Silent Film Music by Ben Model

Newsday: "Silent Films Amass a Quiet Following"

2012-01-04T11:38:00.000-05:00

From today's Newsday:

Silent films amass a quiet following

January 3, 2012 by JIM MERRITT. Special to Newsday

Tonight's Keaton film is getting a warm reception from about 60 people sitting in a screening room at the Cinema Arts Centre.

But, it's not Michael Keaton or even Diane Keaton scoring big laughs in "Seven Chances," the classic screen comedy about a struggling young lawyer who must marry by 7 p.m. to inherit $7 million. Instead, it's Buster Keaton, the silent comic nicknamed "The Great Stone Face." The biggest laughs come during the famous scene where Keaton escapes both a mob of prospective brides and an avalanche of boulders -- all without a word of dialogue.

A QUIET RESURGENCE

"Seven Chances" was a hit in 1925, but Keaton's star plummeted with the advent of talkies a few years later. Nowadays, he's the "biggest draw in silent pictures," according to Ben Model, the silent film historian and film accompanist who hosts the series.

Silent movies themselves have been making a minor comeback with the comedy "The Artist" in theaters, and Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" paying homage to silent cinema innovator Georges Méliès. Once a month, the cinema rolls back the clock to the era when silents played on big theater screens to live musical accompaniment.

One of the regulars in the audience is Klaus Moser, 72, of Northport. Moser has been watching Keaton's silents since the 1970s. "In contrast to Chaplin, he doesn't show any emotion in his face, but he shows it in his body," Moser says.

However, many modern filmgoers avoid seeing silent films, says Charlotte Sky, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre.

One complaint is that many are available only in grainy, scratchy prints. The cinema screens "good quality prints" from major film archives such as the Library of Congress and The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, Sky says.

Once they have experienced a silent, they often change their minds. "When they do come out, they love them and they are wondering why they haven't known that silent films are so exceptional," Sky says. "Everybody laughing together has a different kind of feel than when you're home watching on whatever size screen you have."

THE SOUND OF SILENTS

"These films were never silent," says Model, who also is the resident silent film accompanist for MoMA. He explains, "They always had music."

Model composes and even improvises all his own scores on a virtual Wurlitzer organ -- known as the Miditzer -- while the movie is in progress. He also strives to provide audiences with the most up-to-date restored versions of classic films. For this showing, Model has created a "live restoration," using a digitally restored four-minute Technicolor sequence in a newly released Blu-ray edition. The rest of the film is shown in a 35-mm print.

In tonight's audience: the Bachar family of Centerport. Aiden, 9, Zachary, 11, and their parents, Mary Ann and Kevin, had enjoyed silent Charlie Chaplin movies. They'd also recently seen "Happy Feet 2."
Keaton was new to Aiden and Zachary, whose dad is an Emmy-winning nature film producer-director-writer. But each gave an enthusiastic two thumbs-up to the silent comic.

Says Aiden: "I thought it was cool how he [Keaton] would jump and do acrobatic stunts."

"It was funny," Zachary agrees.

'Anything but Silent'

Monthly classic silent film screening with live organ accompaniment by Ben Model.

WHEN | WHERE 7:30 p.m. Jan. 24, Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., Huntington. Featured film is "For Heaven's Sake" (1926) starring Harold Lloyd.
INFO 631-423-7611, cinemaartscentre.org
ADMISSION $13

New audiobook on/of Francis X. Bushman

2011-12-12T11:45:00.002-05:00

I've long been a fan of Ben Ohmart's "BearManor Media" book publishing outfit, and when I heard about what he had up his sleeve for the imprint about a year ago, I was re-impressed. After self-publishing a book on The Great Gildersleeve in 2001 he established BearManor, doing for other authors of books on classic cinema/radio/TV what he'd done for himself -- put out a quality niche-market book that had an appreciative audience by using 21st century micro-publishing production techniques.

Lon and Debra Davis, authors of "King of the Movies: Francis X. Bushman"(BearManor, 2009), contacted me a year ago telling me my score for the DVD of "The Extra Girl" was one of their favorite scores of mine, and letting me know BearManor was putting out their tome as an audio CD. I thought to myself, "Wow! That's amazing! Did I score "The Extra Girl"? Lon reminded me it was a score I'd done for the now-OOP (out of production) DVD-R label "Unknown Video". (If you've got one or two of their quality releases, you've got the fridge magnets to prove it.)

Apparently, Ohmart's new scheme was to gradually release some of BearManor's titles as audio books, which is another move that I think is a great way to stay ahead of the digital curve in providing access to new content and information. Lon wanted me to do musical underscoring for their book which, as it turned out, was to be more than just having Lon or Debra read their manuscript. They had recordings of Bushman himself telling his stories, which were a major resource for their book. So, this new edition would segments from these tapes, bridged by narration...and piano music.

And so, nearly a year later, the new "audio documentary" has just been released. Even if you already have the book (a book...you know, two covers with pages), you'll want to order this new version to hear Francis X. in his own voice and inflections regaling you with the stories of his amazing screen career that spans the nickelodeon era through television.

Lon sent me sheet music to "My Ship O' Dreams", a piece of popular sheet music first published in 1915 which had lyrics by Bushman and became his theme song when he made personal appearances. I recorded the tune for the project, and you'll hear this as well as interstitial music culled from my score for "The Extra Girl" on the release. "Ship O' Dreams" is also heard on the trailer for the "audio documentary", seen below.

You can order "Francis X. Bushman – In His Own Words" on the GotMyAudio website for $19.99.

Newsday's video on Cinema Arts Center's "Anything But Silent" series

2011-12-07T16:46:00.004-05:00

Newsday sent a videographer, as well as a reporter and a (still) photographer to last night's show. The video piece is up on the Newsday website, and I'm posting/embedding it here. We show silent film once a month, always on 35mm and always with theatre organ accompaniment. In 2011 we presented: Picadilly, Why Worry, Battleship Potemkin, Chicago, Her Night of Romance, slapstick rarities from Library of Congress, The Freshman, Sand, Strike, October, Upstream and Seven Chances. This is my sixth year doing the "Anything But Silent" series at the C.A.C., and I'm looking forward to our 2012 series!

(yes, I know...they misspelled my name, and also misspelled "Manhattan" as "Glen Coove"…and the videographer asked me to spell my name out on camera for him!)

talking with Joe Franklin

2011-11-12T20:10:00.000-05:00

I was interviewed by the one and only Joe Franklin for his radio show a week or two ago, and the segment aired today on his weekly segment on "Bloomberg on the Weekend" on WBBR-AM and on Sirius XM radio. Listen to my appearance on the radio with Joe here:

The Fall Cinesation is a great way for me to enhance my bag of tricks.

2011-09-26T10:31:00.013-04:00

(scroll down for photos…) Sharing accompaniment duties with Phil Carli at the Fall Cinesation every year is one way I stay fresh as an accompanist. Listening to someone else's playing – especially someone whose style and philosophy mirrors mine – helps me push the boundaries of my own scoring vocabulary. Listening to myself all the time is not the easiest way to self-improve, although I'm always on my own case about this, and this is one of the things I like about playing silent film festivals.

This year I used the Miditzer for nearly all the shows I played, and playing the organ for two shows/films a day for a few days for the same audience is another good way to expand the vocabulary. You 're aware that everyone in the house has heard your music already – often just a few hours previous – and so the impetus to avoid repeating what have become your own stock phrases is even greater.

The Cinesation is a great festival, with variable-speed 35mm and 16mm at all shows, and lots of archival prints plus rare collectors' titles. My favorite draw of the fest – all shows take place in Massillon's original 1915 Triangle movie theater (saved from the wrecking ball a few decades ago by the local Lion's club) and not in a hotel ballroom. When you watch vintage films in a vintage cinema, the light from the screen illuminates the proscenium and walls and you are aware, while watching a film, of the space you're in.

Ben Model
New York, NY

Stumfilmdager in Tromsø - radio interview

2011-09-20T20:26:00.001-04:00

I spent a great week in Tromsø, Norway (it's above the arctic circle, cartographers) last week. I shot video and, while I'm waiting for it to get developed, here's a radio segment on the "Stumfilmdager" festival ("Silent Film Days") recorded at one of the senior centers I presented a program at in the days leading up to the the festival. Snakker du Norsk? Enjoy.

Happy birthday Alice Guy Blaché! (new video)

2011-07-01T11:57:00.001-04:00

One of the perks of accompanying silent films is the opportunity afforded to discover directors whose work you have heard of or seen a little of...by playing for a retrospective series of their films.

In May 2009 I accompanied several silents in a retro at MoMA of French director Julien Duvivier, and was really impressed with his work. Going on the journey of his "La Vie Miraculeuse de Therese Martin" found me floating on a beautiful tone poem of a character study, and I looked forward to the repeat show.

I was aware of Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) and her films and place in cinema. From December 2009-January 2010 I played for a number of screenings (as did David Arner and Donald Sosin) at the Whitney Museum during a two-month retrospective of Blaché's films.

Reading the essays in the book published by Yale University Presss in conjunction with the film series -- Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer -- as well as watching and accompanying her films from the 1890s through the 'teens, was a real eye-opener for me. I gained great appreciation for her work as a filmmaker and pioneer in the industry.

She worked in a number of genres, and her dramas were just as well-made as her comedies, several of which explore gender roles in a way that's still funny today. I was impressed especially with her direction of exterior scenes and use of locations and camera when out-of-doors.

One of the dramatic one-reelers I was most struck by was "Falling Leaves" from 1912. In anticipation of Mme. Blaché's birthday on July 1st I decided to find one of her films to score and upload to my YouTube channel. I searched the Internet Archive and found a couple of her films in awfully dupey editions with ragtime piano slapped on, and a beautiful transfer of "Falling Leaves" with no audio.

Here is my new "release" with a piano score recorded on the occasion of Alice Guy Blaché's birthday. Enjoy!

