Author: Ben Model
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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…
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The Park Theater in Glens Falls NY
It’s a wonderful thing when a community is able to raise money to save, refurbish and reopen its town’s original movie theater. It’s even more wonderful when the people involved with programming at these theaters are interested in presenting silent film. Such is the case with the newly reborn Park Theater, originally opened in 1911.…
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The Speed Is Mutual
My rule of thumb with projection speeds and silent comedy films used to be guided by whether there were audience laughs or not. Later, once I’d done a lot of research into the difference between taking speed and projection speed and what films were run at during certain years, that was the second factor. What’s…
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Iron Or Candy
FaceBook reminded me this morning that I sent out a press release for Accidentally Preserved: Volume 1 six years ago. A quick hop onto Google shows that the sixth anniversary is the iron or candy one. Both seem appropriate. My idea of seeing if I could connect a bunch of rare and lost silent films…
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In Film Programming 1+1+1+1 Can Add Up To More Than 4
One of the insights I’ve had into film programming has come from my many years’ experience accompanying silent films. Literally, it’s the experience of accompanying films during a show, and sensing the vibe in the theater. One thing I’ve learned is that there are times when a 90 or 100 minute show can be too…
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ep. 32: meeting audience expectations, tips on choosing a comedy short, and a trip to Nebraska
On this episode of the podcast, I discuss meeting an audience’s expectations while staying true to the film’s original culture, choosing a comedy short to show newbies, and playing for a show where someone else’s music credit is onscreen; also, Arthur Kleiner accompanies a Harold Lloyd short with an iPhone, 700 kids in Boise laugh…
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Stringing Along With Ernie Kovacs for Dutch Masters
I’ve seen the famous Ernie Kovacs commercial for Dutch Masters a few dozen times, at least, and never noticed the string quartet. Not that they were in the commercial, the one known as “Haydn”, the one that won Kovacs and co-director Joe Behar an award the first year the Clios were given out in 1959.…