Category: Uncategorized
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A Mysterious Woman in Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman”
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 my shows this weekend. Usually it gets a tepid response (if any). The difference? At…
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What’s a Nice Car Like You Doing in a Comedy Short Like This?
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 were fortunate in the case of this film. Oh! What a Day (1918) is a…
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Conducting the Klopstokian Philharmonic
I found myself playing piano for films and I’d hear other instruments in my head during the show. This was the very late 1990s. Had to be, because I started learning the organ a year or so before Lee Erwin passed in 2000, and remember going to his place to practice and get advice a…
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Moving Day for Count Orlok
There’s nothing you can do about the laughs that the film Nosferatu (1922) gets with an audience. Or is there? Regardless of the translation from German, the intertitles like “Your wife has a lovely throat” get a laugh from an audience. We already know the Dracula story, and it’s the ridiculousness of a statement like…
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Resuscitating My Podcast
It’s the slower months when projects that have been mentally circling the airport can actually contact the tower and request permission to land. In 2014 I got a little better at this, by anticipating the space I’d have in my calendar and brain, and planning to produce my DVD releases then. A couple months ago,…
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William Perry’s new suite for Ophicleide and Orch.
This past summer I got to spend a delightful chat over coffee with William Perry. When I started playing for silents back in 1981 while at NYU film school, Bill was the first person I sought out for advice. I’d been hearing his scores on the PBS series “The Silent Years”, produced by Killiam Shows,…
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Film of Charles Lindbergh’s May 20, 1927 transatlantic flight – new DVD
40 minutes of rarely-seen vintage newsreels documenting Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight on May 20, 1927 were recently released on a new DVD from Undcercrank Productions. Available on Amazon, the DVD also features a rare Monty Banks aviation silent comedy feature “Flying Luck” (1927), inspired by Lindbergh’s flight and co-starring a young Jean Arthur. The…
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“MUSTY SUFFER” SILENT FILMS UNSEEN SINCE 1916 COME TO DVD
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE UNAVAILABLE TO GENERAL PUBLIC FOR 97 YEARS, THE POPULAR SILENT COMEDY FILM SERIES “THE MISHAPS OF MUSTY SUFFER” COMES TO DVD Renowned Silent Film Accompanist/Historian Ben Model Collaborates with Library of Congress to bring outrageous1916-17 films featuring Ringling/Ziegfeld star to home video NEW YORK, N.Y. (Tuesday, April 1, 2014) – Undercrank…
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Hal Roach silent comedy shorts on Sun March 23 **FREE**
On Sunday, March 23rd at 7:15pm, the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (NYC) is hosting a FREE evening of silent comedies! Wind down your week – or kick off the one that’s starting – with two solid hours of belly-laugh-inducing classic comedies. These 1920s films will be presented with live musical scores by renowned silent film accompanist…
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Doin’ it wrong…on purpose
Working even harder this year on improving my playing/accompaniment. Last night, as an exercise, I hauled out the DVD of something I’m playing for later this month and ran it on my laptop (mute) and played for it… as wrong as possible. Song title puns, a waltz when people were doing the Charleston, dissonant music,…