Happy birthday Harold Lloyd - watch "Bliss" (1917)

2011-04-20T16:48:00.000-04:00

In honor of Harold Lloyd's birthday, I've uploaded a fun, rarely seen early "glasses" one-reeler with Harold to my YouTube channel. I scored this in 2008 for the American Slapstick 2 DVD set from AllDay Entertainment. The set is still in print and you can order the whole 3-disc set from them by click on the link here. The short is seen here, restored on video from a print at Library of Congress and from the private collection of David Kalat. Enjoy!

new Chaplin clip deconstructed - "The Immigrant"

2011-04-15T19:18:00.000-04:00

I sit about ten feet from the screen when I play for Chaplin's "The Immigrant" at the Museum of the Moving Image at their education programs. Watching this film in a sharp 35mm print several times every year, I'd started thinking about the shot of the rocking boat in the film's opening. Not the one with Henry Bergman in drag sliding back and forth below deck, the shot taken on deck.

"Unknown Chaplin" and David Robinson's book both state that this was shot with the camera on a pivot, so it could swing back and forth and create the illusion that the boat is rocking wildly.

So, then if the boat isn't really rocking, how is it that Charlie slides back and forth. Sitting where I do I can tell you he's not on a wire. I've looked. A few weeks ago I took the clip and slowed it down and then, using the rotation and positioning features in Final Cut, straightened the shot out.

Take a look at what I discovered.

Amazing, right?

Happy birthday, Charlie.

Ben Model
silent film historian & accompanist

video blog posting - riding the rails to Astoria for a Chaplin show

2011-02-10T23:39:00.000-05:00

Here's my latest video blog. Take a ride to and from the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria with me on the N and the R as I head out to play for a school group screening of Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant".

belated blog post from Eldridge St, Indian Lake and Astoria

2011-02-04T10:42:00.000-05:00

Here's a new installment of my video blog, in which we visit the historic Eldridge St Synagogue for a Max Davidson show, the 1938 Indian Lake Theater and "Safety Last", and the gala re-opening of the Museum of the Moving Image.

was this sequence timed to music? could be...

2011-01-22T12:47:00.000-05:00

I've found in numerous in Chaplin films that certaiin sequences and routines fit a musical beat and structure, that a bit of business will fit nicely an 8 or 16 bar phrase. It may have been an innate thing with Chaplin, and he may not have intended this at all. First time it popped up was when I wrote my orchestral score to "The Adventurer". The sequence in which Charlie is at the cocktail party and, while chatting with party guest Marta Golden, swipes a drink from Loyal Underwood standing next to him. The piece of music I wrote, in a moderato 4/4 meter, fit the rhythm of the routine just right. Playing for "The Immigrant" a couple times a year at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY I found the same to be true of a few sequences in that film as well.

Well, I've been meaning to post video this for some time. Some years ago when Bruce programmed "The Scarecrow" at The Silent Clowns Film Series I discovered the meal sequence fits a beat and musical structure, and this became part of the score. While I'd found that numerous Chaplin scenes did this, but it was fun seeing this in Keaton, beyond the obvious, deliberate musical numbers in Buster's films (e.g. Steamboat Bill, Play House).

While it's possible (probable?) that Buster had music played on set to keep a beat for this sequence, what ever it was wasn't a waltz. Remember, what we're watching (at 24 fps) is sped up about 50% from the speed it was shot at (16 fps).

I also think Roscoe Arbuckle unofficially co-directed much of this short. "Life of the Party" was released Nov 1920, and "The Scarecrow was released Dec 1920, so Roscoe may have had the down-time...besides his dog Luke is featured in most of the film and you don't think Roscoe just dropped Luke off and went fishing do you? Big Joe Roberts is practically a stand in for Roscoe, character-wise, rather than being the menacing villain he usually plays. Anyway, it's just a theory...

The audio you hear in this clip was recorded live in performance at the Egyptian Theater in Boise, ID in September 2010, when I accompanied a couple of shorts on the theater's original-installation Robert Morton theatre organ. Click here to see my video blog post from that event.

Here's the newly uploaded video:

Playing for "Speedy" tonight at the Riverdale YM-YWHA. Have chosen "All On Account of a Transfer" as an opening short, since it concerns trolleys and was shot at/near the Edison studios in the Bronx, not too far from the Riverdale Y.

See you at the silents!

Ben

2011-01-19T20:45:00.001-05:00

Here's a rare 1927 comedy short that I've just scored and uploaded to YouTube. I used a virtual piano software from Native Instruments, and chose the Steingraeber upright instead of one of the grands (e.g. Steinway D), as it seemed like a good fit.

Enjoy!

Ben

"Spice of the Program" downloadable MP3

2010-12-15T23:24:00.000-05:00

I've just discovered that Naxos' music download site, ClassicsOnline.com, has my chamber piece available. There are a few other sites that have the CD available, including iTunes, but you have to buy the whole CD to get my piece. On the Naxos site you can buy just my track, for $2.39.

Click here to go to the page for New American Masters Vol. 3 on the ClassicsOnline site if you're interested in buying the track. There's a 30-second preview there as well.

(The CD is listed on iTunes, but since my track is just a hair over 10 mins you have to buy the whole CD from iTunes. However, on iTunes the preview clip is 90 seconds long.)

views of the Indian Lake Theatre, Indian Lake NY

2010-11-24T12:42:00.001-05:00

Here are some photos I took of the Indian Lake Theatre in Indian Lake, NY. They brought me up to present and accompany Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last" on Sunday, November 21st. The theatre was built in 1938 and was a summer-season-only movie theater, and continued to be so for the next several decades. The theatre was dark from 2006 until a group of community members organized and fundraised in 2008 and bought the theatre, which is now being run as a not-for-profit. Visit www.indianlaketheater.org for more information.

Front of the theatre, closer view

Front of the Indian Lake Theatre, street view.

Angle view of the theatre front, with signs for routes 28 and 30 visible.

Closer view of the theatre entrance and original ticket booth.

Concession stand.

A 1942 poster for films playing at the theatre that someone from the community found.

Back of the auditorium entrance.

View of the cinema from the back. Seen onscreen is a slideshow I brought on
DVD of silent film era coming-attraction slides.

Side wall of the cinema; visible are surround speakers, as well as vintage light

fixtures which have white light whenpatrons enter the theater, before the show.

The wall sconces switch to blue-green-red during the show. My digital

camera doesn't do justice to the beauty of these colors and the look

these lights give the theater.

View of the cinema from the front, where the recently added performing stage
can be seen. The theatre currently alternates showing new film (in second run, on
35mm) with classic/foreign/art film, video-projected opera, live concerts and theatre.

article in "Lake Champlain Weekly" re Safety Last show

2010-11-22T11:04:00.000-05:00

This very nice article appeared in the Nov 17-23, 2010 issue of the Lake Champlain weekly, a feature story promoting the "Safety Last" show I did for the Champlain Valley Film Society on Nov 20. In the CVFS's 8-year history, the #2 and #3 ranking movies in terms of attendance were last year's showing of "The General" and this year's show of "Safety Last". This was probably due to the silents' being a big draw for families. Silent movies rock!!

orchestra and organ at the Egptian Theatre in Boise

2010-11-12T18:03:00.000-05:00

I know, I know...it's two months later, but anyway here is my video blog entry for my trip to Boise, ID in September. Enjoy!

Nosferatu at MoMA, on Time Inc website

2010-10-31T18:11:00.000-04:00

Here's a cool video profile on me, just posted on the Time Inc. website, and made by Jim Fields. This was shot in the early spring, but I will actually be playing for "Schreck" in December during MoMA's "Weimar Kino" series. Enjoy!

If you wanna see it on the Time Inc. site click here.

Sept 1, in Tromsø Norway - school show

2010-09-02T09:05:00.000-04:00

Here is a new videoblog entry from my first day (back) in Tromsø, Norway. You'll get to see what the Verdensteatret theatre looks like, and get a glimpse at one of the three shows we did for groups of 5th-graders.

plunging into fall 2010

2010-08-27T20:58:00.000-04:00

Back from vacash, and hit the ground running. Prepping for travel to Tromsø, played for Diary of a Lost Girl (first time I used theatre organ since June!) at the C.A.C., book flights to Boise and Massillon, and had to print out and ship out a concert band score for the Hong Kong Wind Ensemble, all while trying unpack (Vermont) and repack (Norway).

I'd been contacted by Dr. Thomas E. Verrier, of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, a few weeks ago about the Hong Kong program. The HKWE is a youth wind ensemble, and Dr. Verrier works with them for an event or two every year. They'll be performing my Chaplin "Adventurer" score for band on Nov 7, so if you're in Tsuen Wan, go to the Tsuen Wan Town Hall at 3pm.

Am looking forward to returning to Tromsø. "Stumfilmdager" ("Silent Film Days") is a nice festival, and like the Cinesation in Massillon OH (end of Sept) it seems a little more relaxed and informal than a high-profile do like Pordenone or even Cinefest. Plus both festivals are held entirely at cinemas built in 1915, so every show has that warm, vintage feel of seeing a silent film in a space it would've been shown in when it was released. There's really something special about watching a film that way, because you're seeing the film as well as the proscenium, walls, ceiling and atmosphere people saw and felt when they saw these films.

Will try to concoct a way to more easily and conveniently do video-blog entries with the flip cam. I don't have the patience usually to bring the footage into iMovie and edit, even though it's relatively simple. I may need to find someone to help me out with these so they get done.

Now, where'd I put that USA-to-Europe a.c. adapter plug...?

"The Spice of the Program" now available on CD!

2010-07-06T15:07:00.001-04:00

A piece of chamber music I composed is now available on CD. The Palisades Virtuosi — an ensemble comprised of Margaret Swinchoski, flute, Donald Mokrynski, clarinet, and Ron Levy, piano — commissioned me to compose a ten-minute work for them back in 2005. The piece, entitled "The Spice of the Program" (yes, like the logo/catch-phrase of Educational Pictures) was premiered at the PVI's Dec 2005 concert, and was recorded the following year. The CD was just released this month (July 2010), in which my piece is joined by five others by Dick Hyman, Bryan Schober, Fred Messner and Randall E. Faust. You can buy it here on the Albany Records website, or here on Amazon.com. I haven't heard the CD yet — who has time to open a shrink-wrapped CD anymore? — but I'm sure the first ten tracks are fantastic, and much classier than mine (track #11). Scroll down to read the liner notes I wrote for my piece.

