‘First Light’ Is Shining Brightly
Documentary on Montauk Lighthouse will get airing on PBS in fall
By Aimee Fitzpatrick Martin SOUTHAMPTON PRESS August 17, 2006
Bumper stickers may tout Montauk Point as “The End,” but as local filmmaker Tom Garber’s new documentary illustrates, Montauk’s venerable lighthouse has a history of many beginnings, and “firsts.”
Erectedin1796onTurtleHill,abluff overlooking Block Island Sound, the Montauk Point Lighthouse has the distinction of being the first lighthouse built in New York State under the authorization of the nation’s first president, George Washington. It was also the first beacon of light that thousands of immigrants saw as they left behind their past in Europe and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of new beginnings in America.
“Glass and iron, stone and mortar. Simple elements from the earth, yet Montauk Lighthouse is so much more than that. It has bound the soul of humanity through time. It symbolizes the courage and independence of its early keepers. It’s the location of tragic shipwrecks and heroic rescues. And it became a rallying point for a generation who learned to care about their past.”
So says the narrator in“First Light,” Mr. Garber’s 55-minute documentary about the history of the lighthouse, which will have its world premiere screening this Saturday, August 19, at 4 p.m. at the Montauk Movie theater. The film is slated to air on local PBS stations in the fall. Already receiving critical praise, “First Light” has been called “absolutely fantastic &ldots; the best ever to be released on the history of a single lighthouse” by Timothy Harrison, president of the American Lighthouse Foundation and editor of Lighthouse Digest Magazine.
Founder of Third Wave Films—an award-winning production and distribution company that specializes in historic maritime documentaries—Mr. Garber spent 15 months researching, writing, producing, directing, photographing and editing “First Light,” which retails at $29.95 and is available for sale at local bookstores, at maritime museum gift shops, on eBay, and through Mr. Garber’s website, www. thirdwavefilms.com.
Mr. Garber, who trained under Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Terry Sanders, is also the creative force behind “Tide and Time: The Maritime Heritage of Hampton Bays” and “Storm Warriors,” the story of the U.S. Life-Saving Service. His other documentaries include “North Shore Maui”; “Of Boats and Brothers: The Yacht Building Herreshoffs”; “Dream of Wooden Boats”; and “Thomas Edison’s Maritime Movies.”
Mr. Garber recently talked about his latest “labor of love” and “the countless dramas, heartaches and heroic efforts that have played out at the foot of the Montauk Point Lighthouse” during an interview at his office, which is housed in the former carriage house of his family’s 1897 Hampton Bays estate overlooking Peconic Bay.
In preparation for making the film, Mr. Garber spent four months researching the history of the lighthouse, immersing himself in public records found in the Pennypacker Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library, along with information from the Montauk and East Hampton historical societies.
“I read that a bell was found among the debris of the John Milton, an 1858 shipwreck in which 30 men perished. That bell ended up in the First Presbyterian Church in East Hampton. The town rallied during this tragedy, allowing the unknown sailors to be laid to rest in the church’s consecrated burying grounds and raising money to erect an obelisk in their memory. The whole idea of the bell surviving and tolling for the dead in the church jelled the film’s beginning for me,” said the filmmaker.
Thus, “First Light” opens with a church bell tolling, its haunting pace quickening as dots on an antique map of Long Island pop up to illustrate the hundreds of ships that have wrecked in the strong currents surrounding Montauk Point—from the John and Lucy in 1668 to The Pelican in 1951.
Armed with a 16mm Bolex movie camera from the 1960s, along with a variety of wide angle and telephoto lenses, Mr. Garber captured the scenic beauty of Montauk in all four seasons, from winter blizzards pounding the surf to the fiery sunsets of summer.
Because film is such an expensive medium, he relied on modern digital video when conducting interviews with local historians, boat captains, and descendants of some of the lighthouse keepers, including Charles Gould, a retired veterinarian from Bridgehampton whose great-grandfather, Patrick Gould, once manned the light.
Mr. Garber turned to Sarah Hunnewell, a director with the Hampton Theatre Company, for advice on hiring local actors for the film and as voice-over talent. Featured in the documentary are veteran actress Diana Marbury, along with Chris Young, Milton Carney, Dennis Flemming, Jeff Lieterine, Haley Willis, and John and Edison Vitti.
