Author: Ben Model
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Matching Music: Dramatic Boost or Overkill
In selecting “appropriate music” for a scene in silent film accompaniment, there’s a fine line between support and simply mirroring what’s onscreen. It’s something I learned and developed during the first few years I was accompanying silents at NYU. It’s a question I still grapple with today. What do I mean by mirroring? This may…
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“The Best of Ernie Kovacs” – EEFMS, the Next Generation
My parents were Ernie Kovacs fans, and when they learned that Channel Thirteen, our PBS station, was going to air a series called “The Best of Ernie Kovacs”, they made sure I knew. My interest in visual comedy, almost an obsession, had started when I discovered Chaplin comedies on TV when I was a toddler. …
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“Let’s Go In to a Picture Show” – popular songs about silent movies
I first heard about this CD project during the Arbuckle retrospective I co-curated for MoMA in 2006 with Ron Magliozzi, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Film and with Steve Massa. Ron had spent a number of years acquiring dozens and dozens (hundreds, maybe?) of pieces of sheet music from the 1910’s and 1920’s for MoMA…
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Live, From My Living Room, It’s…Me!
I think one of my favorite introductions was at a show I did at the Redford Theater in Detroit in 2017. Organist John Lauter welcomed the audience, and gave them a snapshot of my bio — mentioning I’d come in from NYC, that I played at LoC and MoMA, my DVDs, etc — then wound…
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Wake Me When It’s Streaming
Several years ago a typical conversation I had at holiday parties when introduced to someone got an upgrade. Up to that point, when introduced to someone, a question they’d ask — “Have you scored anything for DVD?” — became “Do you have anything on YouTube?” I didn’t at the time, but the following month I…
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Play Me a Movie
The more shows I do the more I meet people with similar stories about their elder relatives. Great-aunts and great-grandmothers or grandmothers who played for movies back in the silent era. The repeats have confirmed what could easily be fuzzy memories conflated over time and retellings, the way the myth of custard pie fights has…
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Stan & Ollie – and a Horse, and an Orchestra
My favorite Laurel & Hardy shorts are the ones with little or no plot. Don’t ask me why. Films like Busy Bodies, Helpmates, Towed in a Hole and of course The Music Box that are basically Stan and Ollie just being Stan and Ollie. They’re about their relationship and about how they get something done…
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“Let’s Get Away From It All” — The Slightly Missing Matt Dennis
The name Matt Dennis may not be familiar, but if you’re an Ernie Kovacs fan you may know it. Or maybe not. You’d have be a credits-reader who also paid attention to the details in the back of the “Ernie Kovacs Collection” DVD box sets’ booklets. Who was Matt Dennis? My introduction to him was…
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A New Year’s Resolution, Thanks To Akira Kurosawa
I’ve been a fan of Akira Kurosawa’s since the middle of high school. I forget which year it was, but my English lit class had read what my wife and daughter refer to as “the Scottish Play” by Shakespeare. Earlier in the school year when we read “East of Eden”, we were shown the 1955…