The Spice of the Program [2005] is a tribute to the short comedy film of the silent era. The comedy two-reeler was the staple of every movie show during the silent film era, and was often the bread-and-butter of every theater manager. During the 1920’s, a theater marquee often displayed the star and title of the slapstick short on the bill as well as the feature attraction, because the new Harold Lloyd or Lloyd Hamilton comedy was often a bigger draw than the dramatic feature showing that week. Drawing on 25+ years of composing and improvising live musical scores for silent films, Model has constructed a piece of chamber music based on the structure of a typical comedy short, with themes (or leitmotifs) for the lead comic, his adversary, and the girl the comic is pining or fighting for, as well as the “standard” mood or incidental music essential for one of these cinema appetizers — “busy” music, “trouble brewing” music and, of course, a chase that resolves with a recap of the a love theme and the film’s main theme. The listener should feel free to relax, forget where they are, and “tune out” — imagining a fictional silent slapstick film as it unspools on the silver screen in their mind’s eye.

All finished with the "Auteurist" series at MoMA

2010-07-02T18:10:00.000-04:00

Well, stick a fork in me...I am done with the 26 performances at MoMA in June, as well as the Sept-May run of the silents in Charles Silver's "Auteurist" series, and have come out the other end. It's taken a day or two for the music to stop swirling around in my head.

I initially thought I'd be able to shoot and post video blogs on a regular basis, but the mental space to do that -- and a few other thing I'd thought I'd manage to pull off during this hectic run of mostly two shows a day -- didn't quite happen. There really wasn't room for reflection on the work done each day to the point that I could articulate it back to anyone who checks this blog.

Throughout the 3-week run in June I challenged myself to make improvements on each performance in my music and improvisation. My watchword to myself (when I could remember it) was always "you can always play less".

I got to know another bunch of regular attendees (seniors and otherwise) who really enjoyed the series, the sound of the Miditzer theatre organ, and my playing. There was one woman who had been coming to several shows with her elderly mother, usually sitting in the first few rows, who presented me with a gift at the end of one of the shows to thank me for my playing...an assortment of Godiva chocolates. Very sweet (pardon the pun).

It was great to have work to go to every day, and silent film accompaniment work at that. The second half of the run was done almost entirely on theatre organ, so that was another nice treat.

I'm still digesting everything and will hopefully post a more thorough report on what went through my mind during some shows, reflections on certain films, etc.

No more performances for two weeks, until Slapsticon, although I have other projects to finish and get out the door before I take the Amtrak down to DC/Arlington.

Perhaps as dust settles I can jot down some notes, and file a more thorough blog post on the "Auteurist" series. There's plenty more silents coming at MoMA in the fall, and I hope to be busy playing for some of these series.

Until next time...

video blog June 11, 2010 - playing for Fields, actualities, early pioneers

2010-06-11T23:20:00.000-04:00

Here's the June 11th video blog in which I discuss playing for a Fields silent, as well as for two programs of early films at MoMA and how it went in comparison to the performances of the same show last fall.

guest on WNYU FM's "Citywide" with Lucas Green

2010-06-09T22:05:00.001-04:00

I was a guest on the "Citywide" radio program on WNYU (89.1 FM and on wnyu.org) tonight. Well, actually we pre-recorded the half-hour show last week. The show is hosted by Lucas Green, currently an NYU student who I met in March when I played and spoke at Prof. Antonia Lant's silent cinema class there. Lucas hosts this show, and wanted to have me on the program.

You can listen to the entire 30 min show here:

Enjoy!

on the Leonard Lopate show, with Harriet Fields

2010-06-08T20:20:00.000-04:00

I was a guest on the Leonard Lopate show today, along with Harriet Fields (W.C. Fields' granddaughter). Listen to the segment, below, embedded here from the WNYC/Lopate website.

videoblog: W.C. Fields, the Lumiere bros., et al

2010-06-08T08:35:00.000-04:00

Here is my latest videoblog, (hopefully) the first in a series of near-daily blog postings I'm hoping to do this month, since I'll be accompanying one or two shows every day. I discuss preparing for a show of W.C. Fields in So's Your Old Man (1926) at the Library for the Performing Arts (6/8), and for a show of 1890s actualities at MoMA (6/9).

3 weeks of daily silent film screenings at MoMA in June

2010-04-19T10:59:00.000-04:00

I will be rawther busy in June. Here is the schedule for the repeat-showings of nearly all the silent film programs in Charles Silver's Auteurist History of Film series. It's going to be a blast revisiting all these, and in three weeks of daily screenings of silent film. This go-round, the shows will be held in MoMA's larger Titus I theater, and will be held at times when most people can attend. I will use piano for accompaniment in the first half, switching over to Miditzer theatre organ somewhere around Keaton's Our Hospitality/Sherlock Jr.; exceptions being Cabiria (Miditzer) and French Avante-Garde (piano).

An Auteurist History of Film: Second Chance Screenings
*click* to see full program descriptions

Weds, June 9 at 4:30 - Actualities and Glimmerings of More (Lumiere et al)
Weds, June 9 at 8:00 - Pre-Cinema (compilation/doc with track)
Thur, June 10 at 4:30 - Lesser-Known Pioneers of Cinema
Thur, June 10 at 8:00 - Georges Melies and His Rivals: Melies, Zecca, et al
Fri, June 11 at 4:30 - D. W. Griffith at Biograph
Fri, June 11 at 8:00 - Stellan Rye: The Student of Prague and Benjamin Christensen: The Mysterious X
Sat, June 12 at 2:00 - Edwin S. Porter (Before the Nickelodeon doc, plus shorts shown MOS)
Sat, June 12 at 5:00 - D. W. Griffith: The Avenging Conscience and Judith of Bethulia
Sat, June 12 at 8:00 - Giovanni Pastrone: Cabiria
Sun, June 13 at 5:00 - "Anthology of Italian Cinema" (compilation/doc with track)
Weds, June 16 at 8:00 - Von Stroheim: Foolish Wives (print has track)
Thur, June 17 at 8:00 - Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin and October (prints have tracks)
Fri, June 18 at 8:00 - Send in the Clowns: Linder, Chaplin, Normand, Arbuckle, Keaton
Sat, June 19 at 2:00 - Ince: Custer's Last Fight / De Mille: The Cheat
Sat, June 19 at 5:00 - Marshall Neilan The Jackknife Man / King Vidor: Amarilly of Clothesline Alley
Sun, June 20 at 5:30 - Raoul Walsh: Regeneration /Maurice Tourneur: The Blue-Bird
Mon, June 21 at 4:30 Buster Keaton: Sherlock, Jr. and Our Hospitality
Mon, June 21 at 8:00 - Ernst Lubitsch: The Marriage Circle
Weds, June 23 at 4:30 - Fritz Lang: Siegfried
Weds, June 23 at 8:00 - F.W. Murnau: The Last Laugh
Thur, June 24 at 4:30 - Merian C. Cooper: Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life
Thur, June 24 at 8:00 - King Vidor: The Big Parade
Fri, June 25 at 4:30 - F.W. Murnau: Sunrise (print with orig track)
Fri, June 25 at 8:00 - Buster Keaton: The General, plus Steamboat Bill, Jr. (last 2 reels only)
Sat, June 26 at 2:00 - Carl Th. Dreyer: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Sat, June 26 at 5:00 - French Avant-garde shorts, incl. Clair's Entr' Acte, Leger's Ballet Mechanique, Buñuel's Un Chien Andelou and more.
Sat, June 26 at 8:00 - Frank Borzage: Street Angel (print with orig track)
Sun, June 27 at 2:30 - Dziga Vertov: Man with a Movie Camera, plus Kino Pravda
Sun, June 27 at 5:30 - V. I. Pudovkin: Storm Over Asia, plus Chess Fever
Mon, June 28 at 4:30 - G.W. Pabst: Pandora's Box
Mon, June 28 at 8:00 - Josef von Sternberg: Docks of New York
Weds, June 30 at 4:30 - Victor Sjöstrom: The Wind
Weds, June 30 at 8:00 - Aleksandr Dovzhenko: Arsenal

the complete "Metropolis" on May 7th

2010-03-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

Have just gotten the "OK" to announce my performance on Fri May 7 accompanying "The Complete 'Metropolis'" at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntingotn, NY (that's on Long Island, folks). This is the new restoration with 25 minutes of lost footage restored.

The C.A.C. is doing a one-week run of the picture, and I'll be accompanying the film with a new score of my own on opening night; all other performances will have the recorded track (the 1927 original Gottfried Huppertz orchestral score, as I understand...I'll re-post or revise if I hear different). I'll be accompanying the film on the mighty Miditzer virtual theatre organ.

I had a great time at Cinefest last weekend, got to meet in person a whole lotta fans, many of whom are also now FB fns/friends. Will post again with details, but I'd have to say one of the highlights was getting to play the Möller 3/10 theatre pipe organ at the Capitol Theatre in Rome NY for the 35mm show.

There's plenty of other news percolating, and I'll post when any of these items are set and solid.

See you at the silents!

Cinefest 30 - day 1

2010-03-25T22:40:00.000-04:00

Day one of Cinefest 30 has gone well. Played for a pair of features from the late 'teens this morning – Life's Harmony (dir Frank Borzage) and The Wild Girl (with Eva Tanguay) – and just played for Charley Chase in The Sting of Stings. I'd played for it (same print) last month at the Silent Clowns Film Series, so it was fresh in my mind. It's a fun short, and doesn't circulate, even among the die-hard collectors at Cinefest, so it was fun for everyone to get to see it.

Here's a clip of the first 4 mins or so of the performance (no extra charge for the audible laughter). Enjoy!

silent film music at "Meet Me At The Corner"

2010-03-15T23:03:00.000-04:00

A new episode of "Meet Me At The Corner" was posted today on meetmeatthecorner.org, a well-traveled educational website of virtual field trips. The episode is about silent film and its music, and I was the guest in the piece. We shot this last fall, when the Colorado-based producer, Donna Guthrie, contacted me in advance of her coming to NYC to shoot several episodes. She literally googled "silent films" and "New York" and found me.

It was impossible to find a theater to shoot in that wasn't going to charge us a couple hundred bucks, so we wound up doing the shoot in a rehearsal studio at Ripley-Grier. The video crew were a couple of communications students from Rider College in NJ. The interviewers for the segments are usually local home-schoolers, and it turned out the young woman who did my segment was someone who is in my daughter's modern dance class.

