OLD MOVIES BRING RUSH OF MEMORIES.

Byline: JUDY O'ROURKE Staff Writer

NEWHALL -- The couple happily eschewed stadium seating and passed on this weekend's star- studded blockbusters to watch obscure footage shot 30 years ago on Super 8 film on a remote South Pacific island.

Lourdes Lamog-Doiel's home movie was among several gems screened for Home Movie Day -- a nonprofit event held Saturday at 50 venues across the country, including the Repertory East Playhouse.

``There are a lot of changes,'' the 50-year-old said of her home in the Falalop Islands, which she left at 21 to attend College of the Canyons. ``Now they have cell phones, a computer -- I send them e-mail.''

Back then, women walked around bare-breasted and electricity was almost nonexistent. Lamog-Doiel had never before seen the footage, which was sent to her by a cousin in Montana, who in turn received it from the high school principal on Ulithi Island who shot it.

``I've never seen anything like this,'' said Rhonda Vigeant, one of the event's organizers. ``It's right out of National Geographic.''

Lamog-Doiel plans to transfer the film to DVD and send copies to relatives and maybe to the Peace Corps, whose volunteers helped build schools and a hospital on the islands. Vigeant referred the woman to a film archivist.

Seated a few rows back from Lamog-Doiel and her husband, Robert Doiel, was Dean Hall, 75, who did not know the couple or bring a film to show, although he is a Super 8 and Regular 8 camera collector. The movie held memories for him, too.

``I was on Guam, and the (Coast Guard) guys in the Quonset hut next door flew mail to (Ulithi) in 1949,'' Hall said. He was serving in the Marine Corps, and by chance, hopped aboard a mail run.

Shirley Lee Putnam screened wedding footage from 1957 at last year's event, but her mother, in whose Los Angeles yard the reception was held, never saw it. Putnam and her mom, Margaret Holinsworth, who will turn 88 next week, together watched the film -- complete with the requisite piece of cake smooshed into the groom's face -- with bittersweet memories.

``The 11th of August, two weeks before my wedding, my brother fell in a park on a hiking trip and died. He was 13 years old,'' Putnam said. Her mother insisted that she go ahead with her wedding.

``You feel like you're there again,'' she said.

``I thought how nice it was, how pretty,'' Holinsworth said. ``And my hair was black,'' she said with a smile.

While the amateurs enjoy their movies and many transfer them to DVDs, professional filmmakers who strive for a vintage feel to modern pictures shoot on Super 8 to obtain the grainy, scratchy quality.

The event was launched in 2002 by film archivists who were determined to preserve homemade movies for their historical value and for posterity.

judy.orourke(at)dailynews.com

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