A roll of 16mm film locked away for more than 50 years has turned one-of-the-world’s-most debated, analyzed and commercialized mythical creature conversations on its head. And it all came through the Olympic College documentary film department. OC adjunct faculty Teresa Brooks found the decades-old roll of film in a family safe and passed it on to Marq Evans, filmmaker and director of the OC documentary film department, to see if he had the right equipment to find out what was on it. She had a hunch it might be Bigfoot-related. Maybe even the original roll of the famous Patterson-Gimlin film which had been lost for decades. But they found something else. Evans’ new documentary, his fifth film, “Capturing Bigfoot” debuted earlier this spring at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas and set the bigfoot world on fire when word got out that a second Patterson-Gimlin film had been found, mimicking and pre-dating the famous film by a year. The internet freaked out. A dress rehearsal? A re-enactment? It was a costume this whole time?! Is this new found footage even real?!! Subsequent festival screenings were canceled abruptly. The film went dark for months. Longtime Smokestack contributor, cartoonist and bigfoot lore buff Pat Moriarity had been monitoring the chat rooms, comment threads, blogs and youtubes. He sat down with Marq in the corner of a downtown coffeeshop for what felt like a clandestine top secret meeting before the exclusive internet post shared news of the film’s upcoming release to the world that morning. The following is a true account of what was discussed. I was there for the coffee. And to write things down. The filmmaker and the aficionado are discussing how people had already been arguing, dismissing, even issuing death threats over the film, before having had a chance to see it… [editor’s note.]
PAT: I GET THE IMPRESSION THAT IT’S GONNA BE OBVIOUS AFTER WATCHING THE FILM. BECAUSE OF ALL THE PEOPLE INVOLVED… YOU CAN POOPOO IT ALL YOU WANT BUT WHEN YOU SEE THE PEOPLE INVOLVED, THAT’S GONNA BE HARD TO IGNORE. MARQ: I think so, you know, but we’ll see what people that have, you know, really dug into this, if they are willing to come off their way of thinking. Not a lot of people change their minds in general, so…
THERE’S THIS ONE DUDE THAT WENT TO SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST, I THINK HE HAS A YOUTUBE CHANNEL… “The Hairy Man Road,” yeah…
HE WAS LIKE COMPLETELY CONVINCED AFTER SEEING YOUR FILM THAT THIS WAS A HOAX. That was an interesting story with him, because it was our second screening at South By Southwest. We’d had the world premiere and it went great, sold out, but there was nobody from the Bigfoot community that knew about it, really. And he came to the second screening because he lived in Austin. Our executive producer had gone home, he was at the premiere but had gone back to San Diego, and he texted me and my producer and said, ‘Hey there is this guy that is live-streaming, he’s at the front of the line right now…”
HA, YEAH, I ACTUALLY LISTENED TO THAT LIVE STREAM… And apparently, he made a comment that he was gonna try to film the screening with his meta glasses. And we were like, ‘Ok, we can’t have that.’ So we went and talked to him, said, ‘Hey, glad you’re here,’ escorted him in and made sure he had a seat. But we took his glasses and said we’ll get these back to you after the show. And we had our own Bigfoot mascot there taking pictures with people, and we sat our Bigfoot right next to him and said if he pulls out his phone or anything… take it away. So it was like this security guard Bigfoot. [Everybody laughs.] Then he did a video review that night, I think. And I was curious what this guy is gonna say because he’s like really into Bigfoot. And he loved the film. He was blown away by the film. And, you know, changed his mind on what he thought was true. But then he’s taken a lot of heat. Apparently, he said he’s getting like death threats… for just reporting what the movie is about. People are saying like he is lying and didn’t see it. But, you know, I saw him and he saw it.
[THE EDITOR INTERJECTS:] I THINK IT’S INTERESTING HOW YOU CAME ACROSS THIS FOOTAGE, TELL US A LITTLE MORE ABOUT THAT… It’s a local story, yeah. I can’t remember the exact date, sometime mid June of 2022, I get an email out of the blue from this woman named Teresa Brooks. At first, she wanted to know if the film department at Olympic College—where I teach film and documentary and where she teaches in a different department but we didn’t know each other—she emails at first asking if the film department had the ability to project 16mm film. Because she had this Bigfoot film that’s been in her dad’s safe for 50-plus years and she wants to see the film and thinks maybe there’d be an opportunity to do something with it as part of a documentary… I wrote her back and told her: ‘We don’t have the ability to screen it, but I can help you get it scanned and digitized as 4K so we can look at it.’ She thought what was gonna be on that film was the original Patterson Bigfoot film, the famous Bigfoot, which has been lost for like 30 years now. It’s been lost since the 80s. That’s what she thought was gonna be on that 16mm film roll from her dad’s safe because the family stories she had heard from the 1960s, and on, were that her dad and her uncle were involved in the making of that famous film.
THEY WERE BOEING EMPLOYEES RIGHT? One of them was, her dad was. Not even just an employee, he ran the film department.
OH… SO IS THAT WHERE THEY DEVELOPED THE ORIGINAL FILM, AT BOEING? We don’t know for sure if they developed the famous film at Boeing. But that’s never been figured out. One researcher back in the 70s tracked it all the way to Boeing, and thought maybe that’s where it was developed, but then couldn’t get any further. So it kind of would make sense.
