Bob West believes his 1973 film,  “The Wednesday Children”, is still relevant. “It’s a message about kids.  How to relate to them. What happens if you don’t.” 

West, an emeritus professor of journalism  at Kent State University, shot “The Wednesday Children” in 16 millimeter. He wrote, directed and starred in it, too.

 “I played the role of a minister in a small church in Medina County and I just happen to be a minister in a small church in Medina County. So I played myself.”   

At 85, West still preaches once a month, and still teaches at Kent State. He was on the edge of the beat poetry movement when he joined the faculty in 1975, and the beat sensibility is reflected in his movie.

“Part of the Beat Generation was the generation gap which started in the mid-50s. If you tell your children they can’t do this and you do it. You can’t smoke. And you do. You can’t drink, and you do. It becomes obvious that it’s hypocritical and that generation gap is pointed in this film.”

West made the movie on what he calls “ half a shoestring”.

The money-man was the late Homer Baldwin, a Wadsworth cable television producer. West says Baldwin came up with the title from the old nursery rhyme. “Wednesday’s child is full of woe. ”

It’s about a group of kids who come under the spell of a demon who turns them against their neglectful parents. Most of the action takes place in a barn where the kids play after school, and where they meet the man West calls the villain of the movie, Mr. Fenton.

“He is the custodian at the church, who is not what he seems to be. He’s cynical and he has the power, a secret power he’s going to give to the kids so they can take over the country and the world.”  

Many of the actors were amateurs, most of them Wadsworth school children.  Producer Homer Baldwin, who was also the head custodian at the high school, helped recruit them.

 West and Baldwin had met when West, then a radio and advertising executive, first moved to Wadsworth:

 “I was teaching film at John Carroll University and on Saturdays or Sunday nights we’d show those films at my home. I had a movie projector downstairs and a wide screen.  So these people came over and watched movies. So he said he wanted to make a movie. I said well, ‘I want to write a movie.’” 

West has loved movies since the age of two “ My aunt took me as a youngster to downtown Cleveland to see Will Rogers in a movie called ‘Jubilo.’

My father would only go to see a movie if Will Rogers was in it. So we went to see at the old Jennings theater, Will Rogers in ‘Steamboat ‘Round the Bend. ’”

His taste turned quickly, though, from the wholesome to the horrific.

 “ ‘The Invisible Man’ with Claude Rains. That hooked me. And my mother and I, my father wouldn’t go, my mother and I went to see a lot of horror films and I got hooked on horror films.  I think the master of them all is producer Val Lutin and his movies for RKO including ’The Cat People’ , ‘The Leopard Man’ , ‘I Walked with a Zombie’ ”

But today’s horror films…horrify him …and not in a good way.

 “Torture porn films I have no use for. ‘Saw’, ‘Hostel’, films like those.” 

By contrast, West follows Siegfried Kracauers’ 1960 “Theory of Film” . At Kent State, it’s on his film students’ reading list.

“ And he says if you’re going to do fantasy, ground it in reality.”  

 “The Wednesday Children” exposes the banality of evil in the middle of sunny Wadsworth.

 “No blood. No night scenes. One of the critics labeled it a daylight horror film.”

He’s citing a 1973 Plain Dealer review.  

A modern-day critic, West’s former film student Jorge DeLarosa, loves the reality of “The Wednesday Children”, but he’s realistic about how it would go over today.

 “By today’s standards kids watching it would be bored. It doesn’t have the action. It doesn’t have the violence and the language and the blood and the fast cuts. It’s a lot of talk. But that talking goes somewhere. There is subtlety. It’s great. I love the movie.”

Delarosa singlehandedly saved his teacher’s film.   Professor West hadn’t mentioned “The Wednesday Children” in the class Delarosa took. He learned about it from other students and persuaded West to let him have the only VHS copy of the film. Delarosa used that and his newly-learned editing skills to make a trailer for the movie.

Back in 1973, “The Wednesday Children” was publicly screened only a few times.

West is grateful to his former student for putting the trailer on the internet where it  caught the attention of the late lead actress’s daughter. 

 “ He got it on Youtube and that’s where the daughter of Marji Dodrill saw it and then got to John Ewing at the Cinematheque, and then he saw the preview and decided he should show it on October 29^th this year as one of his Halloween films and then he invited me and the cast to talk after the film. The whole thing came from Jorge.”  

West never made a penny from his film:

   “ I actually probably lost money. I don’t care. I did what I wanted to do. I always wanted to make a movie. The opportunity came. It worked out pretty well."

The only film print of Bob West’s “The Wednesday Children”  will be shown Saturday night at 7 at the Cleveland Cinematheque.