We did some Q&A and then I accompanied a scene from a Sennett comedy with Billy Bevan and Andy Clyde that Donna had found. I watched it on a laptop while they shot me playing, and then they synched the film up in editing, and did a nice effect, showing my hands in close-up, with the clip running in the upper right corner (see frame-grab below).

I hope this reaches a lot of kids and helps get them hooked on, or at least interested in, silent films. You never know who you're going to reach...! Thanks, Donna!

To watch the whole segment (it's only about 4 mins), click here.

See you at the silents!

Ben

interim post: Lee Erwin-scored short

2010-03-03T17:10:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, I haven't posted any video here in a few weeks. To keep you happy, here is a 1929 Mack Sennett short co-starring Carole Lombard that I just uploaded to YouTube. It has a score by Lee Erwin, which he performed and recorded on his ersatz theatre organ, comprised of three early digital keyboards stacked on a rack -- Roland Juno, Yamaha DX77, Emu Emax sampling keyboard -- plus a full organ pedalboard custom-wired to an old Moog. He plays it like a theater organ, but doesn't necessarily try to duplicate theatre organ sounds. There is so little of Lee's playing for comedy shorts available, I thought this was worthy uploading and posting. Enjoy!

video blog episode 2: accompanying "The Last Laugh" at MoMA

2010-02-11T23:21:00.000-05:00

Here's episode 3, in which I talk about preparing for and accompanying F.W. Murnau's "The Last Laugh" on two consecutive days. The theme song (seen briefly at the beginning) was actually shot at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where I was guest speaker/artist (third time!) at Larry Burke and Larry Wallach's film music course on Feb 2.

video blog episode 2: playing for Alice Guy films and early cinema, et al

2010-01-21T14:57:00.000-05:00

Here is the latest episode of my video blog. I talk about accompanying Alice Guy Blaché films and the challenges of playing for nickelodeon-era films, about working with Parallel Exit, and some other tidbits. Enjoy!

video blog episode 1: Griffith, Gish, and instant leitmotifs

2010-01-08T19:59:00.000-05:00

I'm going to give video-blogging another go in 2010. Using the FlipVideo camera makes it a little more convenient, and talking-head blogging sure beats writing, and typing and correcting typos (which only seem to appear after I click on 'publish'). I'm hoping I can be a little more consistent than the last time I tried this.

The theme song is actually something I wrote for a public access program my Mom used to host and produce in Larchmont (hence the piece's name, "One for Alice"), and it popped back into my head when I sat down to shoot this today.

Here's episode one. Feel free to click on the full-screen option in the bottom right corner of the window, or better yet...watch it in full HD here.

musical theme: "An Auteurist History of Film"

2010-01-06T17:25:00.000-05:00

This is a theme I came up with for the series at MoMA, which I play as the lights go down and between films (if it's a double-bill). Gives you a look (and a listen) at the mod-looking Modus digital piano Yamaha has loaned to MoMA for the series. (I shot this quickly, before the house opened on Jan 6).

"An Autheurist History of Film" (theme), music by Ben Model
copyright © 2010 by Ben Model. All rights reserved.

Auteurist series at MoMA moves in the 1920s

2010-01-03T22:25:00.001-05:00

Well, we're out of the woods, now (meaning films of the 'teens), and the pictures just get better and better every week. The series screens on Wed/Thur/Fri at 1:30pm; the dates below reflect the fact that I only play on Weds and Thurs. In 2010 I will use the Miditzer for accompaniment more, as by 1920 the theatre organ and orchestra were the more prevalent sounds heard in picture houses. Film scheduled for May will be posted later...

Jan 6 & 7 - True Heart Susie / Broken Blossoms (DWG)
Jan 13 & 14 - Foolish Wives (print has recorded track)
Jan 20 & 21 - The Chaplin Revue (print has recorded track)
Jan 28 & 29 - Sherlock Jr / Our Hospitality (Keaton)
Feb 3 & 4 - The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch)
Feb 10 & 11 - The Last Laugh (Murnau)
Feb 17 & 18 - Siegfried part 1 (Lang)
Feb 24 & 25 - The Big Parade (Vidor)
Mar 3 & 4 - Strike / Potemkin (prints have recorded tracks)
Mar 10 & 11 - Grass / Secrets of a Soul
Mar 17 & 18 - The General / Steamboat Bill Jr (excerpt)
Mar 24 & 25 - Sunrise (original Movietone/Riesenfeld score on track)
Apr 7 & 8 - The Passion of Joan of Arc
Apr 14 & 15 - French Avant-Garde film program
Apr 21 & 22 - Kino Pravda / Man With a Movie Camera
Apr 28 & 29 - Chess Fever / Storm Over Asia

L&H, Keaton and Lloyd Hamilton

2009-12-09T12:16:00.000-05:00

Looks like a deleted scene from Playtime, doesn't it? I'm sitting in the Bauhaus lounge at MoMA. I'm early for my show today, and enjoying the free wifi at MoMA.

Have been too danged busy to reflect and post here, but I know people read this blog, so I'll jot something down, just to stay in touch.

Sunday's Silent Clowns show was our last of the season, and we did a program of L&H silents that people voted for online. The finalists that were screened were Putting Pants on Phillip, The Battle of the Century, From Soup to Nuts, and (of course) Big Business. Show was at the Museum of the City of New York, where we partner for a show once a year or so, and it's a beautiful auditorium. I had an idea a few weeks ago to have Bob Greenberg and Jonathan Smith who -- among many other talents they possess -- are L&H impersonators, show up as a surprise to announce the films. They've made appearances at our shows twice before and are always a big hit, and this time was no exception. Here's a shot of Bruce, me, Steve, Jonathan and Bob after the show.

Had some fun with main title music for the shorts. For Phillip I played the March of the Cuckoos theme with a scottish left-hand underneath, for Battle I played the opening of Lecuona's "La Virgen de Macarena", and for Business I played a version of "Jingle Bells" where the first two bars were the first two bars of the "Cuckoo" theme.

Last night I brought my 16mm print of Lloyd Hamilton in Papa's Boy to the show of Steamboat Bill, Jr. at the Cinema Arts Centre. SBJr came from LOC in 35mm, and it's nice to see a 35mm print of that film that hasn't been beat to death. I brought the Ham short because of the hat-trying-on sequence in SBJr. The hats are all iconic toppers of movie stars, and the checkered cap Keaton takes a liking to was Ham's trademark hat. Besides, when do you get to show or see Lloyd Hamilton? I'd shot new, authentic main titles for the print, which had been made in the '50s with a remade main title in simple helvetica of "Who's Kidding Who?". I'd won it on eBay because someone listed it as a Glen Cavender short, but the screen grabs tipped me off that this was a Hamilton (with Cavender, Blanche Payson and others) in supporting roles. I created the lookalike titles in Photoshop, printed them on transparency film and shot them with a lightbox I built with Plus-X reversal in 16mm.

My dance card for the first 4 or 5 months of 2010 is slowly filling up. The MoMA series will run through May, it turns out. We're running Napoleon in April, and in the big theater (Titus 1) on a Sunday afternoon, instead of Wed/Thur/Fri (*whew*). Now I just need to find time to post the bookings on my website...

Gotta go grab lunch and get ready for today's double-bill.

See you at the silents!

vote for The Silent Clowns on Chase Community Giving

2009-12-02T15:50:00.000-05:00

Are you on Facebook? Please help support The Silent Clowns Film Series by voting for it (a/k/a Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc., our not-for-profit corp identity) on the Chase Community Giving page on FB.

Click here and type in Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc. in the 'search for your charity' field:

Alice Guy silent films at the Whitney (schedule)

2009-11-03T09:51:00.000-05:00

I've just received my "marching orders" for the Whitney's Alice Guy retrospective, Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer. Below are the dates and film titles I'll be accompanying. There will be other screenings dates, times and films, but I do not know what they are. There will be piano accompaniment for most Sunday afternoon screenings, and the Sundays I am not playing for will be accompanied by either Donald Sosin or David Arner. I'm posting these here now for anyone anxious to see what's on tap. The Whitney's page on the retrospective – which at this writing has a blurb but no film screening info – is here.

A GranTouch digital piano is being provided for the series by Yamaha Artist Services. Most of the films are archival 35mm prints, with some films presented on either 16mm or digital Blu-Ray video.

Again, posted below are just the shows I'm playing, and is not a listing of the whole retrospective screenings. Sunday shows are in the afternoon, at 2:00pm (?):

Special Screening: Women's Film Preservation Fund
Fri, Dec. 4, 2009 (7:00PM, Whitney Museum)
Mixed Pets. 1911 (Solax).
A Fool and His Money, 1912 (Solax).
A House Divided. 1913 (Solax).
Matrimony's Speed Limit, 1913 (Solax).

Sun, Dec. 13, 2009
Alice Guy in Spain, 1905 (Gaumont).
Tango. 1905 (Gaumont).
Le Bolero [The Bolero], 1905 (Gaumont). Performed by Miss Saharet.
Cake-walk negre [Negro Cake-walk], 1905 (Gaumont; phonoscene lacking sound component).
Le Piano irresistible [The Irresistible Piano], 1907 (Gaumont).
La Hierarchie dans I'amour [The Hierarchy in Love], 1906 (Gaumont).
Matrimony's Speed Limit, 1913 (Solax).
When Marian Was Little. 1911 (Solax).
Canned Harmony. 1912 (Solax).
La Fee printemps [The Spring Fairy], 1906 (Gaumont).

Sun, Dec. 20, 2009
Les Fredaines de Pierrette [Pierrette's Escapades], 1900 (Gaumont).
Au bal de Flore [At the Bal de Flore], 1900 (Gaumont). Performed by Miles Lally and Julyett de I'Olympia.
The Ocean Waif, 1916 (International Film Service Inc.; Golden Eagle Features/International Film Service Inc.)
La Maratre [The Stepmother], 1906 (Gaumont).
La Femme collante [The Sticky Woman], 1906 (Gaumont).
Les Resultats du feminisme [The Results of Feminism], 1906 (Gaumont).
Cupid and the Comet. 1911 (Solax).
Officer Henderson. 1913 (Solax).

