On Saturday May 18th I will be giving a presentation entitled “Laughter Restored: Discovering Rare Gems of Silent Film” at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Restored and Rediscovered Festival. This will be a first for me, as I’ve not given this presentation before. I’ll be talking about how I became a boutique home-video label, without intending to.
Undercrank Productions was born in 2012 via a coalescence of ideas I’d had: I had a stack of rare silent shorts in 16mm that no one could otherwise see, there was this new form of fundraising called Kickstarter that artists and creators were discovering, and manufacture-on-demand DVDs had just become a possibility through Amazon’s CreateSpace. I harnessed this with some tech know-how and a some DIY skills I’d picked up about marketing and promotion from a few podcasts, and my first DVD release –Accidentally Preserved: Volume 1 – was born.
The JBFC’s Senior Film Programmer Monica Castillo invited me to do an Instagram Live interview to talk about my work and about the presentation. The JBFC has posted the interview to their YouTube channel, and I’m embedding it here for you to watch and enjoy.
The main page for Restored and Rediscovered: A Film Preservation Festival is here, and the listing for my program is here. If you’d like to book me to present “Laughter Restored: Discovering Rare Gems of Silent Film” at your festival, museum, film school, etc. please email me.