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I Shot the Batman
In the spring of 1949 amateur filmmaker Edgar Humboldt became the first person ever to shoot motion picture footage of New York City’s famous Batman vigilante. Several months before his death in 2008, Humboldt reminisced about the incident.
This second-hand dealer I knew named Jake Katz had set me up with a war-surplus Bell & Howell Eyemo and several hundred feet of film for a very good price. The Eyemo was the same model I’d used when I shot footage for the Army during the war. Great camera! It felt good to finally handle a real 35-millemeter film job again, after piddling around with that little Keystone eight-millimeter I’d been using.
I decided I’d better shoot a couple hundred feet with the Eyemo for practice before trying anything ambitious. You know, try it out under different lighting conditions, to get the hang of it back. I took it out to an isolated area of shore on the west side of Staten Island to see about getting some sunset shots. I was in luck. It was a good sunset.
I’d shot about thirty-five feet of film when the sun sank out of sight. There was still plenty of good, mellow “magic hour” light to see by. Suddenly I heard what sounded like a boat. I was standing next to an outcropping of rock. The sound came from the other side. I stuck my head around and saw this little cabin cruiser approaching the shore. I guess they couldn’t see me for the rocks I was standing behind.
So I thought to myself, “Great, I can get a quick shot of this boat approaching the shore.” So I shot another ten feet of film, and then I heard my drive spring run down. Those Eyemos would only shoot forty-five feet of film before the drive spring wound down. Maybe thirty seconds’ worth of film at a regular twenty-four frames per second, which is what I was shooting.
When I looked up after winding the spring, I saw that the boat was coming in for a landing on this section of bank. I thought, “This is kind of interesting.” It looked like there were four guys in the boat. Three of them jumped in the water and got up on the shore. Then they started unloading these boxes of something.
Well, that looked pretty shady. They still didn’t seem to know I was there, so I decided I’d get a shot of them. My Eyemo was one of the ones that had three different lenses on a revolving mount. A “spider” mount, we called it. I flipped it over to the longest lens and set the aperture wide open. Then I carefully looked back up over the rocks and got ready to shoot.
That’s when I saw something big and black come bounding out of the trees nearby. It was a guy in a black outfit with a cape. It was the Batman! Of course everybody had seen drawings of the Batman in the paper. There’d even been one of two blurry photos of him. And here he was running at these four guys, and here I was with a motion picture camera all primed and ready. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing!
It was then that my Army experience took over. You didn’t miss a good shot in the war, no matter how surprised you were, or scared you were. You just operated your camera and got the best shot you could get. So I stood up and trained the camera on the scene, and started filming.
I started shooting just in time to catch the Batman running up and punching the guy closest to him out. They just barely had time to see what was coming. Then another guy drew a revolver from under his jacket and fired. His was in too big of a hurry and he missed. The Batman spun around and kicked the piece out of his hand.
Another guy went for him. The Batman grabbed the guy’s arm and flipped him over on his back with jiu-jitsu or something. He landed hard! Then he did the same thing with the guy whose hand he’d just kicked the gun out of.
By now the fourth guy, the one they’d left on the boat, had ducked in the cabin and was bringing out a rifle. The Batman took this flying leap from the shore onto the boat. That’s when I heard my spring run down again. I wasn’t able to film the Batman settling the last guy’s hash. I was cussing like blue blazes because I’d missed that.
Well, I wound my spring up again and shot my last ten feet of film of the Batman jumping back down from the boat. I can’t believe nobody saw or heard me the whole time. Guess you could say they were too busy to notice anybody else! When I was done shooting the rest of the roll, I took my gear and got on out of there.
The film turned out pretty good when I developed it. Obviously it wasn’t the best possible lighting conditions. But you could definitely see what was going on. By the time I had the developing done, it was in the papers about how the Batman had caught these dope smugglers on Staten Island and turned them over to the police.
I approached the Warner-Pathe newsreel office in Manhattan with my film. They snapped it up in a New York minute. Soon it was all over the country. Actual moving pictures of the Batman in action! It was a sensation. Even after ten years there were still people who thought the Batman was really just some kind of urban legend. Now there was actual, undeniable moving-picture proof.
The NYPD was pretty sore at me for not having turned the film over to them from the start, let me tell you! They subpoenaed me in the case. I didn’t mind testifying, but I did mind when they tried to use some kind of legal maneuvering to get the film away from me permanently. I fought them in court, and I won. That was in all the papers too. Guess you could say that was my “fifteen minutes of fame.” It certainly got more attention than any of the documentary work I did off and on over the next forty years.
You can see the original Eyemo in its place of honor in my study. I kept using that camera for as long as I shot film. I don’t have the original film any more. I donated that to an archive a couple of years ago with all the rest of my work.
That footage still surfaces once in a while. They show it on every Batman documentary anybody does for TV. It’s not just there, either. Last year my grandson, Chase, took me on his computer and showed me this web site called YouTube, where people post all kinds of video clips. And would you believe it, my Batman footage was on there! Chase showed me where it said on the site that over sixty thousand people had already seen the footage. Felt pretty good to see it out there.
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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
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