Author: Ben Model
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Who Wants to Watch a Lost Silent Film About Watches?
Back when my interest in film collecting had whittled itself down to trying to pick up silent comedy shorts in 16mm that no one was bidding on on eBay, I turned up what turned out to be a lost film. It’s the most viewed video on my YouTube channel. It’s not a comedy, and it’s…
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Accidentally Preserved by the Kinetophone
When the Thomas Edison Company set out to make its sound films in 1913, preservation wasn’t necessarily what they were going for. However, what survives of the Kinetophone films allows the viewer of today a very special window into the past. The system was complicated, at times fussy, and required multiple operators to make it…
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A Head Start on a Kickstarter
My current Kickstarter funded in 9 hours. This is not an anomaly for me. My last one funded in 8, the previous one in 12, and the one before that in 8. These, like all 8 of the crowdfunding campaigns I’ve done since 2012, were for DVDs of silent movies no one’s heard of starring…
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Marcel Perez: One Name Behind the Camera
Marcel Perez kept revising his onscreen persona and his character’s name throughout his career. His years working in the U.S. Found him sporting three different character names, and a different costume and persona each time he changed distributors. But one thing remained constant throughout all of this. He is always billed, as director, as Marcel…
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Natural Movement and Don Juan
One of the main reasons a silent film is often run at a more gooey speed is that a decision had been made that it should have “natural motion”. Usually a projection speed in the 18 fps neighborhood. Even without documentation or a time machine, there is an easy way to see if this was…
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Curatorial Crowd-Sourcing For The “Mostly Lost” DVDs
I have released two DVDs of films identified at the Mostly Lost film identification workshop. Whether they realize it or not, the participants at Mostly Lost from 2012 through 2017 had a hand in making this disc happen. It’s an added facet of the crowdsourcing that is at the core of what the workshop is…
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Kovacs Centennial Celebration Held in Trenton
“I went to high school with Ernie Kovacs!” is one thing you never expect someone to say to you at an event. But that is precisely what a woman who attended the Ernie Kovacs Day event last month said to me. She was 100, and came to the program with her high school yearbook. I…
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Douglas MacLean – Picking Up Where Douglas Fairbanks Left Off
There were two main types of feature-length comedies made during the silent era. There were the slapstick ones, which sputtered initially in the late ‘teens until Chaplin figured out how to make this work, and the ones that didn’t star slapstick comedians. The second kind had a run from 1915 through the end of the…
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Silent Comedy Features Without All That Slapstick
Douglas Fairbanks spent six years making feature-length light comedies, mainly playing a semi-typical middle-class young man on a series of adventures. Once he made The Mark of Zorro, there was no turning back to that format. The five- or six-reel non-slapstick comedy genre did not end when Doug moved into costume pictures, but its discussion…
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A Chaplin-esque Alice Howell Comedy
Trade ads proclaimed Alice Howell as a (or the) female Chaplin. I’d initially thought this was a parallel to Chaplin’s being the number one star. There are similar proclamations about Mabel Normand, and the analogy fits. Mabel was the top female comedy star of the silent era, and even made the move to features, although…