the boat; they manage to move about in the water, on kayaks or canoes or paddleboards, without the benefit of an outboard motor.

Of course, there would be no prohibition against writing a script for the final movie. Remarkably, Danny Jowell, the original robber with a foxlike grin—now Daniel S. S. Jowell, Q.C., a barrister in London—was coming to North America with his family, and he had agreed to be in the movie. Paul Newman going from being the young pool shark in “The Hustler” to being the seasoned mentor to the pool shark Tom Cruise in “The Color of Money”? That was one option I was considering.

There were pressures, of course. What screenwriter hasn’t experienced pressures? Even before I left New York, Rebecca had written that she wanted a part that was small but pivotal—the sort of cameo Marlon Brando might have done late in his career. My grandsons had made one non-negotiable demand (another spoiler alert): at the end of the movie, someone had to eat the golden egg, probably scrambled. I had always assumed that the egg was made of solid gold, but who am I to say? Toby took it for granted that he had a lock on the robber part. I’d decided to cast Danny as Lord Chumly of Snarf. He is suspected of being the original robber by the daughter of our first movie’s haughty princess. This even haughtier princess (Danny’s daughter, Helen) considers the Chumlys “dreadfully common—the sort of people who run their own baths.” I had to write scenes for Danny’s (and Lord Chumly’s) sons, Leo and Alexander. Leo was given the task of helping the robber regain his foxlike grin—lost from the trauma of losing the golden egg in a poker game. Alexander, who’s three, was assigned to say, whenever the script called for his comment, “Absolute rubbish.” While attending to all these pressures, of course, I was conscious that I was writing our final movie—a sad thought tempered by the realization that I had just about run out of golden-egg plots.

Banned from the set? That’s putting it rather strongly, but Alex and I did agree that it would make sense for me, as the screenwriter, to view the process through the unedited footage. I found that the Jowell kids followed the script admirably. I can’t say the same for their father. Danny, who had inherited his own father’s talent for mimicry, insisted on doing his major speech in a Vito Corleone voice, even though he was supposed to be a member of the English nobility, and even though there was already a Mob boss in the movie. Danny’s unscripted deviation (what he later referred to as “a matter of artistic interpretation”) conjured up the most serious fear haunting any screenwriter whose script is being trampled on—the fear that the trampler might have improved the movie.

It had also been agreed that the final movie should contain scenes that hearkened back to our earlier efforts, even if we were the only people who understood the references. I thought of it as auto-homage. So Nate again talked about rearranging people’s faces. Rebecca got back into her black hat and cape to reappear as the evil witch, a small role pivotal to the plot, although I insisted that she also appear in her U.S.-marshal costume to end the movie with her patented “Rats! Foiled again!” The tune of the closing song was lifted from the same Broadway show as the song that closed the first golden-egg musical, “Guys and Dolls.” Its penultimate lines were “Ate the egg? That’s still groovy / ’Cause this is our final movie.”

But was it? My grandchildren and I discussed this as we went through the bulging bin of props and costumes, deciding what to keep and what could be discarded. Conceivably, if the grownups committed another atrocity as serious as not providing Wi-Fi, the kids could use costumes and props for a second issue-advocacy commercial. But that’s not what they seemed to have in mind, as we decided, say, that the lab coveralls could be disposed of and that one rubber chicken was enough. They talked about making movies with their own children. “I can totally see my kids in that,” Isabelle said, as I held up a tailcoat. A couple of days before, Rebecca, the grandchild most interested in writing, told me that she would be the screenwriter, with Toby’s son as the robber with the foxlike grin. She said that the only problem was figuring out how to feature a golden egg that had already been eaten.

I told her that we’d never been strict about continuity, at least when it came to moviemaking. Also, there was nothing to prevent her from beginning with a movie that had nothing to do with the golden egg.

She nodded. “Maybe I’ll just start from scratch,” she said. ♦