When Roger Met Patty: Review

 

When Roger Met Patty by William Munns (2014), Createspace Independent Publishing, Platform, 510 pp, paperback and Kindle.

    In October 1967 Roger Patterson rode into the area of Bluff Creek, California hoping to film a bigfoot. And he did! This was just nine years after the whole concept of bigfoot had been publicised by the appearance of some remarkable footprints at Bluff Creek, and by John Green's discussions on the sasquatch in Canada. What incredible good fortune! And nothing like this has been filmed since. Yes, especially since the advent of digital photography and phone cameras, innumerable films purporting to show such a creature have surfaced, but nothing of this clarity.

     The Patterson-Gimli film, to give its official title, and "Patty", the whimsical name of its subject, has been the focus of intense controversy ever since. Even its detractors admit that, if it is a hoax, it is a very good one. But could it really be just a man in a gorilla suit and if it was, how was it made? Or is a really possible that such a creature could actually exist and, if so, that Patterson was one of the luckiest documentary makers in history? Fortunately, now an expert has entered into the fray.

     In 1966 Bill Munns commenced a three year course in theatre and film, in the process of which he and his fellow students were required to make a film. He then went on to study make-up and for most of the rest of his working life he was involved in "creature features": the making of movie monsters by means of fur suits and prosthetic heads and other body parts. Finally, he decided to examine the Patterson-Gimli film (PGF) in detail to determine whether it would be possible to fake such a thing, using the materials and techniques available at the time which, you will remember, was precisely the period in which he was learning his trade. So here is the very expert best qualified to make such a study. And, as he pointed out, he had no vested interest in the result. Nobody so far has been able to demonstrate how such a hoax could be produced, so if he were able to do so, he would gain just as much kudos as if he had proved it was genuine.

     Firstly, he discusses the film itself, which has been copied, recopied, zoomed in, freeze framed, turned into slow motion, and otherwise edited. Munns appears to have tracked down just about every copy, and he has provided a voluminous set of appendices listing all the resources. The site of the film is well established, and it is deep within the wilderness, where previous sightings had been reported. It is also an inappropriate site for staging a hoax, because it commences with a small creek between the cameraman and the purported animal. The roll of film is 100 feet long, with the first three quarters taken up with a man riding a horse, which Patterson presumably intended as filler for the documentary he was making. Then the PGF itself commences. It is 23.85 feet long, consisting of 954 frames, and lasts only a minute. I wonder how many people were aware of that. I certainly wasn't. By analysing the film Munn is able to show that Patterson was already running when he started the camera rolling. His finger apparently slipped off the trigger as he crossed the creek. Meanwhile, "Patty" behaves like a genuine wild animal; she moves off slowly when he begins to approach, but only hurries once he has crossed the stream, and then turns to look back before moving off into the undergrowth. Then the cameraman runs out of film. In a great deal of detail, Munns explains that this is inconsistent with any sensibly planned hoax, but consistent with accidentally being in the right place at the right time.
     Now, against the allegation that Patterson was skilled enough to construct a plausible fake, Munns explains that, at the time - when he studying the profession, remember - Hollywood was a closed shop. Make-up artists and such had to belong to the union, and were only allowed to train union members. There was no school for make-up and creature effects, and no comprehensive books on the subject.

     He then goes into great detail about how an ape suit is made, how one gets into it, and then moves around in it. As you can imagine, and as he makes plain, it is simply not possible to get a human in an ape suit to correctly imitate the fluid movement of a big, hulking, hairy primate. (And as an introduction, you may wish to read this short PDF by another expert on why Hollywood has never succeeded in duplicating the Patterson-Gimli film.) He then discusses making a gorilla head. Apart from the obvious problem that there is next to zero movement of facial muscles on such a prosthetic head, the big problem is that a human being has a high forehead while an ape's slopes sharply back from the brow ridge because of its small brain. The solution is to make the head bigger in proportion to the body to create an optical illusion. Munns shows how Patty's head is the right size and the correct shape. (I might add this was what alerted me to the fact that a recent photograph of an alleged bigfoot was a fake; its forehead was too high.)

      As far as Bob Hieronimous' claim that he himself was the man inside the ape suit in the PGF,  Munns simply states that they tried making a suit according to his specifications, and it didn't work. This should have been obvious from the start. It involved wearing a football helmet inside the false head - which would have raised the back of Patty's head, but given her a high forehead. If also involved using sticks for gloves to extend the arms, although this would make the forearms out of all proportion to the upper arms. No, this is the not unknown phenomenon of a fake hoax. Essentially, instead of going to the trouble of hoaxing something themselves, some people realise they can get their 15 minutes' of fame, and have more people believe them, if they falsely claim to have hoaxed something already controversial.

     Munns also filmed naked women walking and turning around like Patty in the PCF. While this may be titillating, there was method in the madness. He had acquired a grant to hire figure models for the purpose of answering the following questions:

• Do real, flesh and blood breasts ripple and move like Patty's do in the film (Yes!), and can this be replicated using a prosthetic breast (No way!)?
• Do flesh and blood hips and thighs reveal the same movements of skin and muscle as shown on the PGF, and can a man in an ape suit replicate them? You can probably guess the answer to this.

     This brings us to another chapter in the book, where Munns explains that the appearance and movements of Patty in the film are completely consistent with a living creature. You cannot read the book without coming to the conclusion that the film is genuine. Therefore, until someone equally qualified comes forward and reveals errors in his argument and, preferably, duplicates the film artificially, we must accept this as the definitive analysis of the film. The corollary, of course, is that, incredible as it may seem, there really is a huge, hairy, bipedal ape unknown to science stomping around North America.

      There is yet one other question to be ask: why has no other film of such clarity ever been made? Why have all the many recent so called "bigfoot" photos or films been of such poor quality? I think I answered this in an earlier post about a less convincing photo.

      We are so used to watching wildlife documentaries which are so good that is seems we are in the middle of it that we tend to forget the planning, patience, professionalism, and high technology involved. Wild animals do not organize their activities for the benefit of human photographers. This goes double for when the photographer is a rank amateur strolling through the woods with a camera or mobile phone, and when the animal in question is rare, shy, preferentially nocturnal, and which lives in areas where trees and shrubs get between it and the eyewitness. Have a look at these "bigfoot photographs". Not very good, are they? But isn't this just what you would expect if a real animal were involved: one or two very good shots (? Patterson-Gimli), many which were obviously hoaxes, and a large number which are neither one thing or the other?

       Of course, it would have been better if the PGF had been made by David Attenborough. Roger Patterson lived a chaotic life, and was alleged to have said when he was dying: "I am probably the worst person the film could have happened to." Nevertheless, he was the luckiest of all amateur documentary makers, for he was at the right place at the right time to film something most wildlife filmmakers would die for. And Bigfoot is real.