Category: The Silent Comedy Watch Party
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Streamed Silents: Does Live-Scoring Make A Difference?
It’s interesting. I really thought my idea of live-streaming a live-scored and live-hosted silent film program would catch on. Perhaps slowly at first, and then at some point it would start to snowball. After all, so many of us silent film enthusiasts say that the live music is a key part of seeing a silent…
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Getting the High Sign
One of the great things about living in NYC is that by taking walks, rather than getting everywhere by car, you run into people you haven’t seen in a long time. A teacher from film school told me once that he got more work walking home from work in mid-town to his Upper West Side…
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Brandy Snifter on the Cocktail Bar Piano
I wasn’t sure when I first heard about Patreon, but a recent NPR piece about it that interviews its founders Jack Conte and Sam Yam mentions their launch year of 2013. So, this was during the time in the early 2010s that I’d been researching what people in the music business had been doing to…
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Over-scans and Purple-Green Bands
Believe it or not, I have not been able to find answers to two basic questions about YouTube live-streaming. They’re issues I’ve been noticing for the last four weeks on the Silent Comedy Watch Party, and I can’t believe that one of them hasn’t been picked up on and hack-suggested. The one I probably can’t…
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Revisiting the Films of John Bunny
John Bunny enjoyed a popularity in his day that has evaporated with time. To some extent that process began right at the end of his screen career. The mid-‘teens saw the rise of slapstick in the manic Keystone comedies and those of Charlie Chaplin and others. The polite social, situational comedies Bunny was making in…
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Two Weddings and a Sandwich
Programming shorts to a theme is often useful if you need to draw a potential audience’s attention or if you have a hard time making choices from a long list. And sometimes it just happens without any planning at all. Case in point: this Sunday’s edition of The Silent Comedy Watch Party; it streams live…
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Adding a Page to Watch Party Menu
“Can I tell you about today’s specials?” Okay, it’s been a couple weeks since someone’s asked you that question. But in the case of The Silent Comedy Watch Party, it applies. With people hosting movie-viewing watch parties on social media left and right, the floodgates of copyright-ignoring seem to have been flung open. Perhaps the…
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Opening the Gates and Letting the Laughs Out
Last week’s premiere episode of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” was a success, so it seems I was right about going ahead with doing the stream. I was also wrong about something. Luckily that was easily correctable, and it was something I should’ve seen coming. I spend most of the evening following the show on…
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“The Silent Comedy Watch Party” – *premiere*
The premiere episode of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” streamed live on Sunday March 22 at 3:30pm EDT (New York, east coast USA). Hosted by silent film accompanist Ben Model and film historian Steve Massa, the one-hour program will present three rare slapstick comedy shorts. The films are streamed live — Ben Model accompanied them…
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I Threw Spaghetti at the Wall – and it Stuck
A farmhouse in Ireland, a park bench in Manhattan, living rooms in Denmark and Australia and Texas and Nebraska and Kansas. These are some of the locations people watched the pilot of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” yesterday afternoon, a show I broadcast live from my living room. This was yet another adventure for me…