The Velveteen Rabbit and Old Home Movies: What Is Real?

Christian Taylor 00:00
When you are real, shabbiness doesn't matter. That was 40 years ago, come this Christmas, and that line has never left me.

Christian Taylor 00:11
Have you ever held on to something old and worn because it meant something to you? An old crumpled or torn photo, a recipe card with a stain on it, or a box of old home movies sitting in the back of a closet? Well, if so, then this episode is for you. This week, I want to talk about why so many of us are reaching for real things right now, and why I think that reaching is so worth paying attention to. And if you make films, I think you'll walk away with a few ideas about how you can keep them real. I'm Christian Taylor, host of the Documentary First Podcast. Last week on Documentary First, I sat down with Phil Maher, who founded Stockfilm, the world's largest home movie archive, with over two hundred thousand clips from the 1930s to the 1980s. And he told me something about those old reels that's really had me thinking. Listen to what he said.

Phil Maher 01:08
We like to keep it pretty strict to what the original was. Having the scratches, having all the dust particles and what was originally filmed, makes it feel like you're there. It makes it feel original and real, and that it was difficult to capture stuff in the past, and that this is how it looked.

Christian Taylor 01:36
It makes it feel original and real. When Phil said that, I have to be honest, for just a moment, I was distracted. My thoughts took me back to a little stuffed rabbit who longed to become real. Let me explain. It was Christmas Day, 1986, in my family home in Arlington, Virginia. I was 17, and my littlest sister, Annie, was three. And it was that time of day, mid-morning at Christmas, when there's this restful lull between the unwrapping of Christmas presents and the Christmas meal. And Annie was sitting in my lap, and we were experiencing one of the gifts she had been given that Christmas, a delightful book called The Velveteen Rabbit. Now, this book came with a cassette tape. Now, for you youngsters out there, this cassette tape was a device that had largely displaced the 8-track by that time. Side note: the 8-track had stolen shares of the vinyl album industry by that time, and cassettes were coming right before the compact disc, aka the CD. But I digress. Back to The Velveteen Rabbit. Now, not too long into the story, my little sister fell sound asleep. But I was entranced by what I was hearing. Well, it's no wonder: the voice reading the story was Meryl Streep, and George Winston was playing the soundtrack underneath. Who couldn't be entranced? Additionally, I'd never heard the story before, not once. And it really moved me. Before I knew it, I found myself crying. It obviously touched something deep inside me. And from then on, it became my favorite story to read to children. And truth be told, every single time I read it (not that I succeeded), I tried my best to sound just like Meryl Streep. She was my hero. Now, if you don't know the story, here's the heart of it. A toy rabbit made of velveteen, just like this, shows up in a little boy's stocking on Christmas morning. He was set, wedged, in the top of the boy's stocking with a sprig of holly between his paws, and the effect was charming. He's new and splendid; he's fat and bunchy. But then he gets forgotten, and the fancy mechanical toys look down on him. The only one in the nursery who's kind to him at all is an old toy horse called the Skin Horse. The Skin Horse has been there longer than anyone else. His coat is so old that it's bald in patches, and you can see the seams underneath. One day, the little rabbit asks him a question. "What is real?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery floor, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" "Hmm. Real isn't how you are made, said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real." "Does it hurt?" "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are real, you don't mind being hurt." "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." When I heard those words at Christmas, I suddenly got a lump in my throat, my eyes began to sting, and my palms became all sweaty, because I knew there were deep truths in the words of the Skin Horse, as young as I was. And later in the story, before the boy has loved that rabbit so hard that his whiskers are gone and his spots have faded, the book says this: The Rabbit didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him real, and when you are real, shabbiness doesn't matter. When you are real, shabbiness doesn't matter. That was 40 years ago, come this Christmas, and that line has never left me. Now let's go back to what Phil said. He keeps the scratches; he keeps the dust. He doesn't polish those reels until they look like they were shot on an iPhone, because the flaws are what tell you this thing really happened. Somebody really stood there with an 8mm camera, trying to get the exposure right, at a first communion or a Christmas morning or a family vacation, and pointed it at the people that they loved. Phil told me he has seen hundreds of Christmases on those reels. Hundreds. And he says he thinks of himself as a steward of these people's lives. I just love that. These aren't famous people. They're families. And Phil is the one making sure somebody remembers them. That's the same kind of real the Skin Horse was talking about. It isn't about how something was made. It's about what happens to it and who loved it along the way. And you don't have to be a filmmaker to feel this. When you see a flickering, scratchy home movie of a family opening presents in the 1950s, you know you're looking at something true. And for anyone who makes films, this is worth remembering the next time you're tempted to clean everything up. Sometimes the imperfection is the very thing that lets your audience believe you. So why does this feel so urgent right now? Well, I don't have to spell it out for you. The reason is obvious. We now have tools that can make footage of things that never happened: a face that never existed, a street that was never filmed, a moment in history that nobody was there to see. And it can look completely real. Now, I don't want you to misunderstand me. I'm not against AI, and Phil isn't either, not at all. He uses it to help date the footage in his archive and to make it easier to search, but he does draw a very clear line, and I want you to hear it in his own words.