Sun, Jan.10, 2010
Sage-femme de première classe [First-class Midwife], 1902 (Gaumont).
A House Divided. 1913 (Solax).
Mixed Pets, 1911 (Solax).
Roads Lead Home. 1913 (Solax).
New Love and the Old. 1912 (Solax).
The Girl in the Armchair, 1912 (Solax).

Sun, Jan. 17, 2010
Danse des saisons: L'Hiver, danse de la neige [Dance of the Seasons: Winter, Snow Dance], 1900 (Gaumont).
Au cabaret [At the Club], 1899 (Gaumont).
Chez Ie marechal-ferrant [At the Blacksmith's], 1899 (Gaumont).
Avenue de I'Opera. 1900 (Gaumont).
La Bonne absinthe [The Good Absinthe], 1899 (Gaumont).
L'AveuQle fin de siecle [The Turn-of-the-century Blind Man], 1898 (Gaumont).
Chapellerie et charcuterie mecaniques [Mechanical Hat-and Sausage-maker], 1900 (Gaumont).
La Fee aux choux [The Cabbage Fairy], 18967/1900 (Gaumont).
La Concierge [The Concierge], 1900 (Gaumont).
Chez Ie photographe [At the Photographer's], 1900 (Gaumont).
La Fee printemps [The Spring Fairy], 1906 (Gaumont).
The Great Adventure. 1918 (Pathe Exchange).

Sun,Jan. 24, 2010
Danse Gitanes-Sevillane [Dance of the Seville Gypsies], 1905 (Gaumont).
Chien jouant a la balle [Dog Playing Balll. 1905 (Gaumont).
La Charite du prestidigitateur [The Charity of the Magician], 1905 (Gaumont).
The High Cost of Living. 1912 (Solax).
A Man's a Man, 1912 (Solax).
The Sewer, 1912 (Solax). Directed by Edward Warren; set design and script by Henri Menessier.
The Strike, 1912 (Solax),
L'Enfant de la barricade or Sur la barricade [The Child of the Barricade or On the
Barricade], 1907 (Gaumont).
Le Fils du garde-chasse [The Gamekeeper's Son], 1906 (Gaumont).
Bonsoir (La Fee aux fleurs) [Goodnight (The Flower Fairy)], 1905 (Gaumont).

October wrap-up, and a look forward into Nov & Dec

2009-11-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

I've managed to post about every single one of my performances during October 2009. The calendar quarter of Oct-Nov-Dec finds me working full-time as an accompanist, with 18-22 shows each month. I decided at the beginning of October to try and chronicle all the shows, plus give Twitter updates, for those of you who read this blog, aiming to give brief reports on the shows that reflects particular insights that (only) a film accompanist has to consider or notice or deal with. I'm hoping these posts are informative or entertaining or resourceful to readers.

I won't be posting as much in November (or probably in December as well), but will try to do so from time to time. If you want to take a look at this "month-in-the-life-of", click here to go to a page containing all my posts from October. My performance schedule for November and December is posted online on my website.

See you at the silents!

Ben

Oct 28: 2 Danish @ MoMA, Thanhouser in New Rochelle

2009-10-31T22:58:00.000-04:00

Back in the Bartos for a pair of Danish films at MoMA, The Student of Prague and The Mysterious X. Both films were shown in 16mm prints; Student turned out to be a Bob Lee / Essex Film Club print, and Mysterious was some very old 16mm (it seemed a little brown in hue) with all its intertitles gone.

We ran Student at 24 fps, as instructed since it had a track, and surprisingly it ran just fine at that speed. I'd never seen this one before, and the film turned out to be a Faustian tale of a student who exchanges his own reflection in mirrors for riches and love, only to become trapped by the arrangement and dies at the end. Mysterious X turned out to be an espionage melodrama (from Denmark? in 1913?). Charles' film notes -- shown onscreen as audiences entered -- included a synopsis which helped them and me with the plot. We ran the film a little too fast but it was manageable. It was a film where I had to watch faces constantly for information, espe since the titles were gone, and to help the audience decode what was going on, use chord progressions, melody and tempo fluctuations to help out.

Finished the show, and headed to Grand Central to catch a train to New Rochelle. Grabbed dinner with Ned, his wife Michelle, and Theresa Krump Leghorn of the Museum of Arts and Culture in N.R. Then off to the MAC which is actually in part of a new wing at New Rochelle High School, where my mom (and her brother and cousins) went to school, for the evening's Thanhouser centennial show. Ned gave a great presentation with powerpoint on the history of the Thanhouser Film Company, and then screened seven films with me on piano, projecting off the new DVD set. The state-of-the-art theater has a nice Yamaha grand, and we were able to position it so I could see the screen without any problems. It was fun revisiting these films again in a theatrical setting (I'd only seen them without an audience, before Monday's MoMA show), some of which were the same as the MoMA show.

One of the films, Her Nephews From Labrador (1913) had its location ID'ed by a couple of audience members (one of whom was my cousin Russell Handelman, who grew up in New Rochelle) as being a pond and nearby waterfall called Larchmont Gardens...in Larchmont. When we screened the film at MoMA I'd thought the location looked a little familiar, but figured it was in New Rochelle. I grew up in Larchmont and knew exactly where this was. Click here to go to a Google maps location where the "duck pond" (as I knew the spot) is.

Scores went well, and I managed to remember the tune I came up with for "Labrador". We had a pretty decent crowd considering it was a Wednesday night in New Rochelle, that we were running somewhat obscure silent films, and it was the first night of the World Series.

Ned and Michelle went around New Rochelle the next day, shooting video and stills of Thanhouser film locations as well as a tour they got of Tedesco Auto Body, housed in the old Thanhouser Film Corp. building. Click here to see their photo album from their shoot on Facebook.

Oct 27: "Nosferatu" in Huntington

2009-10-31T22:38:00.000-04:00

We ran a really nice, tinted 35mm print of Nosferatu at the Cinema Arts Centre for this show, and it looked great at 21 fps. What was nice was that the projector technician who'd engineered our ability to have 21 fps as an alternate speed was in the audience to see his handiwork in action (he'd missed our Arbuckle and Orphans of the Storm programs, where we'd used it so far). Believe it or not, I typically do not spend every day of the week leading up to Halloween playing for Nosferatu, Phantom, Caligari and Jekyll and Hyde every year. I'd not played for Schreck in quite a few years, actually, and so this show was fun and my first time doing it on organ.

Once again, a main theme that I'd come up with for Nosferatu's character and which I've never written down, came out of my brain and fingers all by itself without my trying to remember it before the show. And I got to use the Miditzer's snare drum in the scene where one is played at the announcement of the plague. I brought it back for the wide shot of coffins being carried through the street, even though the snare drum is not played onscreen...aiming to make it a "plague" motif (I hope it worked).

One of the nice things about the show is that it was introduced by Ian Holt, who's co-written a sequel to Stoker's Dracula with Bram's great-grandnephew Dacre. Click on the book image to go to Amazon's page for the book. I didn't have to answer questions about the film, and Ian – who is an expert on vampire folklore – spoke about Bram Stoker's book, the play based on it, Nosferatu, Stoker's widow's legal battle, who the real Dracula was etc etc. Very informative and a great choice for this picture. We've built up an audience of regulars and I think a speaker who was not me, especially for an iconic film like this where the subject matter is of greater interest, was fun. Turns out the show was Holt's first time seeing a silent with live accompaniment. We had a real big crowd for the show and hopefully we've hooked a few more Long Islander's on silent film.

Oct 26: Thanhouser at MoMA

2009-10-31T22:15:00.000-04:00

Last April, Charles Silver, Steve Massa and I screened MoMA's holdings of Thanhouser Films to select the titles for this program. As it turned out some of these wound up being on the latest Thanhouser DVD set, which I also scored for Ned Thanhouser. With the exception of one title, a dupey 16mm print, they are all excellent 35mm prints, and we elected to omit Joseph in the Land of Egypt because of its length (four reels), in order to show more films.

The evening was preceded by Ned's being interviewed on the Leonard Lopate radio program on WNYC. I've been a guest myself a few times over the years, and connected Ned with the show's producer, since I knew Ned would be in town for both the MoMA show and the one in New Rochelle. The segment is about minutes long, and has some great background info on the Thanhouser company; you'll hear me playing the sheet music song "Zudora" during the show's intro and outro, excerpted from the score I recorded for episode #2. I've embedded the segment below.

The show went very well, and we had a nice crowd. We ran the films a little faster than the speed they were transferred at for the DVD, which was a nice chance for me to see how they felt this way, and with an audience. I'd scored them looking at a (large) computer monitor. I wonder what it'd be like to record a score with the image projected instead. Since I record with the Miditzer at home, I could borrow a projector and show it on the wall in my living room perhaps...

Oct 25: Harold Lloyd in "Dr. Jack"

2009-10-31T22:01:00.000-04:00

Dr. Jack, along with Keaton's The Haunted House, was our Halloween offering at the Silent Clowns series. I dressed for the occasion, donning my saddle shoes and straw boater. (BTW, best place to get your own saddle shoes is muffys.com -- they make saddle shoes for all the Broadway shows and tours, and they're reasonably priced and great quality). I'd never seen Dr. Jack and watched the new DVD a few days beforehand to prepare. I was struck by the film's charm and how well it succeeded, even with Lloyd playing somewhat out-of-character; in the film Mildred is the one who is the weakling who goes through a change in reel 5, thanks to Harold's character. While something of an anomaly for that reason, I think it's one of the better features and deserves more exposure.

I watched the DVD with the sound on, as an experiment -- I usually screen films on DVD with the audio muted -- and was surprised to recognize several photoplay music cues in the score, some of which I'm proposing for the Schirmer's book or which were contenders.

The show went well, as did the scores. I managed to come up with couple themes that worked and which I was able to recall when they were needed again. Two weeks earlier, when we ran The Goat, Keaton's theme -- which came out of me at a show Bruce and I did at the Princeton Arts Council some years ago and which had become part of the score for a while -- had not wafted up to the surface during the show like a couple of the other themes had...until a couple days later. I used it for Buster in The Haunted House, and it (basically) fit.

