Ben Model’s blog
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One of the reasons a majority of people associate the piano with silent film, as opposed to theatre organ or orchestra, is that it had been the type of accompaniment utilized the most on a majority of home video editions of silent films. I’d like to address a question that came…
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Eugene: The Movie!
Ernie Kovacs played one version of “Captain Buzzkill” or another in most of the movies he made for Columbia. He was being cast for what he looked like, his “type”. Kovacs made two attempts to upend this: one we know about and one that may be more conjecture on my…
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Is Accompanist a Five-Syllable Word?
On paper, when you look at it, the word “accompanist” is easy to read. And yet, half the time or maybe more, when I am introduced at a show, the word comes out with an extra syllable. It probably happens more with silent film accompaniment than with most other piano…
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The Sounds of the Silents — Theatre Organ Accompaniment in NYC, part 3
When I meet people from other parts of the country and tell them I’m a silent film accompanist , they are often surprised when I tell them there are (currently) no theater organs in Manhattan. There are instruments around the west coast, several areas in the Midwest and the southeast…
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The Spirit of ’76 Circa 1905
I usually avoid recognizable music if I can help it, as it’s a distraction to the viewer unless there’s someone playing a record or piece of sheet music shown in a close-up. With this particular 1905 film, I needed to make an exception. Here’s a film (below) from the American…
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The Sounds of the Silents — Theatre Organ Accompaniment in NYC, part 2
When I began playing for silent films while at NYU film school I made a point of meeting all the accompanists in NYC. It was at the Carnegie Hall Cinema that I met theatre organist and composer Lee Erwin. I got to hear him accompany films on theatre organ for…
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The Sounds of the Silents — Theatre Organ Accompaniment in NYC, part 1
The sound of the theatre pipe organ as live accompaniment to silent films was part of the musical landscape in NYC during the peak years of what I think of as silent film’s first renaissance. Lee Erwin played a silent film show in 1968 at the Beacon Theatre, and was…
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Fan-Funding Douglas MacLean
The crowdfunding phase of my Douglas MacLean DVD project just concluded. I like to refer to the process as “fan-funding”. It’s not so much a crowd that’s funding these projects, to me — it’s a loyal, enthusiastic and interested consortium of fans who are backing the Undercrank productions I’m undertaking.…
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Musty Boxes Wolheim to Save Harrison Ford’s Bacon
I should know if Harry Watson, Jr. and Marion Davies appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies together (alas, for the moment, I don’t). If they didn’t, Watson was certainly on Davies’ radar as he has supporting character roles in two of her features, films made half a dozen years after his…
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Charlie Chaplin and a Stationary Horizon
Something occurred to me during a screening of Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) that I was accompanying for a school group several years ago. I knew the scene at the beginning where the boat is rocking was shot with the camera on a sort of pendulum to create the illusion, so…