“As the voice of the minister of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, Chris Young read from the actual text from the funeral for the sailors from the wreck of the John Milton. Chris really got into it,” Mr. Garber said, “because it turns out his own great-grandfather was a minister in East Hampton during the same time period.”
To maintain “the purity of his vision” for the film, Mr. Garber decided to finance the documentary himself and relied on modern technology to keep costs down. “It’s all smoke and mirrors,” he said, laughing about the visual effects he was able to achieve on a shoestring budget.
In one scene, for example, he wanted to show the British warship, The Culloden, wrecking off Montauk Point during a brutal storm in 1781.
“While I was making the film, I heard the HMS Bounty, a ship which Disney had just used in ‘The Pirates of Caribbean,’ was docked at Greenport and would be leaving that morning. So I jumped in my car and filmed it sailing from the dock,” he explained. “During editing, I reversed the negative image to make it look like it was nighttime, and to make it look like a blizzard, I superimposed snow I filmed at my house in the winter. It was a sophisticated technique and it took a lot of effort to get it right, but ultimately it didn’t cost me anything.”
Far from an amateurish production, the documentary features a professional original sound track by Cinema Sound Works of Staten Island and dramatic narration by Terry Rabine of Albany, along with historic photos and film footage.
The documentary explores the history of the lighthouse and the beginnings of Montauk, which dates back to the early 1600s when the Montauket Indians plied the local waters for food and transportation. When the Dutch arrived in the 1620s, New York’s waterways were vital for trade with the Midwest, England and the West Indies.
By the 18th century, coal, sugar and lumber commodities were bought and sold in an active market, and most ships carrying these supplies passed through Montauk Point. After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed Congress saw the need to stimulate trade with Europe and passed the Lighthouse, Beacon and Buoy Act of 1789, which appealed for a lighthouse to be established on Long Island. While most lighthouses were built to serve a singular port, Montauk Point was seen as a beacon that benefited coastal trade and transatlantic ships not only from New York, but also Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
It took four years for the newly formed United States government to negotiate the $250 sale of 13 acres in Montauk that was owned by “The Proprietors,” a group of men from East Hampton who grazed cattle on Montauk Point in summer. The area was virtually uninhabited in the winter.
As Mr. Garber points out in the documentary, the East Hampton community was reluctant to build a lighthouse because shipwrecks were profitable business: a good living could be made off the cargo that washed ashore, everything from salvaged coconuts to shoes, ostrich eggs and liquor.
In 1796, builder/architect John McComb Jr. won the contract to erect an 80-foot tower with a 28-foot-wide base and 11-foot-wide octagonal lantern on top, along with a keeper’s house and cisterns for water. The logistics of assembling manpower and materials needed for such a massive project in such a remote location were formidable. Brownstone was shipped over from Connecticut and carted up the hilly slope by 50 laborers, carpenters, masons and blacksmiths who were hired for the lighthouse project. Completed in just four months, the first light was fueled by whale oil, and later by animal fat oil, kerosene, and finally electricity in 1940.
For the first 100 years, Mr. Garber said, many of the lighthouse keepers—all courageous and fiercely independent souls—came from well-establishedEastHamptonfamilies: the Edwards, Hobarts, Lopers, Bakers, Paynes and Mulfords. It was a lonely and hard life for the keepers. While stationed there from 1885 to 1910, keeper James G. Scott lost three of his six children, including one who contracted scarlet fever from a shipwreck survivor.
By the 1940s, after years of powerful waves pounding and eroding the cliff, the Montauk Point Lighthouse was within 50 feet of falling into the Atlantic Ocean. “First Light” also talks about the impressive civilian effort to save the lighthouse, which was led by a diminutive 77-year-old woman named Giorgina Reid, who patented a reed trenching technology she worked on for a decade in the 1970s to preserve the bluff and lighthouse for future generations to enjoy.
“It’s quite a story with many lessons to learn,” said Mr. Garber, who is already hard at work on several upcoming projects, including an experimental film about the frenzied pace of life in the Hamptons, and a documentary about the history of tugboats.