AND THEY DIDN’T WANT TO USE A REAL BUSINESS… Exactly… especially if you’re pulling off a hoax… So Teresa contacted me with that, I help her get it scanned… [he pauses]… no, wait, yeah scanned…. I sometimes use the wrong word, like one time I said ‘processed’ and everybody was like, ‘Ohhh! He’s lying!’ because that’s a different thing. But anyway, we got this scanned to 4K and we get it back, and I was like, ‘Awh, that’s not the famous film.’ Because in my mind I was thinking that would be cool if we found this lost film…
OH YEAH, THAT WOULD BE HISTORY MAKING BECAUSE NEXT TO THE ZAPRUDER FILM, IT’S LIKE THE MOST FAMOUS HOME MOVIE THAT I CAN THINK OF… That said, though, there’s probably not a documentary for me to make if that would’ve been what it was. It would’ve been like, cool, we uncovered this and this is newsworthy and whatever… But what it was… was this different thing. This different Bigfoot from earlier. But the footage was like: ‘Wow, OK, it’s walking from left to right, it has the same choreography as the famous film where it’s shaky and gets still just for a second at the exact time that the Bigfoot looks at the camera…’ And It looks a little bit different, but that seems like it’s the same suit.. if you believe it is a suit…
‘THE HAIRY MAN ROAD’ GUY SAYS HE THINKS IT’S THE EXACT SAME SUIT. My thought is that it’s the same suit with modifications… I see a different face. But it would stand to reason that if you shoot the film, and it’s not ready for prime time, you regroup and think ‘how do we improve it?’ I think both the costume was improved and the person inside the costume was re-cast. And the setting, I don’t know if it was ever intended to be at that first setting or if that was literally just a practice run… But they did change the setting as well. So we get this film back and, at first, I was kind of disappointed. But then it was like, ‘Well, what is this though?’ Teresa’s family stories are that her dad and uncle were tied to Roger Patterson who shot the famous film. This looks so similar but it was from before… so what is this? That was the beginning of it, just trying to figure out what this is. I started looking into the Patterson film. Read everything I could about it, watched everything I could about that. Then that became an interesting subject matter because the people around that, Patterson and Bob Gimlin, were these cowboys from Yakima. And I was born in Yakima so I had this connection there…
SO YOU PROBABLY HEARD THIS FOLKLORE WHEN YOU WERE A KID… Well, my dad worked for the asphalt company where a lot of this kind of originated out of. So he had told me stories when I was kid, that he knew where this came from. And that was pretty much it. But I had heard the story from him…
SO THEY KNEW LOCALLY THAT IT WAS A HOAX? What my dad always said, was that the guy that ran the asphalt company, Al DeAtley—who is Roger Patterson’s brother-in-law—that he was the mastermind, and he did it all to save his company. It is not true that he was the mastermind, but he certainly saw an opportunity, got in there, and made a ton of money off of it. And it did save his company. So my dad did have some of the story right… But I never thought, ‘I’m gonna make a documentary about this someday.’ That was never something that crossed my mind. But then, it just falls in my lap… And it was just research at first, I was working on other projects, too. I remember at one point telling my wife that it would be stupid of me to not basically make this the number one thing because it’s such a good story. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that it was gonna solve this six-decade mystery, it was just that these people, these characters were so fascinating.
I GET THE IMPRESSION THE FILM IS MORE ABOUT THE PEOPLE INVOLVED, THE INNER RELATIONSHIPS OF THOSE FOLKS AND HOW IT AFFECTED EVERYBODY… Yeah, it’s a human interest story, the subject just happens to be this Bigfoot thing. And that’s how I made the film too. We didn’t make it for like the Bigfoot fans. We think, obviously, they are gonna be interested in it, but we made it for more of a general audience that can fall in love with these characters.
I’M SURPRISED NOBODY HAS BOTHERED TO LOOK IN TO THE HISTORY OF THE PATTERSON FAMILY… ALL OF THE DOCUMENTARIES—AND YOU KNOW THERE’S A TON OF THEM—BIGFOOT-RELATED AND SEEMINGLY ‘AFTER THE TRUTH’ AND STUFF, BUT NOBODY HAS BOTHERED TO GO TO YAKIMA, FIND OUT ABOUT THE PATTERSON FAMILY, TALK TO THE SON AND THE MOM… Yeah, the only person that ever did do that was Greg Long. He’s in the movie, as a subject. He wrote a book about it. He did that research you are talking about in the late 90s, early 2000s. The book came out in ’03, I think, called ‘The Making Of Bigfoot.’ And it is the most well-researched story of any kind relating to this subject, I would say, before ‘Capturing Bigfoot.’ But he was never able to talk to the Patterson family because they wouldn’t talk to him. That was their approach: ‘We’re just not going to talk to anybody.’ Roger’s wife Patricia would sometimes allow believers to come in and do some things. But you know, she was making money off of it, off the licensing of the film. Her husband died in 1972 and all three of her kids were still young and at home at the time, and here she is, raising the kids, and she has this film, and she’s like: ‘I can survive, I can feed my family with this.’ But ultimately they didn’t ever really want to do interviews. They certainly didn’t want anything to do with somebody that might say that the film is not real…
[THE EDITOR INTERJECTS:] SO WHAT WAS IT LIKE WHEN YOU APPROACHED THE PATTERSON FAMILY? So, this is where we were able to take ‘The Making Of Bigfoot,’ Greg Long’s book to another level… // INTERVIEW w/ PAT MORIARITY
[‘Capturing Bigfoot’ a new documentary by local filmmaker Marq Evans releases on National Bigfoot Day Oct. 20 at theaters across the country and streaming on Amazon. Special screenings are scheduled for Oct. 18 at SIFF Cinema Uptown, Seattle & Oct. 30 at the Roxy, Bremerton. Find more at capturingbigfoot.com]
