Copies of
Multiple Sidosis
are available directly from the producer!

Interested in owning a copy?  Write to:

Sidney N. Laverents
3705 Mesa Vista Way
Bonita, CA 91902
(619)479-1275  
sidchar@cts.com 

Multiple Sidosis on VHS (NTSC format)......... $15.00 + $2.00 postage
Multiple Sidosis plus
5 other films by Sid Laverents ......................... $20.00 + $2.00 postage

(Contact Sid for pricing and availability of international formats.)

‘Multiple’ stories on amateur film
by Brooks Boliek

WASHINGTON – When Sid Laverents, an inveterate amateur filmmaker, started playing with the two-track tape recorder he had received as a birthday present in 1969, he didn’t know that three decades later his new toy would help put him in the same category as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, and Steven Spielberg.
But thanks to that Roberts tape recorder and a ten-minute film he shot with a 16mm Bolex camera that stars twelve images of himself titled “Multiple Sidosis,” the 92-year-old Laverents now has a film in the National Film Registry to be preserved for all time alongside some of America’s most famous motion pictures.
“We had wanted to include a purely amateur film for some time,” said David Francis, the chief of the Library of Congress motion picture, television, and recorded sound division.  “There is this whole area that no one has really considered, but amateur film societies existed all over the country in the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, and even into the ‘50s.  There was a small conference on amateur film, and this one was voted the favorite.
Francis calls the final product with the dozen Sids playing various instruments and whistling a “technical comedy.”
Lavarents told the Hollywood Reporter that he was intrigued by Les Paul and Mary Ford’s recordings in which they played all the instruments, so when he got his tape recorder, he decided to do the same thing.
“I was inspired by Les Paul and Mary Ford,” he said from his home in San Diego.  “I had done some studies with light filters where I put more than one image on film.  So I said, “My gosh!  Why don’t I try it.”
But with a two-track machine, he had to be careful not to erase the tracks he had already laid down.  It took three or four months to lay down each track.
“I did this 12 times and came up with some surprisingly good audio,”  he said.  “When I got that right, it was a matter of getting the pictures to fit.”
That’s easier said than done.  It took four rolls of film to get everything straight, and the aircraft engineer by trade had to invent a machine that would allow him to synchronize everything.  Out of the 1,900 feet of film he shot, Laverents was left with only 325 feet in the final product.
While “Multiple Sidosis” may be his most famous work, Laverents ha made 12 films and more than a half dozen feature videos.  In one, he gets consumed by a dinosaur.
“After I got started, I guess I just went a little deeper in it than most people, "he said about his hobby -- one he pursues even as a nonagenarian.
Even with his selection, and all the years of filmmaking, Laverents is still obsessed with cinema, his wife Charlotte said.
"His deepest wish is to visit the Spielberg studios," Charlotte Laverents said.  "After all these years as an amateur, he'd really like to see how the professionals do it out there."  

Sid Laverents spoke at the Association of Moving Image Archivists' annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on Nov.6, 2001.  

Ross Lipman of UCLA, who supervised the archiving of Multiple Sidosis presented the wonderfully restored 35mm archival copy.