When I ended the previous post, I’d pointed to a few of the elements that coalesced to help give flight to SiT from its cinnamon nest of obscurity to soar through the celestial firmament reborn as a cult classic. But one there’s one more critical factor remaining. Or rather one more critical person. His name is Bill Shepard – the person whom Stephen (Deutsch) Simon describes as the prime force or the one who did more for the revival of Somewhere in Time than anyone else.
Here’s how Shepard describes his experience in the previously cited LAIst article,
“I was going with a very nice lady from Saint Paul,” Shepard said. “She was actually the one who suggested going to the movies. I sat there for 103 minutes literally enchanted. I’d never seen a movie like that before that affected me like that. And as the two of us were walking out of the theater, she turned to me and said, ‘Well, that didn’t do that much for me. How about you?'”
(Shepard with current INSITE president Jo Addie in 2020 from INSITE)
While he seems to have forgotten the name of the “very nice lady from Saint Paul” Shepard never forgot the movie. Perhaps, like Elise and Richard in the film, Shepard was building his castle of love though not just for two. Piece by piece and believing he couldn’t be alone in his affection for the film, he began seeking other fans and over the next decade picked out a perfect come true. Those of us living in the 21st century might have to work to understand the breadth of effort this project required in the 1980s. There was no Facebook, no X (formerly known as Twitter), no Instagram. There wasn’t even an internet. Instead, Shepard placed small ads in newspapers and magazines around the country and the world seeking people with a similar passion. (For some reason the movie did exceptionally well in Hong Kong. Opening at the Palace Theater on 12 September 1981, it had an uninterrupted run of 223 days ending on 22 April 1982 and establishing a new record for the longest continuous screening of a film in the now former British colony. It earned 9.8 million Hong Kong dollars or about 1.7 million U.S.)
As momentum built through the cable airings and the soundtrack sales, so did the responses to his queries. It took the better part of a decade but, at least from Shepard’s perspective, his project had, to use a current term, gone viral. In 1990, he founded the International Network of Somewhere in Time Enthusiasts or INSITE. According to the official Somewhere in Time website,
INSITE exists to Honor the film, and those responsible for its creation, to Inform members about all aspects of the film to enhance their appreciation of it, as well as to Influence public and media perception of the film, to assure its recognition as the classic we know it to be.
By the next year, so many of the movie’s fans had responded to Shepard that he organized the first Somewhere in Time weekend at Grand Hotel.
Even that first event drew significant attention from people involved in making the film. Joining the fans in attendance were the film’s director Jeannot Szwarc, screenwriter Richard Matheson, and costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorleac who received the film’s lone Academy Award nomination.
I was on Mackinac Island at Grand Hotel
for the thirty-third edition of this fan fest weekend that celebrated the film’s 44th anniversary. Though the visit was my first (as it was for many people I met) many members of the cast and crew join some of the fans as annual habitues (as it was for many people I met).
Christopher Reeve returned to the island for the third SiT reunion in 1994. It was the only time Reeve attended because about seven months later he was competing in an equestrian event in Culpeper, Virginia and suffered an accident that left him a quadriplegic. LAIst reports that in response to a fan’s question about where he personally views Somewhere in Time he said,
This holds the prime place by the fireside in my heart. This is the one that I have the greatest gratitude for. It’s very hard to perform and do your work, where you put your emotions forward for the camera, for people to see… and then have it greeted officially by the sound of one hand clapping. And that people found this move and said, ‘Wait a minute! It didn’t deserve the fate that it got. It didn’t deserve to be treated that way.’ It moves me more than you can know.
He used his residual enthusiasm from his lone appearance to convince his co-star Jane Seymour to attend – something she has done repeatedly even bringing her grandchildren in 2023. (As you may recall, she attended virtually in 2024.) Here’s the trailer for the SiT website’s video of Reeve’s visit.
Justin Chang took a second look at the film for Variety in 2013 and wrote that it endures because it has “the courage of its absurd convictions.” He further wrote,
Ludicrous and irresistible, Somewhere in Time belongs to a long and glorious tradition of love stories … in which time travel serves as a crucial narrative element and structuring device. It is a genre whose charms I’ve found myself unusually susceptible to in recent years. … Wildly romantic, brazenly paradoxical and stubbornly resistant to the rules of logic, these films rely for their effect on a blissful surrender of reason. To dismiss them as ridiculous or implausible is to miss both the point and the pleasure.
And there you have it. All it took to make Somewhere in Time a cult classic was the birth of pay cable television, a brilliant John Barry score, and the dogged determination of the film’s greatest fan to find other admirers and create a unique fan society devoted not to a star but to one film and only that one film.