NEED TO KNOW
Alan Hamel and Suzanne Somers enjoyed 55 years together before the actress’ death at 76 in 2023
Hamel has spent many recent months pouring through his family’s personal archive of film and video, dating back to the 1960s
The former talk show host, 89, tells PEOPLE about the emotional work of revisiting the past
Alan Hamel has bittersweet feelings as he goes through his personal photo and video archive.
The 89-year-old has been combing through memories of days past as he prepares for several projects honoring his late wife Suzanne Somers‘ legacy. With a documentary, a movie based on their love story, and an AI clone that brings the experience of chatting with Suzanne to friends, family and fans, Hamel explains that he’s always been a fan of documenting life as it unfolds.
“I have been filming my family since the ’60s, and this is before video. Video started in 1960, but only for television. There was no video for home movies. And I started shooting Super eight film in the ’60s, and I have thousands of tapes of only the family that I have never seen, because once I shot the tape, I put it in a box,” he tells PEOPLE.
“And what I’ve been doing, and this will all go into the documentary, what I’m doing is I’m playing all these tapes and digitizing them at the same time. And one day, after they’re all digitized, they will spend forever in a digital box. And the only people allowed to go in there would be the immediate family. There will only be two ways of going in. One will be facial technology and fingerprints and whatever happens down the road.”
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Courtesy of Alan Hamel
Alan Hamel and Suzanne Somers
Hamel is excited about what this extensive digital archive will mean for him and Somers’ blended family. Somers welcomed her son Bruce Somers Jr. in 1965 with her then-husband Bruce Somers Sr. The pair split two years later, and she married Hamel in 1977 after dating for 10 years. Hamel, who already had children Leslie and Stephen from a prior relationship, and Somers combined their families and raised their children together.
“It’s exciting to think about generations from now looking back and seeing how their family looked and how they sounded and what they did and what made them laugh and where they vacationed and what kind of cars they drove, what was the work that they did, how they argued, etc.,” he says.
“I love that project. I am so proud to have all this source material that’s going to be going into the documentary and that is going to provide for generations to come a look into the past for those generations. I was never able to; I never knew my grandparents. Unfortunately, both my parents were Europeans, and they made it out, but my grandparents did not. Plus a lot of my uncles and aunts and cousins, etc., they were all killed during World War II.”
Going back to the photos and videos is fun for Hamel, but also emotional.
“I sit there watching it and I’m watching my family and they forget that there’s a guy with a camera, me, standing there. They totally forget about it and so they don’t change their behavior. And I’m watching my mother and my father, who have been gone for a long time, and I’ll tell you, I get very teary. I sit there in my office and I get very teary being able to look at my parents and my sister from many, many years ago,” he says.
“And so it’s a project I really like a lot, and it’s taking a lot of my time, but it’s worth it. I can think of a lot of things that I’ve done in my life that take a lot of time, that go nowhere. So I love being in that project. So that will deliver the movie and also the documentary.”
Courtesy of Alan Hamel
Suzanne Somers
The combination of his own experiences and Somers’ passing has impressed on Hamel “how important it is for people to have access to a past generation of their family.”
“So going forward, Hamels and Somerses and families will be able to access that, which is wonderful. And it excites me to think about 100 or 200 or 300 years from now, people looking at what we call television right now. Who knows what they’re going to be looking at, generations ahead, but we know they’re going to find this so fascinating to be able to look back literally hundreds of years.”
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