BY KATHY HALL
Correspondent
The boardwalk in Asbury Park is a vantage point for Christina Eliopoulos, who is filming “Greetings from Asbury Park,” a documentary that traces the history of the city. Above: With Palace Amusements in the background, the filmmaker interviewed Louise and Bob Sugarman. Christina Eliopoulos knows that Asbury Park’s first boardwalk was rolled up at night. She has filled her home with postcards, photographs and posters documenting the town’s evolution from its founding as a “resort for the pure of heart” in 1871, through its heyday as a family resort to its incarnation as a honky-tonk home to some of rock music’s most influential artists.
But it’s her interest in Asbury Park’s future that is driving Eliopoulos to create a 100-minute documentary titled “Greetings From Asbury Park.”
“Asbury Park was one of the most unique places on the eastern seaboard, a place that was world renowned,” she explained. “If you look at all these postcards, people walking the street, they were sharing something bigger. Asbury Park was the ultimate stage. You could fulfill a fantasy, you could be someone else. You could just stroll proudly with your beautiful wife, your beautiful kids. You could cruise and show off your beautiful car. … That is needed in society. I want people to really think about what can we do to bring it back.”
Eliopoulos’ family has been in Asbury Park since 1917, when her great-uncle emigrated from Greece and set up a small stand on the boardwalk. Christine was born in the city and spent summers working there. She studied journalism and politics at New York University, had her first byline in Newsday when she was 19, and was employed as a general assignment reporter for the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post news wire.
Her credits include co-writing a CBS documentary, “The Wall Within,” which followed five veterans recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and directing a documentary short, “This Is My Line,” that explored the power of art therapy. She has also directed brand films and commercials for Ogilvy & Mather.
Eliopoulos began work on the Asbury Park project four years ago, asking her friends and contacts for their home movies. She admits to being “very shameless” in raiding people’s attics for boxes of old Super 8 film and photographs, and is proud of the trust people have in her to take care of their family memories.
All the archival materials used in the film are taken to New York, where they are professionally cleaned and transferred to a digital medium. Then the originals are returned to the family along with a digital copy. Eliopoulos continues to seek contributions from all segments of the Asbury Park community.
“I want to include as many voices in the film as I can. I feel it makes it everybody’s film because everyone is giving me a little piece of their history. “
Eliopoulos has tracked down images of Asbury Park in news reels from the ’20s, several works by Thomas Edison, and a number of early commercial films including “The Suburbanite,” a popular film about the perils of moving into suburbia that was filmed in 1911.
She is using 16-mm film for the project rather than video, even though it costs her $400 just to open a can of film.
“Film is the best medium I know that can combine historic, scholarly and personal perspective,” she said. “We’re talking about a town that had a huge reputation and was mythic in a way.
“Film does that justice, and I don’t think video does. Film is an imagistic medium, video is not. Video to me feels like a voyeuristic kind of tool. Film feels like it lives beyond the frame. … When you shoot something in film, it’s almost like you can see through it; you sort of feel you are looking into it. Video has a kind of flatness. It’s purely an artistic choice,” she explained.
To manage the complex mix of archival materials and contemporary interviews, Eliopoulos uses a computerized editing program. Every frame that she shoots and all the archival material is transferred to a digital medium and fed into a computer.
“Then we start composing it,” she explained. “We take snippets from here and there, edit it digitally and get a cut of the movie.”
That digital version is taken to a negative cutter, who finds the selected shots on the original roles of film and provides them to the editor in the order they will appear in the final film.
The editor assembles and digitizes the original negative and archival material to a high-definition format with color correction and any special treatment the film might need. This digital master is then “outed” to film or can be provided digitally for television.
It has taken Eliopoulos four years to obtain financing for the film, with most of the funding coming from small private contributions and the sponsorship of Women Make Movies, a nonprofit media arts organization that facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.
The self-described “emerging film maker” has been named as Artist in Residence for the 2005 Two River Film Festival at Monmouth University, West Long Branch. Student interns from the university’s communications department will gain real-life experience by working with her on all aspects of “Greetings from Asbury Park.”
“They get to see how the film evolves, get to see how these various concepts get strung together,” Eliopoulos explained. “They get to see not only the fun stuff, but they get to experience the frustration when you can’t get a particular interview that you need, or a piece of footage is inaccessible to you.”
Eliopoulos has high praise for the Monmouth students and acknowledges their contributions to her film.
“A documentary film is 50 times more scripted than a narrative film. When you have your subject on camera, you’d better know what you are going to ask them, you’d better know how it relates to every other interview in the film, and you’d better know how it relates to every other clip, photograph, piece of music that you’ve got.
“All that takes incredible amounts of research, and the students that I’m working with are all incredibly gifted at research; they are my sleuths. I give them a thread, they come back with a tapestry.”
Jessica Ross of Point Pleasant, a senior concentrating in radio and television, is enjoying her experience as an intern on the project.
“During the day, I’m with Christina,” Ross said. “I see her thought process and how she wants to direct, where she wants to go on location. And, I’m also assisting the producer, so I see how he comes in. He wants all these facts and data and all the names exactly. I see how they mesh together.”
Participating in the project has also changed Ross’ perception of Asbury Park
“I used to drive through Asbury Park and didn’t know much about it,” Ross said. “Now, there’s a couple of cute little stores and restaurants I’ll definitely check out. … It’s been a great experience,” she concluded.
Following its debut at the Two River Film Festival at Monmouth University Nov. 4-6, Eliopoulos will enter the film in as many key festivals as she can in order to find a distributor. She also plans to create an eight-part classroom cut with study guides that will be available to schools throughout New Jersey.
“I want a younger generation of people to understand the power and the magic of the place,“ she said, “and I want people to recognize that we are in the middle of a beautiful and sometimes very challenging social experiment.
“This is the story of a town in transition, and the country is watching us to see how we will be able to effect this transformation,” Eliopoulos said. “The goal is that we lift the fortunes and we lift the circumstances of everybody. That’s a true redevelopment, and the country is watching to see if we are going to be just rebuilt, or reborn.”