Fairfield writer explores history of 1967 Bigfoot film

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Running neck and neck with the Zapruder film, in terms of endless analysis, is a 60-second piece of 16mm footage that has come to be known as the Patterson-Gimlin film.

Shot in 1967 in Northern California, the film purports to show Bigfoot trudging past the camera, looking straight into the lens, and then heading off into the forest.

Just as much of the case for a second gunman in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy stems from the home movie made by Abraham Zupruder on Nov. 22, 1963, the Patterson-Gimlin film has fueled the notion of a giant humanoid creature roaming in forests all over the United States.

The film has inspired countless documentaries, fictional films and books, with recent examples including the animated feature film, “Smallfoot,” and the new young-adult novel, “The Bigfoot Files.” by Lindsay Eagar.

Fairfield historian Phil Hall decided the time had come to look back at the shooting of the Bigfoot film and the 50 years of debate over its authenticity, as well as the pop culture industry it has spawned. “The Weirdest Movie Ever Made” is subtitled “The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film” and was published by Bear Manor Media on Oct. 1.

Hall has written about “lost films” and many other lesser known aspects of the movie industry, but has long been intrigued by the very brief 1967 Bigfoot footage.

“I wanted to do a book about a film that people know about but hasn’t been written about before,” he says. “Nobody needs another book about Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock. ... (But) everybody knows about Bigfoot because of that crazy little 59-second film.”

The two men, Roger Patterson and Bob Gitlin, were aspiring filmmakers who planned to do a documentary about the legend of these large humanoid creatures in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the country — Hall informs us of a few sightings in Connecticut — but they were ill-prepared for their 1967 expedition.

The men only had one camera, and no sound equipment.

“Neither of them had any experience (in filmmaking) and it shows,” Hall says. “They had more enthusiasm than talent and whether they found (the creature) or invented it is still being debated.”

“Not unlike the Zapruder film,” Hall writes. “The Patterson-Gimlin film represents the most astonishing of cinematic accidents, where the right people were in the right place at the right time with a movie camera.”

While some dismissed the film as a fake and see the Bigfoot phenomenon as a mass hallucination, the esteemed anthropologist and primatologist Jane Goodall says there might be something to the idea because reports of Bigfoot (or Sasquatch or Yeti) sightings have come in from all over the world.

Goodall points out that “British scientists have found what they believed to be a yeti hair and that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal.”

Jeffery Meldrum, a professor at Idaho State University and one of the only academics to research the subject of a Bigfoot creature, has endorsed the Patterson-Gimlin film. “It’s all so easy to say ‘Obviously, that’s a man in a fur suit.’ Until you see it up against a man in a fur suit.”

Hall looked into the commercial gorilla costumes available in 1967, and writes that none of them were as big as what the two men photographed — especially the elongated arms — and none of them had female breasts.

The author debunks some of the skeptical urban legends surrounding the film, including director John Landis’s assertion that the costume was made by the same make-up artists who created the ape outfits for the 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes.”

The book quotes the head of the 20th Century Fox makeup unit denying the rumor. Hall also writes that “Planet of the Apes” was deep in pre-production mode in 1967 and it is highly unlikely that anyone connected with the film had the time or the interest to create a commissioned Bigfoot outfit for Patterson and Gimlin.

The creature in the film bears a strong resemblance to a sighting reported in British Columbia 12 years earlier. A construction worker named William Roe said he encountered a Sasquatch during a hunting trip. “... I saw by its breasts that it was female. ... Its arms were much thicker than a man’s arms, and longer, reaching almost to its knees.”

After they processed the film, Patterson and Gimlin made a documentary about their experience that they booked in theaters and schools around the country. They were pioneers in a form of theatrical exhobition called “four-walling” in which a moviemaker rents theaters and keeps all of the proceeds (avoiding a distributor middleman).

In 1972, independent filmmaker Charles B. Pierce used the same technique to release a documentary about about a frequently sighted humanoid creature in Alabama — “The Legend of Boggy Creek” — and scored the tenth highest grossing film in a year that included “The Godfather” and “Cabaret.”

Hall stresses that his goal in writing the book was not to endorse or debunk the 1967 film.

“Nobody cares what I think about the movie (so) I wanted to take it on its own terms. To show how it was made and how it got into the wider world,” he says.

jmeyers@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @joesview