I'm still thinking about Dr. Jack. There is much made of the use of showing reflections in mirrors, and it features a number of character actors who are not part of the usual Lloyd ensemble; Charles Steveson shows up, but for only a tiny part.

profile on me in The Epoch Times

2009-10-27T15:40:00.000-04:00

Last Friday, I got an email from a reporter from the Epoch Times, asking me for an interview on silent films and silent film music. She had a short deadline and found my website online, and could she interview me on Skype because she was in Bulgaria. Sure. I have a Skype account, fired it up, and we text-chatted for about 45 mins. I'd never done an interview this way before, but I can see its advantages. One, if you're in Bulgaria writing for a NY edition of a paper and your subject is in NYC, it's way cheaper than an int'l phone call and easier than batting a volley of emails back and forth; it's more of a conversation, in terms of how it flows. The other advantage is that your subject doesn't have to worry about being misquoted since all the text is in the transcript of the chat session. I didn't have a photo of me accompanying a film, unfortunately, but was able to send in a jpeg of a piece of photoplay music for people to see. I thought the article came out rather well.

Here's a link to the article.

Oct 21-22: a pair of Scandinavian films

2009-10-25T22:40:00.000-04:00

Oct 21 and 22 found me back at MoMA's Bartos theater accompanying a pair of films from my one of my favorite corners of the planet, Scandinavia. Afgrunden and Ingeborg Holm were screened, both in 35mm prints. MoMA's print of The Abyss is okay; there's a bit of decomp, but it's complete. The print of Ingeborg Holm was very good.

There is a shift in Ingeborg Holm, about a third of the way through, after Ingeborg's husband passes away, when the film stops being about this family with a nice home and a shop that the husband works at to being about Ingeborg's journey of mourning, heartache over her separation from her children and, eventually, into madness where you're just watching actress Hilda Borgström. I found myself completely drawn in at both shows, getting completely lost in the film, connecting with Borgström's beautifully subtle and subdued performance and creating the music to support it. Sjöstrom's direction is so wonderful and artistic, you forget that the film is largely comprised of long takes and well-composed wide-shots the actors play their scene in and through. And this is in 1913. There's so much meat up on the screen, the film is a delight to play for. I'd have to say the last time I got that lost in a mood-piece of a film like this was Julien Duvivier's La Vie miraculeuse de Therese Martin, which I played for at MoMA in May.

Oct 17 - "The General" in Lake Champlain area

2009-10-25T18:44:00.000-04:00

Oct 16 - Traveled to Essex, NY for a show (on 10/17) of "The General" (DVD projection of the new Kino disc). Could've flown to Burlington VT on JetBlue and taken a ferry across Lake Champlain but, let me tell ya folks, Amtrak is the only way to fly. Both the trip up and the one back on Sunday found Amtrak a pleasant experience and right on time (actually a few minutes early). A beautiful ride up the Hudson and into the Adirondacks.

The program was co-sponsored by Piano By Nature and by the Champlain Valley Film Society. My General show was preceded by a talk on silent film accompaniment and piano improvisation. The talk (late afternoon) and show (evening) were held in the auditorium of the local school, a K-12 in Willsboro. The talk went really well. I'd been interviewed a number of times by the press that week -- actually, every day that week -- and so I'd had the arc of the history of silent film accompaniment as well as an organized explanation of my own journey and philosophies on the subject fresh in my head. Being interviewed is a great opportunity to better articulate things, and often analogies and statements etc will come up during the chat to supplement the premeditated ones. Here are links to two articles that appeared in local papers about the show:

"Speakers to Enliven Film Series" (The Press Republican)
"Who needs talkies? Silent film pianist to play in Willsboro" (The Valley News)

The talk went on for an hour and a half, with some Q&A and a written outline to help me with the flow etc. One of the things I demonstrated is the freedom and flexibility improvisation allows an accompanist, talking and playing at the same time (something that does not come easily to me) to explain. I also played a couple examples of mood music (my own) and of different comedians' musical rhythms, i.e. the statement-response-reaction of a typical L&H interaction. This talk needs to go on my website as an added possible program. Even without clips, it went over really well.

The evening show was extremely well-attended, with the largest number of kids the film society had seen at one of their events and the second standing ovation at the end of a film program they'd ever had. Most of the people in the audience had not seen a silent film before and were absolutely wowed by Keaton's masterpiece. The score went well; the General can be a challenge sometimes since it's mostly a long chase that -- because it's conducted (pardon the pun) entirely on trains -- is almost entirely at the same pace. The piano was a Story & Clark grand that played well and had a nice tone.

Oct 14-15: D.W. Griffith Biographs @MoMA; press interview

2009-10-25T18:18:00.000-04:00

October 13 and 14 found me at MoMA playing for a program of Griffith Biograph shorts, as part of Charles Silver's series. The Weds show was in Bartos, on the Modus digital, and the Thurs show was in Titus 2, on the Steinway.

(The T2 instrument, BTW, was Blanchette Rockefeller's piano and had been reconditioned by Steinway – inside and out – several years ago. When MoMA was at the Gramercy during the museum's renovations, we used this Steinway there right after the work was done. It plays "like buttah" and the piano's action is amazing.)

It was fun getting to see the program of Biographs, and accompanying them was enjoyable since, even though they were early films, because they were Griffith shorts there was a great deal off drama and subdued acting and effective storytelling onscreen. This helps inspire an accompanist, especially in a film that – primitive as these are – have a certain poetry to them, like The Country Doctor or A Corner in Wheat. I don't think my playing was that different from one day to the next, with the different instruments. Both days I think I wound up free-associating a bit of photoplay music into one or two of the films. On Thursday my hands just started playing "The Bold Riders" (by Gerard Carbonara, one of the pieces I'm hoping will wind up in the Schirmer book) during the battle in Elderbush Gulch. This has happened a couple times over the last few weeks, when playing for pre-WWI dramas.

After the Thursday show I was interviewed by a sophomore at Columbia's film studies program for a piece in the Columbia Spectator's weekly arts magazine called "The Eye". She also took photos of me at the piano. The iPhone has an audio recording app, and she used this for the interview. The second time I saw this in use: first time was when I was interviewed for a podcast by a blogger from WNYC at a William S. Hart film I played at MoMA. When the article is published/posted I'll link it on this blog.

Oct 11 - Silent Clowns: new digs, fun shorts

2009-10-25T18:03:00.001-04:00

Sunday Oct 11 was our maiden voyage at the Arclight Theatre. Our audience really loved the new, more intimate space and the films looked great in there. Piano is an old Somebody & Someone upright, which I'd tuned a week or two before and seems to have held. The action is a little loose and creaky here and there, but I'll take that over some of the grands I've played whose action is a bit on the tight side (sluggish center pins). One of the things that runs through my mind while I'm accompanying sometimes, is how to fix an action issue with the piano while I'm playing. The sound of this old upright, however, fits the films in some people's minds, and I don't mind it.

Program was a group of five shorts where the lead comic utilizes the vaudeville "tramp" character or is just down-and-out. There is a "fate" theme for The Goat – like the one in Tschaikovsky's 4th – that came out of my hands a few years ago at a show Bruce and I did in Bryn Mawr for one of the campuses of S.I.G. that suddenly popped back into my head just before that film hit the screen. And, somehow, the chase music I'd come up with for the film came to me when the chase started. None of this was premeditated at all. Two days later, the theme I'd come up with for Buster's character wafted up into my head; that theme was one that also "just happened" at a show Bruce and I did at the Princeton Arts Council a few years ago. These were both themes that I wasn't sure if I thought they worked when I played them for the first time, but Bruce and his wife Alice told me they really fit afterwards, so they stayed.

We had a great crowd, and I was really pleased that everyone liked the new theater. It's a different sort of space, a little more homey, than the museum aud we'd been at since 2005.

Another happy altscore.com customer

2009-10-19T15:27:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, someone bought and downloaded my piano score MP3 that synchs with the Kino DVD/VHS of Sherlock Jr. with Buster Keaton. I opened my virtual mailbag this morning to find this kind note:

I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your making the "Sherlock Jr." piano score available. I watched this film for the first time this past weekend and was driven to distraction by the self-indulgent, too-clever-by-half Club Foot Orchestra score that seems to be the standard on every available release of this film. I purchased your alternate score, watched the film again, and enjoyed it a great deal.
-- Michael W., in Oklahoma

If you haven't already, visit altscore.com to check out the alternate scores I have listed there. I've been too busy to record more lately, but hope to do so when (if?) things slow down. I have read much by silent film fans about scores by Maria Newman on a few DVD's of Pickford films that could use an alternate track.

article about "Metropolis" in Queens Gazette

2009-10-15T23:00:00.001-04:00

There's an article in the Oct 14 issue of the Queens Gazette about last week's show of Metropolis that I spotted online. Click here to read the article. The writer did a nice job, and quoted me on a couple of things and mentioned the Silent Clowns series as well.

Oct 10 - "Cat and the Canary" in Brooklyn

2009-10-14T23:43:00.000-04:00

Sat, Oct 10 -- the first silent film program in this bi-monthly series sponsored by the Brooklyn chapter of the AGO was sparsely attended, unfortunately. The people who came, however, got to hear that magnificent instrument in action. The acoustics in the church are great, and I had fun using the Echo ranks -- which included chimes -- that are at the back of the sanctuary. Used the chimes for the moment when the old clock rings just before the will is read. We had a TV monitor on top of the console, since the screen was below and behind me.

At one point the screen went blank. I kept playing anyway and called out to Keith Bigger, who was running the equipment, and pointed at the screen. I continued to play, looking over my shoulder occasionally to see the screen from the back, as Keith scurried to the monitor and reset it, which didn't take very long. When something like this, or a film break, etc happens, I keep playing. This was one of Lee's things as well, and I've heard stories about Lee playing through a film break. The idea is that until the film is over the show isn't either, and keeping the mood and momentum going is key.

The organ sounded great. Keith is also organ curator and has devoted a great deal of his time to maintaining this beautiful instrument and should get some sort of medal for this at some point. He was one of the few people who said 'yes' to me when I was looking for a place to practice the organ back when I started on the instrument 8 years ago – so was Jeff Barker and Nelson Page at the now-shuttered Galaxy in Gutenberg, NJ which had a wonderful Kimball theatre organ in it.

