I don’t remember how or when I started doing this, but I’m certain it’s something I picked up or learned from Lee Erwin. I start playing before the film begins. I’m pretty sure it’s a traditional way to begin a… Read More »Playing The Audience In To A Film
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.… Read More »Who Wants to Watch a Lost Silent Film About Watches?
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… Read More »Accidentally Preserved by the Kinetophone
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… Read More »A Head Start on a Kickstarter
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… Read More »Marcel Perez: One Name Behind the Camera
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… Read More »Natural Movement and Don Juan
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… Read More »Curatorial Crowd-Sourcing For The “Mostly Lost” DVDs
“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… Read More »Kovacs Centennial Celebration Held in Trenton
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… Read More »Douglas MacLean – Picking Up Where Douglas Fairbanks Left Off
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… Read More »Silent Comedy Features Without All That Slapstick