The reel deal.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

EUGENE HOME MOVIE DAY What: In conjunction with National Home Movie Day, the University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives seeks visits from those with home movies still on 8mm, Super 8mm and 16mm. Experts will be on hand to examine your original films, possibly show them and provide instruction in how to preserve them. When: 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday; a lecture - "Everyone Needs a Home (Movie)' - by UO English professor Michael Aronson, who specializes in "orphan films," follows at 5:30 p.m. Where: Main floor of UO Knight Library, Proctor classrooms 41 and 42. Cost: Free. Also: A screening of more home movies will be at the Indigo District, 1290 Oak St., from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. More information: www .homemovieday.com or call Erin O'Meara at 346-1905.

Come on. We know you have them.

And all they're doing is gathering dust, so bring them.

Please bring them.

Bring your original home movies (not VHS or DVD) in their tin canisters, or those little yellow boxes, to the University of Oregon's Knight Library on Saturday.

Yes, it may seem a bit odd that someone else wants to see those old films of you riding your tricycle, or your parents on their wedding day, or Grandma and Grandpa on Thanksgiving.

But tucked in there somewhere might be images - glorious, long-lasting, color images - of Willamette Street in Eugene before World War II. Or maybe there are some shots of the UO campus way back when. Or River Road before it was widened and developed.

Whatever the case, Tom Robinson and the rest of the curators in the UO Special Collections and University Archives department at the Knight Library want to see what you have on the fourth annual National Home Movie Day.

It's an event that's not only happening here, but all over the planet. From the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood, to the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, to the Boston Public Library, to the Anthology Film Archives in New York City, to the Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia in Tuscany, to a spot between two houses in Pittsburgh, people will be watching home movies on Saturday.

The event was launched in 2002 by a group of film archivists concerned about the fate of countless home movies shot on good, old-fashioned film - regular 8mm, Super 8mm and 16mm - during the 20th century.

"The purpose is to tell people about the importance of preserving their home movies," says Robinson, a Portland collector of home movies, other rare films and photographs who was recently hired as a curator in the UO's Special Collections department. "They show times and places that don't exist otherwise. Home movies usually have vibrant color, and show the reality of America's existence without any pretension."

The other purpose of National Home Movie Day is educational, Robinson says. Many people have transferred their home movies to VHS tapes and DVDs during the past 20 years, and while this might be convenient, the movies won't last long in those formats, he says. And for those who already have thrown out the original film, well, sorry, but you've made a big mistake, he adds.

Robinson estimates that only 2 percent of home movies have survived on film.

Robinson, a thin and eccentric 53-year-old who is partial to bow ties, has a collection of home movies that tops 1,000. He ran away from the Washington, D.C., orphanage that raised him and has no formal education beyond the third grade, although he has written several books on photography. But his passion is home movies, and he's been perusing garage sales for two decades now, looking for them. Cherishing them. And preserving them.

In a small room of the Knight Library, Robinson clicks on a Bell & Howell projector that's older than the Eisenhower administration and lets roll a 400-foot, nine-minute film. It reveals cast-iron buildings along Burnside Street in Portland before World War II. Buildings that are no longer there. History. It's someone driving through a Portland neighborhood in an old car, capturing the folks walking and waving on the sidewalk.

It's a family at the Oregon Coast. It's a home movie camera in a plane, above The Dalles, capturing the destruction of the Columbia River flood of 1948. It's American Indians fishing at Celilo Falls on the Columbia. It's the Portland Rose Parade, circa whenever.

It's vibrant color, in Kodachrome, and it's not going away.

"Kodachrome is a permanent color process that won't fade," Robinson says. "So this film is as crisp as the day it was made."

VHS tapes last an average of only seven years and DVDs an average of eight, Robinson says. And if you write on your DVD with a Sharpie pen, which many of us do, it's more like two years, he says. Kodachrome, that stuff Paul Simon sang about and Kodak first produced in 8mm and 16mm film in the mid-1930s, will last almost 400 years if it's well preserved, Robinson says.

And when it comes to well preserved, Robinson says he really loves the photo vault in the Knight Library's archival system for photographs and film. It's cold. As in 40 degrees. Robinson likes it so much, he's agreed to donate all of his photographs (and he estimates that he has millions) and film to the UO upon his death because it's one of the few places with refrigeration available, he told The Oregonian in 2004.

If you think this is all just a bunch of hooey, go on eBay and see what home movie sales are fetching. A single reel of a home movie shot in Germany before World War II, showing Coca-Cola trucks driving by swastika flags, just fetched $5,500, Robinson says.

"They are virtually the only daily life type films of what people are like, along with Hollywood films," he says. But Hollywood films are fiction, Robinson adds.

"They give us a view of what everyday America was like," says James Fox, head curator of the UO's Special Collections and University Archives, who hired Robinson. They are cultural and historical. Think of Abraham Zapruder's 8mm film that recorded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Much of the craze over home movies in recent years, in addition to the pure nostalgia of them, can be attributed to the award-winning and Oscar-nominated 2003 documentary, "Capturing the Friedmans," says Erin O'Meara, electronic records archivist for the Special Collections department. The footage consisted almost entirely of home movies of the Friedmans, an upper-middle class Long Island, N.Y., family in which both the father and youngest son were charged - and ultimately convicted - of molesting young boys who were students of the father.

"That was such a powerful movie," she says. "People had a really strong reaction to that movie, probably more so than whatever the blockbuster was that year."

Robinson, O'Meara and Fox hope that people will come Saturday, bringing their home movies with them. They want folks to come from Portland, from Southern Oregon, from Eastern Oregon, from all over the state, Fox says. They want to see your history.

"Just bring your movies, and popcorn, and a good attitude," he says.