Next show at the Baptist Temple is in December, and we'll be running Chaplin shorts. Hopefully we'll get a bigger audience next time.

Oct 8 - "Metropolis" at QTIP

2009-10-13T13:57:00.000-04:00

October 8, 7:30pm -- after playing for the Melies/Zecca matinee program (second time, on Thurs), I headed out to QTIP, or Queens Theatre in the Park for this screening of Metropolis that was part of a weekly series that AMMI was doing in a partnership with the theater.

The theater is located inside Flushing Meadows park, and QTIP provided a car service to and from, making the commute much easier for me...plus the return trip was in an Escalade. The show was scheduled to be introduced by David Schwartz, but he'd called me a couple days beforehand asking me to do the intro. This was no problem; I'm used to introducing my shows anyway.

The theater is a very nice space, with an extensive backstage and green room and dressing room area. Actually, I was met by the company manager's assistant, who took me through the staff entrance directly to a dressing room. I'm sure this is what most performers like, but I just wanted to see the theater. I rarely hang out in the dressing room before a show; I like hanging in the wings or back of the theater. Helps me get a handle on the vibe in the room. When I did stand-up back in the late 80s I always stayed in the room to see the comics going up before me and how the crowd was reacting; guess that's where I picked up that habit.

The show was DVD projection, but the image was on a huge, curved screen projected with a high-end 4K projector...very sharp, very bright.

The instrument du jour was a Steinway baby grand that, unfortunately needed some work. Being a tuner/tech I knew exactly what I was dealing with (sluggish center pins, repetition springs in need of regulation), plus there were a few bass notes that wouldn't dampen. However, it was a Steinway and had that nice oomph in the bottom which would be useful for Metropolis, and it was in decent tune and worked out just fine. We set light levels (lowered all until there was just enough so I could see the keys and my story notes), and de-miked the piano; there was a stage mgr, lighting person and projectionist/tech.

Since a lot of background on the film can be found online, I chose to speak briefly in my intro about the various versions of the film, about its original score and why I wasn't using it, and a little about Fritz Lang. We had a modest crowd of 40-50 people, and the film went over really, reaaly well. I brought my Zoom recorder and placed it on the piano to get a reference recording. Below are two "needle-drops" (Daddy, what's a needle?) from my recording of the score.

Clip #1 (2:13) is from, gee, actually I'm not sure:

Clip #2 (5:04) starts during that bourgeous party in the beginng and then there's a shift in tone when Maria and the children enter the room.

I have the whole score on an MP3 and, if I can find the time (and a split point in the middle), maybe I'll release it on altscore.com since it was performed in accompaniment to the DVD and will therefore synch with it.

After the show, a reporter from the Queens Gazette interviewed me about the film, the performance and my work. This article will appear in the next week or so, and I'll post a link once it comes out. When I left the theater, the sun had now set and it was night and there, all lit up in its chromium glory was the Unisphere, which was quite a sight after watching Metropolis.

Oct 7 & 8: trick films @ MoMA

2009-10-10T14:23:00.000-04:00

George Melies and his Rivals
Le Voyage dans la lune (A Voyage to the Moon) 1902. France. Directed by Georges Méliès. 13 min.
Barbe-Bleue 1901. France. Directed by Georges Méliès. 10 min.
Les Sept Chateaux du diable (Seven Castles of the Devil) 1902. France. Directed by Ferdinand Zecca. 12 min.
Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (Impossible Voyage) 1904. France. Directed by Georges Méliès. 17 min.
La Caverne infernale 1905. France. Directed by Gaston Velle. 2 min.
Créations renversantes (Stunning Creations) 1905. France. Directed by Gaston Velle. 2 min.
La Garde fantôme (Phantom Guard) 1905. France. Directed by Gaston Velle. 3 min.
La Peine du talion (Tit for Tat)1905. France. Directed by Gaston Velle. 4 min.
Robert Macaire et Bertrand (Foxy Hoboes) 1906. France. Georges Méliès. 10 min.
Le Tunnel sous la manche (The Nightmare of the Submarine Tunnel) 1907. France. Directed by Georges Méliès. 14 min.
Excursion dans la lune 1908. France. Directed by Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca. 10 min.

We had a really good house on Weds, not only in size but they were really into the films, applauding at the end of each one, and chuckling (both where appropriate and inadverently inappropriate). Thurs's crowd started out small and grew after we began; a more sedate reaction, although they more audibly enjoyed the Zecca knock-off of Trip to the Moon.

I'd have to say that trick films are probably the hardest to play for, even moreso than last week's program of early pre-DWG directors. These trick films find all actors onscreen in tableaus and in constant motion so you aren't always sure where to look. My Weds show, esp with the films I was sughtreading, was about finding who "had the ball" so to speak in a lot of the scenes. For Thurs I knew where to look and where to point the audience musically so they'd find it more eaily as well.

Was surprised that this show of 10 films in a row did not seems as tiring as it ought to. I generally have a rule with shorts programs -- when I have more say in the programming or running of the show -- to put a break after 3 or 4 shorts, because a program of 5 or 6 stories without a brief mental intermission can be draining and by the time you get to the last short you've forgotten the first two. Still, this program of Melies/Zecca worked just fine. We'll see if the same is true of next week's DWG Biograph show.

Unfortunately, the print of Nightmare of the Subway Tunnel did not arrive. Too bad, it's a really good one; Serge Bromberg showed it at BAM a couple years ago. Ironically the print that did show up (but wasn't screened) was Now You Tell One with Charley Bowers. Charles Silver will order the Subway Tunnel film for one of the upcoming programs, so it'll still be seen.

I continue to enjoy playing the Modus for these shows, and was interviewed by a writer for some promotional piece for Yamaha about the instrument. I was actually interviewed by someone in the press every day this week.

Oct 4 - Dough & Dynamite for American Girl

2009-10-07T22:17:00.000-04:00

Oct 4 at 9:30 am (!) found me at MoMA bright and early for a private screening for a handful of young girls, their American Girl dolls, and the girls' moms, a Grandma and a Dad. This was another one of the promotional events linked to American Girl's new Rebecca Rubin doll, whose historical year is 1914. The girls were escorted into the Time Warner screening room by a pair of American Girl special events staffers, where we showed them Charlie Chaplin's Dough and Dynamite.

I had the M-Audio controller keyboard and keyboard stand from MoMA's Miditzer rig set up, connected to my laptop to access a virtual piano sound (okay, it was Garage Band, but I'd found some better samples about a year ago). The laptop was patched into the TW room's audio system. The girls were impressed by the fact that they were going into a screening room, and the two girls who had the Rebecca Rubin doll seemed excited to see the Chaplin film when I mentioned in my intro. D&D may not be the best first silent film to show 5-8 year old girls, but it is part of the story in "Meet Molly", the first of the Rebecca books. Her uncle Max is an actor, working in a nickelodeon, and at the end of the book he finds work in a picture studio and takes Rebecca and her family to a picture show, assuring them it's okay because they're showing Perils of Pauline and the new Chaplin film, "Dough and Dynamite".

In book 4, "Rebecca and the Movies", she visits Uncle Max at the studio:

"On her tenth birthday, Rebecca can hardly believe it when her cousin Max, the actor, invites her to come to his movie studio! Although her parents don't approve of actors or movies, Mama relents and says Rebecca may go. When the camera begins to roll, Rebecca finds herself facing an opportunity she never imagined in her wildest dreams. Does she have the nerve for it? And what would her parents say if they knew?"

The film played okay (it was 9:30 on a Sunday morning, though) and everyone was really appreciative. After the screening, the girls, grown-ups and dolls went to the American Girl Place store for brunch. I'm impressed with the historical research done for the books, and am thrilled that thousands of kids will learn about silent movies and Charlie Chaplin because of this doll and her books. We do another one of these at MoMA on November 8th. I prepared a DVD of the film with my score on it for use at similar private events at the other 7 stores around the U.S.

A little while later, I headed to the New York Film Festival to see Serge Bromberg's new film, Henri Clouzot's Inferno, and got a $10 rush ticket. I met up with Steve Massa and his wife Susan, and we chatted about rare or obscure silent film with Serge after the show. Susan snapped this pic of the three of us.

Oct 3 - shorts & Zorro in Sag Harbor

2009-10-07T21:55:00.000-04:00

My third time performing at the Bay Street Theater found me with the Miditzer in tow. This was a request from Bay Street, and they covered a rental car for me to bring the instrument out (I don't own a car, and the Hampton Jitney wouldn't exactly work). The other thing new was that in addition to the evening show, we did a matinee for kids. The theatre has a regular series of programming called KidStreet, and I was thrilled that we were able to work in some silents to the series.

Miditzer set-up was a snap...it's getting to be that way, a routine now, really. Takes 15 - 20 mins, and because I bring a variety of cables and adaptors and a certain amount of working knowledge of what an audio tech needs (and how to work most mixers), the sound check went really quickly. Best part of the Bay Street's sound system is that the sub-woofers are under the theater seats. So, you really felt the 16' Bourdon in the pedals.

The matinee was attended by littler kids, maybe 8 and younger, plus some moms, Grandparents and a Dad. One Week went over like gangbusters as expected, and Number Please didn't quite get a lot of laughs. Perhaps older kids would've appreciated Lloyd's humor better. The kids show we do in Norway every year is usually a similar age group and, after a very quiet showing of Big Business one year I've learned what works for the 3-7 year old audience better; it's not just slapstick that little ones respond to, it's the spirit in which comedians inflict it on each other.

The evening show went really well. We had a nice crowd and, despite more inadvertent laughter than I'd anticipated – although, this was a Saturday nite crowd, after all – the picture played beautifully and people were really cheering for Doug by the end. I was glad to show Mark of Zorro again after doing it in Tromsø. Another chance to further hone my score. Doug is long overdue for rediscovery or revival, and Zorro is the General or Safety Last of the Fairbanks pictures (meaning it's the best one to show an untested audience).

All in all a great (although long) day of driving and performing. I also learned that 9am (due East) and 11pm (due West) are great times to drive the L.I.E.

