The month-long sale on Undercrank Productions Blu-rays and DVDs is over now, and I am grateful to everyone who bought any of our releases. The celebration of Undercrank’s 10th anniversary was a two-fold opportunity to thank and to serve silent film fans.
From the beginning my idea was to find a way to get films fans wanted to see out to them, in a quality package, even films they didn’t know about. Having the sale which ran June 1-30 was a way to make it a little more affordable for folks who already had some of our releases to pick up some of the others. So that they could discover and enjoy the stars or films they didn’t already know. The more people get to see Alice Howell or Douglas MacLean or even the Musty Suffer shorts, the less obscure these performers and films become.
Making an event out of the Undercrank Productions anniversary also meant there was an opportunity to introduce the label to the silent and classic film fans who weren’t aware of our outside-the-canon releases. I’m grateful to the online journalists who posted articles to their blogs and who interviewed me for their podcasts. These were all folks who’ve supported my releases over the last 10 years, and their support to help get the word out to people whom I’m not connected with or able to reach myself and who might be interested in films we’ve released is invaluable.
The hybrid-crossover combination of the two of these is that many people who’ve discovered the Undercrank Productions releases in the last 4-5 years may not have been aware of titles we put out during our first 5 years. Both Marcel Perez collections were done before 2018, and may not have been on people’s radar. Perez’s comedies ought to be as known as some of the other second-tier silent comedians like Charley Chase or Monty Banks or Lloyd Hamilton, and if the anniversary sale has meant more people have discovered his films – which he both starred in and directed – then it’s been a success.
There wasn’t a 10-year plan or a pair of 5-year plans for anything I produced (and scored) and released from 2013 to 2023, and I don’t have one for the next 5 or 10 years. I’m continuing on a year by year basis, following what piques my interest as something silent film fans would be interested in seeing. Thanks for being along for the ride, whether you pledged to the Kickstarter for Accidentally Preserved: Volume 1 (my first release) or you pre-ordered Tom Mix: Sky High and The Big Diamond Robbery (my 29th release, which will be out on July 18).