Category: Library of Congress
-
You Can Help Bring 2 Tom Tyler Silent Westerns Back to Fans
Not all of my home video projects are initiated by me. I’ve co-produced and released Blu-rays and DVDs for projects who were the brainchild of fellow film accompanists Jon C. Mirsalis and Andrew Earle Simpson, historian-educator-author Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, and my friends at the Library of Congress. I’m pleased to let you know that there’s another…
-
A Stetson Hat Boomerangs Back
I hadn’t any more use for my 16mm print of Making a Stetson, so I sold it on eBay. I’d won it there in the first place. It seemed to be a lost film, but then a 35mm print turned up in New Zealand and I wanted to know when my print had been made,…
-
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…
-
Scoring a Silent Film in a Vacuum
Recording a New Piano Soundtrack for The Bride’s Play starring Marion Davies, Aided by a Live Show Experience The hardest part of creating a silent film score for DVD/Blu-ray release is that you’re composing-improvising-performing the score in a vacuum. You’re not recording in the same environment that you perform in, the one where a factor…
-
Scoring Something Good
Every once in a while, I’ll hear or be told about some new amazing silent film discovery being shown at some festivals I don’t get to play at. It happens, I would imagine, with some of my colleagues, as well as with fans who don’t live near those festivals. I’ve learned to tell myself, “That’s…
-
Will the Real Reelcraft Main Title Please Stand Up?
One of the bits of restoration work that went into The Alice Howell Collection DVD set was creating new main titles and credits for some of the films. Where possible. And that happened in varying degrees, depending on the studio. I was able to access frame grabs of Century Comedies from 1920 to use as…
-
Alice Howell – Front and Center
One of the things that struck me about the “Slapstick Divas” program of silent comedies that I’ve presented with Steve Massa over past year or so was the type of roles the funny ladies in them had. It reminded me of a thought I’d had about Mary Pickford’s child roles in her features. The slapstick…
-
“Jimmy Aubrey Comedy” is Not Always an Oxymoron
Worries and Wobbles (1917) has what might appear to be three strikes against it on the surface: “Jimmy Aubrey comedy”, “directed by Larry Semon” and that it’s a rather blatant knock-off of Chaplin’s One A.M.. The first of these is also usually an oxymoron. I can tell you that, like any of the very few…
-
Charles Puffy’s Film Career Sandwich
You may know that face. No, it’s not Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Nor is it Oliver Hardy, sans mustache, nor is it Otto Fries, or any of the other lesser-known plus-size comedians of the silent era. This performer was in over 130 films from 1913 to 1939 — Destiny, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, Mockery, The Man…
-
Found at “Mostly Lost”: volume 2 – new DVD
My DVD label Undercrank Productions has a new release, the second in a series that showcases the identification fun we have every year at the “Mostly Lost” workshop at the Library of Congress at it’s Packard Preservation Campus in Culpeper, VA. Attendees each year receive a “swag bag” when they arrive and register on day…