Category: DVD distribution
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Finding More of Baby Peggy
A Baby Peggy Rediscovery — or: When “Circus Clowns” Doesn’t Mean “Circus Clowns” I was pretty much set with additional material for the DVD of the Library of Congress’ restoration of The Family Secret. After playing for MoMA’s restoration of the short Miles of Smiles, I’d inquired about and gotten the okay to include it…
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Finding Wallace Lupino’s Lost Laugh
A Rare Comedy Short Made When the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread Was Still Sliced Bread A CBS Sunday Morning Report on people who collect toasters included a factoid that made me think of Wallace Lupino, brother of Lupino Lane. There is a gag in The Lost Laugh (1928) involving a toaster that I’d not…
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Saving Monte Collins
A lot of one-reel comedy shorts from the late 1920s seem to only survive in 16mm home use prints from the 1930s. Wedding Slips (1928) with Monte Collins now only exists as a digital file. Luckily I snagged this one in its final throes of vinegar syndrome decomposition, and managed to get two passes at…
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A Racing Locomotive, a Town on Fire and Colleen Moore
The Ninety and Nine was one of a handful of stage properties that were very popular and which toured a lot in the early 1900s. Like a few other of its type — such as Ben Hur, East Lynne and a certain play by Thomas Dixon — it had a major chase and spectacle mounted…
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The Sounds of the Silents — Theatre Organ on DVD
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 in from my recent series…
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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. Every time I launch one…
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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 “Musty Suffer” series of shorts.…
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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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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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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…