Cut and Paste Film Making

I allowed myself an indulgence on Saturday afternoon. I sat down and watched a crappy old movie on TV. It has been a long time since I've taken the time to do that. The film in question - Mosquito Squadron, a WWII RAF action potboiler from 1969 - was no masterpiece, but is of interest because it is cobbled together from sequences lifted from other, more expensive, war movies. The opening sequences of V1 flying bombs comes from 1965's Operation Crossbow, whilst most of the action sequences involving the Mosquito aircraft comes from 1964's 633 Squadron. I always enjoy spotting the bits where these sequences are spliced into the newly-shot footage. Most of the time the film stock, props and costumes are well-matched between the old and new sequences. The film does include some newly shot action scenes. However, because the budget was so low, none of this footage is 'live action' with real aircraft in flying sequences. Instead, all of them involving miniatures work just as unconvincing and shoddy as that in the earlier films. You can clearly see the guide wires on the model aircraft in most of these scenes. The cast of the new footage are strictly B-list, mainly TV performers like David McCallum, so all-in-all, the film must have been pretty cheap to produce. Indeed, it is important to remember that films like this were intended simply to be inexpensive supporting features, used to pad out the lower half of a programme. (Ah, for those good old days when you used to get a co-feature at the cinema, all you get with the main feature now are adverts and trailers).

It actually used to be quite common for films to produced like this. Back in the 1950s Republic studios frequently used to create 'new' serials by cannibalising the action sequences from a couple of older serials and matching the costumes of the actors in the new footage to those worn by the performers in the older material. Where necessary they'd even use action highlights lifted from more prestigious (and bigger budgeted) A features. The practice continued in US television well into the 1980s - I remember at least one episode of the Fall Guy built around footage from the movie Stunts. Irwin Allen was particularly adept at this sort of thing. At least two episodes of his TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea used footage from his 1960 version of The Lost World, whilst several episodes borrowed wholesale from the earlier film version of Voyage. It all became extremely incestuous in the early 1970s when Allen produced a TV pilot called City Beneath the Sea which extensively utilised special effects footage from the Voyage TV series. Don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against this method of film making. On the contrary, it inspired me to do the same thing in order to create 'new' stories for The Sleaze when I'm pushed for time or simply lacking in inspiration. I've a quite a few stories from the site's early days which I've never archived, usually because I don't think they did their central conceit full justice, or because I simply don't think that they are up to scratch. However, most of them contain some decent gags and ideas, and I'm not adverse to building a whole new story, on the same theme, around these. I often do something similar with posts from this blog. I make no apologies for doing this - the results are often top notch stories I'm very proud of. Sometimes I can even manufacture more than one new story from a single old one. I like to see the process as a form of recycling. Who says The Sleaze isn't in the forefront of the fight against global warming?