#Jittlov Font

[thecurioustale]

The Wizard of Speed and Time: A cult classic film with special effects in practically every shot, but it's from the '80s...

At one point during Desert Bus this year, they got to talking about the Jittlov Font and its legendary readme file. (I looked at it; it's interesting, but it's not legendary. Back then, stuff that we all do regularly could make quite a stir due to its novelty on the Internet.)

Eventually, they got to talking about how its creator, Mike Jittlov, also made a movie. Like, an honest-to-goodness feature film that was released in theaters. They mentioned that Jittlov was a special effects artist by trade, and had done some work for Disney, and that his movie had special effects in virtually every shot.

Today, with our overproduced, CGI-heavy, do-it-all-in-post film production paradigm, we take that for granted. I remember George Lucas smugly joking about how he put one shot in The Phantom Menace that had no special effects work just for nostalgia's sake. But with The Wizard of Speed and Time this has a very different meaning: His film, being from the '80s after all, used almost entirely practical special effects—usually animation (e.g. stop motion), but definitely not limited just to that. The Desert Bus peeps mentioned how Jittlov did a scene where he's underwater in a pool for several minutes, and how that actually happened for real: It's one continuous camera shot, and Jittlov has no breathing equipment. He just held his breath for several minutes. (One of the few perks of being skinny, I suppose.) The film features a very wide showcase of different types of special effects. A little of everything that existed at the time, honestly.

The Wizard of Speed and Time is on YouTube for free (with the tacit consent of Jittlov himself), and over the weekend I finally got around to watching it!

I almost didn't make it out of the gate. Jittlov's editing style is horrifyingly frenetic. The camera cuts are almost constant (notwithstanding that pool scene). The opening of the film is very disjointed, and on first viewing it's hard to know for sure when the credits end and the movie proper begins. The pacing is just so, so fast, and this warps everything. I almost turned it off immediately, and it wasn't until the 12-minute mark that I paused, had a think, and decided that I would indeed commit to watching the rest of it.

Having watched it, I can say that I'm glad I did! This is one of those rare films that's worth watching purely for the special effects. The story and plot are very basic. The acting is not world-class. The music is charming at points but ultimately forgettable. The cinematography as I mentioned is uncomfortably frenetic. But the craftsmateship of filling almost every camera shot in the movie with special effects is something worth seeing for its own sake. It's a tour-de-force and there's nothing else like it that I know of. It's a real "museum piece," if that makes sense.

The effects work is all done not only expertly but very lovingly. In fact, I would say the other main strength of the film is its theme of preserving and celebrating the humanity in industry. In the movie, Jittlov portrays the motion picture industry in Hollywood as largely soulless, and presents this soullessness as the true antagonist of the story. There's also some anti-tax and anti-union stuff in there under similar auspices, with the IRS billed as the "Infernal" Revenue Service; but, despite being pro-tax and pro-union myself, it's easy to see where Jittlov was coming from, and that he was doing so in good faith.

Jittlov made this movie on a tiny budget by doing most of the work himself. He directed, did the special effects, played the starring character, etc. His name shows up in the credits frequently. Even still, the film was a box office flop, and I can understand why. But I will say that the film delivers splendidly on its implicit promise built up in the plot of showing us the special effects work that Jittlov's character is working on. We do get to see it by the end, and actually that whole sequence is an adaptation of a short film Jittlov had done in the '70s.

I like people like Jittlov. I'm one of them, myself. Very much a mate of his own mold. Very passionate. Artistically driven. Wants to believe in a better world but is oppressed by the current one. I feel better about myself for having given his movie a chance. We should all be so lucky as to have people bear witness to our work!

He was an early user of the public Internet, and his website, Mike Jittlov's WizWorld, is still online. It's a time capsule of what the Internet looked like 25 years ago, which I find immensely refreshing and also filled with cultural curios I'd forgotten about, like how he has a list of quotes on one of his pages. Just quotes that he happened to like, and gathered them all up. That used to be a popular thing to do on websites! That Internet was a lot nicer than this one, in many respects.