Phil Maher 08:41
I think keeping the actual footage 100 percent real and not altering it with AI is super important, because that's the historical record. That's stuff that happened. That's giving trust in the footage and trust in people.

Christian Taylor 08:56
Trust in the footage and trust in people. I think that's what's at stake here for all of us, filmmakers included. If we can't tell what really happened from what was made to look like it happened, we start to lose our hold on our own history: our grandparents' Christmases, our hometowns. And as I said to Phil on the show, if we were to lose all of that, I think we would lose a part of who we are and who we were. Phil said one more thing that I really appreciated. He said that if you do use AI to recreate a moment in history, you gotta tell your audience. Be honest about what's real and what isn't. And I agree with him. I think he's right. Which brings me to my house. For weeks now, I've been setting up something called a NAS. That stands for network-attached storage, and it's basically a big hard drive system that lives in my home instead of only out there in the cloud. And I'm not doing this because I'm some sort of computer geek; far from it. I'm doing it because I have so much precious film footage, and I don't want to lose all of my work. The drive that holds my film currently, The Girl Who Wore Freedom, is a RAID drive, and it's failing. Years of my work are on that drive. So I've been doing exactly what Phil is talking about: making sure I have copies that I can actually put my hands on.

Phil Maher 10:20
Obviously, the cloud can go away in a lot of cases, in the sense that you don't really own it. If a data company blows up, it's gone forever. Having the physical media is important because you have the real backup.

Christian Taylor 10:40
I said this in our interview, and I'll say it again here. When you buy a movie on Apple TV or Amazon or wherever, you're not really owning anything, even though it says you are. You're only licensing it for an extended time, perhaps, but it's still just a license. And people are wising up to this with films, music, and even art. I've had so many conversations lately with people who feel the same way. They want to own the album again, or the CD. Heck, I've been thinking about The Velveteen Rabbit so much lately, and it's really made me want that 1986 book and cassette more than ever before. Things have gotten so unreal these days that people are longing to meet in person rather than just on a screen. Phil noticed something on those reels that I kept thinking about. One of those things he sees again and again is people dancing. Not just at weddings: in their basements, at Christmas, at any old get-together. Old people, young people, kids, everybody dancing together. He pointed out that they didn't have TVs to gather around or screens to stare at. And I have to tell you, when I watch those reels, I miss that. I think a lot of us do. And I think we feel the realness slipping away. So I think we need to choose to put real things back in our lives and in our films while we still can. So what can we actually do about it? Well, I have a few ideas. First, if you've got a box of old reels or tapes or slides sitting in a closet, please don't throw them out. Phil told me that's exactly how so many family memories get lost. They sit in a closet in a format nobody knows what to do with, and eventually somebody throws them out. So get them digitized. I did that with the slides and reels I had, but do hold on to the originals too, and don't let them get hot or humid. Go listen to the interview with Phil to hear more about how to take care of that media, and reach out to him. Maybe you want to donate your footage so he can keep it as well. Second, keep your copies in more than one place. Phil keeps everything in three: on-site, in a cloud, and in an off-site location that isn't connected to the internet at all. That's what I'm working to copy here at my house. And if you make films, leave the scratches in when they tell the truth. Keep your original masters in three different locations, just like Phil does. And if you ever use AI to show something nobody filmed, just be up front with your audience about it. I think they'll trust you even more for it. Hey, before I close, if this episode meant something to you, can you share it with just one person? Maybe the person in your family who has that box of home movies in the closet. And if you haven't already, follow Documentary First wherever you're listening to this, so you don't miss next week's conversation. And if you'd like to support what we do here, we have a wonderful Patreon community. All the information is in the show notes below. I'd like to close with one more part of The Velveteen Rabbit that I haven't told you about. Near the end of the story, the boy gets very sick with scarlet fever. When he gets better, the doctor orders that all the books and toy things he played with in bed have to be burned, including that shabby old rabbit. "Get him a new one," the doctor says. And so they do. That night, the boy has a new bunny to sleep with. The book says it was a splendid new bunny, all white plush with real glass eyes, brand new, perfect, and the boy is too excited about going to the seaside to care very much about it. I think about that new bunny a lot these days. We're surrounded by splendid new bunnies, aren't we? Shiny, perfect, and some of them made in a matter of seconds. It's so easy to put the old, worn-out things in a sack and leave them out back to be burned: the box of reels in the closet, the photo with the torn corner, the cassette tape, the old toys. But that isn't where the story ends for our little rabbit. The little rabbit cries a real tear, and the nursery magic fairy comes and makes him real, not just to the boy, but to everyone. And the next spring, when the boy is playing in the woods, two rabbits peek out at him from the bracken. And one of them, the book says, had strange markings under his fur, as though long ago he had been spotted, and the spots still showed through. Even after he became real to everyone, you could still see where he had been loved. It's just what the Skin Horse had told him back in the nursery: once you are real, you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always. I think that's what Phil is protecting in that climate-controlled vault of his: the scratches, the dust, the spots that still show through. My little sister fell asleep not too long into that story on Christmas Day in 1986. Forty years later, I'm the one who still can't stop thinking about it. So this week, would you go find your box of real things and take good care of them? I'm Christian Taylor, and you've been listening to Documentary First: The Deep Dive. And I'll see you next time. Bye, everybody.