I knew of Thomas Ince as part of the triumvirate that was the short-lived Triangle Film Company. I’d played for an Ince series at MoMA about ten years ago. Until my current Douglas MacLean project brought his name and work… Read More »Reeducating Myself About Thomas Ince
Say what you want about Wikipedia – at least its listings either have factual attribution or will state the article needs verification. This keeps misstatements from being taken as fact or spreading. I’m still puzzled by the origin of an… Read More »Ernie Kovacs, Fred Allen and The Medium of Television
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 my favorite sounds at a silent film show is that of kids’ laughter over the laughs of the adults in the theater. People bring their children or grandchildren to silent film shows from time to time, and it’s… Read More »Audience Preservation: Silent Movies as Family Programming
Hi! Earlier today I imported my podcast from another site to my main one, and now you are getting emails about each episode. It’s a bug with my site, and I’m sorry this is happening. Feel free to delete these.… Read More »I’m so sorry about the multiple podcast emails…
I’d almost forgotten about the home movie gem I posted a few years ago. Southwest Silents on Twitter @SWSilents has been tweeting a Silent Film Xmas Advent, finding holiday-related silents online and sharing them. They’ve already posted two discoveries that… Read More »Home Movie Day Goes Sledding
There is no deeply dramatic reason for Douglas Fairbanks to leap over the benches and fences or climb the trees or anything else of extreme athleticism he does to get from point A to point B in American Aristocracy (1916),… Read More »Before There Was Parkour, There Was…Douglas Fairbanks
USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive and Lobster Films Collaborate to Make Blackhawk Films Catalogs Available to Fans and Scholars Again The monthly arrival of the Blackhawk Films catalog was one of the most highly anticipated mail deliveries for… Read More »The Blackhawk Films catalogs are available again!
Honoring the Gag Work in a Silent Comedy Sometimes Involves a Doing a Little Homework and Then Sharing Your Findings With An Audience The gag title seen above from Keaton’s The Scarecrow (1920) got a huge belly-laugh at one of… Read More »A Mysterious Woman in Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman”
Putting Humpty Together Again, Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress It isn’t often that a two-reel comedy can be reassembled by accessing a reel from one archive and a reel from another, but we… Read More »What’s a Nice Car Like You Doing in a Comedy Short Like This?