Life comes at you fast, normally. But in the case of Palomar College Television producer Bill Wisneski, it took 50 long years for him to discover that documentary filmmaking runs in the family.
Earlier this summer, on July 4th, a time capsule that had been plugged into a wall at the Georgetown County Courthouse in Georgetown, South Carolina 50 years earlier was retrieved. Inside, to the surprise of Wisneski, was a reel of film containing a 15-minute documentary about life in nearby Andrews put together in 1976 by his grandfather, Lee Parsons.
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| Lee Parsons, camera in hand (Andrews Library) |
Parsons, who passed away in 1984, narrates the film via voiceover, something that really threw Wisneski and other members of his family for a loop. "I immediately called my mom," Wisneski told the Post & Courier. "I played a clip for her, and of course, she started crying. It was very emotional for her to hear her father's voice, which she hasn't heard since he died."
On August 18th, this newfound documentary artifact will get a proper unveiling via free public screening at the Andrews Library, with grandson Wisneski traveling cross-country from San Marcos, California to be there and provide an introduction. The found film was digitized and Wisneski has in fact been polishing it up delicately with some color correction.
Over his more than two decades teaching at the Southern California community college's production division, which was started coincidentally in 1975 just a year before the time capsule was consecrated, Wisneski has won dozens of Pacific Southwest Emmy Awards for his work with students. In fact, just a few days after the time capsule was retrieved this summer, on July 7th, Wisneski was claiming his latest for the 48-minute documentary My Wild Life, a portrait of exotic animals photographer Suzi Eszterhas.
There is at least one other documentary that Parsons shot and edited, about the turtles of the Galapagos Islands. Wisneski would dearly love somehow to unearth that one as well.
His grandfather was already a larger-than-life remembered character thanks to a trajectory as a football star, actor, radio man and prominent member of U.S. Senator Burney Maybanks's team. To that effect, grandson Wisneski will be traveling back to South Carolina with grandpa's 1967 Canon camera and taking some keepsake footage with that along the way.
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