The family and friends of Michael Strassman have donated his film archives to the AAC Library. The archives consist of about 300 film and video cassettes produced by Range of Light Productions on the topic of climbing, along with supporting correspondence, notes, photographs and other personal archives.
Strassman was the author of The basic essentials of rock climbing (1989), Climbing big walls (with Jim Bridwell, 1990), and A rockclimber's guide to the Alabama Hills : Lone Pine, California (2002).
Range of Light produced climbing film classics Moving over stone (with Doug Robinson), Rock , and Climb international China, Hong Kong, Thailand. The archives contains unedited footage from these shoots.
From Doug Robinson's Rock and Ice memorial:"When I met Mike in 1986 he was fresh out of UCLA film school and inspired me with the dream of making a climbing video. We had no idea what we were getting into. Over the next year, with support from Patagonia and Austin Hearst (of Hearst publishing fame), we ran around shooting the best climbers and areas in the West.
Leasing a shoulder-top TV camera, we discovered that its old-school tube technology was delicate, not built for dangling shots hundreds of feet up. One time it quit on us in Indian Creek, which led to the novel scene of Mike in a desert phone booth with a technician on the line, trying desperately to repair the camera with a Swiss Army knife. Half-shot sequences were adroitly salvaged by fine editing on Mike’s part. Months of post-production led to Moving Over Stone, the second-ever climbing video to hit the market. It went on to become the best-selling “rock video” of all time. "
We are currently raising funds to transport the archives to Golden from Los Angeles. Our second fundraising priority is to digitize a selection of film and tape cassettes (lots of beta), at a cost of approximately $20-30 per cassette.
Please donate in $25 increments to help preserve the work of Michael Strassman.
Thanks go to Boulder filmmaker Josh Lyons for bringing the collection to our attention and to LA filmmaker Alex Reinhard for assisting in bringing the collection to Golden!