The offbeat filmmaker who was an amateur legend
1908–2009
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A native of Cheyenne, Wyo., Laverents was in his early 50s when, while “working as a flight-test instrumentation engineer for Convair in 1958, he bought his first movie camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex,” said the Los Angeles Times. Soon he was creating quirky short features, often using his engineering skills to design equipment to film them. One effort, Snails and How They Walk, depicted a snail race, with numbers painted on the racers’ shells. Another short entry titled It Sudses and Sudses and Sudses featured “out-of-control canisters of shaving cream that fill up every nook and cranny in the bathroom.” Accompanied by horror-type music, “the mass of foam forces the film’s shirtless and potbellied star—Laverents—to escape through the window.”
His masterpiece was Multiple SIDosis (1970), said The New York Times. Its nine minutes consist mainly of Laverents “knitting together a soundtrack of several separate recordings of himself performing a jaunty Felix Arndt tune called ‘Nola.’ He whistles, hums, blows across bottlenecks, and plays instruments including a banjo, a jew’s-harp, and an ocarina.” What distinguishes the work is Laverents’ repeated exposure of different images of himself on the same piece of film. “By the end, there are 11 different Sids on the screen, including a couple wearing Mickey Mouse ears and fake whiskers.” Multiple SIDosis took four years to make and, in 2000, was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry, only the fourth amateur movie to be so designated.
Laverents’ sole survivor is his fourth wife, Charlotte. His autobiography was titled The First 90 Years Are the Hardest.
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