Oct 1 "Lesser-Known Pioneers of Cinema" (MoMA)

2009-10-05T23:10:00.000-04:00

La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ. 1902. France. Directed by Ferdinand Zecca, Lucien Nonguet. 30 min.
La Vie du Christ. 1906. France. Directed by Alice Guy Blaché. 28 min.
The Automobile Thieves (incomplete). 1906. USA. Directed by J. Stuart Blackton. 10 min. Francesca di Rimini. 1908. USA. Directed by J. Stuart Blackton. 10 min.
At the Crossroads of Life. 1908. USA. Directed by Wallace McCutcheon, Jr. With D. W. Griffith. 10 min.
Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker. 1908. USA. Directed by Wallace McCutcheon, Jr. Screenplay by D. W. Griffith. Cinematography by G. W. “Billy” Bitzer. 15 min

Read Charles Silver's notes on the program here (you may have to scroll down to the entry for this show).

Oct 1 was the repeat showing of this program, and my playing was markedly different from the first time out, the day before on Sept 30. I recorded my performance on Sept 30 and listened to it as I walked home from MoMA. (I use a Zoom H4 digital recorder.) Showing #2 gave me the advantage of having seen the films the day before so I was better able to anticipate story points, and was also able to shape melody and tempo to help point the audience to where they were supposed to look in the tableau-performance Christ films. I also felt, from listening to the recording, that I could do more in the range of dynamics and arranging, and to allow myself to leave more air between (or during) musical phrases. I recorded the Oct 1st show, and if I can get it together will post a "needle-drop" of a hunk of one of the scores.

The first Jesus film is a gorgeous 35mm print; I'd seen hand-colored early films before, but this entire 2-reel "epic" was hand-colored from start to finish. The Alice Guy film, which I'll be playing for at the Brooklyn Museum's "First Saturday" event in December (they'll be exhibiting paintings that Guy's tableaus were based on), is straight B&W, and not quite quite as razor-sharp, but a good print. The Guy made more use of locations of exterior scenes, while the Zecca was entirely studio-bound.

The "Automobile Thieves" film was a big shift in energy as it is primarily a chase film; I found myself free-associating agitato mood cues from the Photoplay music book I've been working on. I don't usually use that type of music, but it seemed to fit these early films.

I really tried hard to make an improvement in the scores between show #1 and show #2, and think I did. I'm really looking forward to this series -- which will now run through May -- to seeing so many silents in chrono order and to really getting better at accompanying silents.

October begins: 22 performances in and around NY

2009-10-05T22:15:00.000-04:00

October finds me working full-time as a silent film accompanist. 22 performances in and around NY, plus a DVD box set release. When not performing, the rest of my working hours involve preparing for shows, agent work for shows coming up and for shows percolating for 2010, being my own press agent and doing press interviews, plus trying to spend more time at the piano (or organ) to develop and expand my accompaniment vocabulary.

It's daunting and exciting at the same time. I've made myself office manager as well, in order to stay on top of things and not burn out. For instance, in October and in November (18 shows) the days I don't have performances are Mondays and Tuesdays...so that's my "weekend". Some Fridays as well.

I won't have time to go back and write up shows from Sept or the summer, unfortunately, but I'm going to try and report on each of the shows this month. If you read or follow this blog and haven't seen my sched, check it out here. I'm also considering using my Twitter account to "tweet" so people and fans can follow more regularly throughout each day -- tweeting from my cell -- in case that's interesting to anyone. My Twitter account is here.

Do understand that there will be several things going on that I am not going to post about, so do not take what's posted on this blog as the only silent film work I'm doing -- just the live performances.

See you at the silents!

article on Zorro, shorts, at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor

2009-10-01T17:08:00.000-04:00

Elise D'Haene did a real nice write-up in this week's East Hampton Star on the shows I have coming up this Saturday, at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Click here to read the article.

Carmagnole in "Orphans of the Storm"

2009-09-29T12:32:00.001-04:00

Am playing for Orphans of the Storm in Huntington tonight. Reviewing my story sheet reminded me that toward the end the townspeople dance the Carmagnole. My notes -- cribbed from some other website years ago -- on the dance read:

"The Carmagnole, an anonymous song and street dance popular during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution (1789-1799). The carmagnole consisted originally of 13 two-line stanzas, each of which ended with a refrain praising the Revolution. The dance was a form of farandole, the ancient chain dance of France. The Carmagnole was sung and danced at revolutionary gatherings, including festivals and executions.

I went online and found a midi file of the tune (solo melody, no chords or accomp), and found a YouTube video of a 1920 French 78rpm record. Below is the video and a link to the PDF I've made of the lead sheet (in case any other accompanist searched for this and wound up here).

Click here to download the PDF.

Back to Film School: Actualities and Glimmerings of More

2009-09-16T20:38:00.000-04:00

Back to "film school" today! Accompanied the "Actualities and Glimmerings of More" program at MoMA. Had a pretty big crowd, maybe 80-100 people.

I didn't keep count while I was playing, but am guessing it was at least 40 films. Since they were early actualities with little or no plot, and since even the story ones were so short, I was creating full melodies for each rather than doing the usual underscoring thing. The last few films on the program were a few mins long – like the infamous Rescued By Rover – and had more opportunities for my usual format. I did find a more melodramatic approach fit these films, and spontaneously found myself playing The Crafty Spy by Gaston Borch for the gypsy's scenes in Rover. Still it was a challenge creating that many complete melodies, and I was up for it. A nice change...and I get to do it all over again tomorrow.

Last week I noticed on the MoMA website's listing for the first "Auteurist" program there was a link to film notes on that program written by Charles Silver. MoMA stopped doing printed film notes in 2003, and is not resuming doing printed notes. I suggested to Charles that he look into having the notes projected on-screen while the audiences are entering the theater. I really like Charles' writing -- the intro he wrote and gave at one of our Arbuckle shows in 2006 was absolutely brilliant -- and it seemed a shame that people coming to the shows wouldn't get to see these new notes...unless they had an iPhone or web-enabled phone and it suddenly occured to them while waiting for the show to start that they should poke around the MoMA website to see if there were film notes. I arrived at the Bartos theater this afternoon before the audience came in and saw this:

All of Charles' notes are available online at this page. Go there and bookmark the page, as Charles' notes for each program will be added weekly, I believe.

"An Auterist History of Film" at MoMA begins

2009-09-14T14:40:00.000-04:00

For those of you with weekday daytime availability, be sure to bookmark
this page on MoMA Film’s website for An Auteurist History of Film:

http://moma.org/visit/calendar/films/989

The first 6 or 7 months of this two-year film cycle at MoMA, curated by Charles Silver, is all silent film. A different program is shown each week on Weds, Thurs and Fri at 1:30 in Theater 3 (enter on W. 54th St). The cycle goes chronologically through the history of cinema, and showcases prints in MoMA’s collection. Piano accompaniment by yours truly at Weds and Thurs shows (no accomp on Fri). Just $10 each show (free if you’re a member, which is only $75 a year) to attend this excellent ersatz film history course.

Here are the programs scheduled so far, from Sept through Dec:

Sept 16, 17, 18 — actualities from 1890s made by Edison, Lumiere, Skladanowksky, and British Gaumont
Sept 23, 24, 25 — Edwin S. Porter doc “Before the Nickelodeon”, plus (unaccompanied) Porter shorts
Sept 30, Oct 1, 2 — pre-Griffith directors: films from 1902-1908 by Ferdinand Zecca, Alice Guy, J. Stuart Blackton and Wallace McCutcheon
Oct 7, 8, 9 — George Melies and his rivals: trick films from 1902-1908 by Melies, Zecca, and Velle
Oct 14, 15, 16 — D.W. Griffith at Biograph
Oct 21, 22, 23 — The Scandinavian Connection: “The Abyss” with Asta Nielsen and “Ingeborg Holm” dir. Victor Sjöstrom
Oct 28, 29, 30 — Two Danish Innovators: “The Student of Prague” and “The Mysterious X”
Nov 4, 5, 6 — Griffith Leaves Biograph: “Judith of Bethulia” and “The Avenging Conscience”
Nov 11, 12, 13 — “Cabiria” (Italy, 1914)
Nov 18, 19, 20 — “The Birth of a Nation”
Nov 25, 26, 27 — “Intolerance”
Dec 2, 3, 4 — Griffith’s Competitors: Ince and DeMille — “Custer’s Last Fight” and “The Cheat”
Dec 9, 10, 11 — More Competition: Neilan and Vidor — “Amarilly of Clothesline Alley” and “The Jackknife Man”
Dec 16, 17, 18 — And More Competition: Walsh and Tourneur — “Regeneration” and “The Blue Bird”
Dec 23, 24 — Send in the Clowns: comedy shorts with Linder, Chaplin, and Arbuckle

Visit the website for the series for individual program info and film titles at
http://moma.org/visit/calendar/films/989.

* * * * *

An Auteurist History of Film
September 9, 2009–Ongoing

This two-year screening cycle is intended to serve as both an exploration of the richness of the Museum’s film collection and a basic introduction to the emergence of cinema as the predominant art form of the twentieth century. The auteurist approach to film—articulated by the critics of Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s and brought to America by Andrew Sarris—contends that, despite the collaborative nature of the medium, the director is the primary force behind the creation of a film. This exhibition takes this theory as its point of departure, charting the careers of several key figures not in order to establish a formal canon, but to develop one picture of cinematic history.

Organized by Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film.
Yamaha Modus H1 piano generously provided through Yamaha Artist Services, New York.

"Headless Horseman" at Hudson River Museum - Sun 9/13

2009-09-14T10:12:00.000-04:00

The newly revamped Hudson room at the Hudson River Museum does not have its grand piano available just yet, so I brought up my Kurweil PC2, OnStage keyboard stand and a few audio cable and adapters for this show. Being able to bring a keyboard is occasionally a factor in some shows, and being audio-tech-savvy comes in handy as well. This show was teched by someone deployed by Sound Associates in Yonkers (they're also in NYC), so I arrived to find everything all set, with a 1/4" cable plugged into a D.I. box all set and ready. Sometimes my knowledge of operating a Mackie mixer and owning a variety of attenuating audio adapters has been useful at certain venues, but wasn't needed this time. I picked up a few tips on assembling a 9x12 fast-fold screen from the tech while we were waiting for the show to start, so that was another plus for me.

It was a glorious day outside, and so we had about 25 people, mostly seniors and a couple families. The film went over quite well, and my brief intro talk was on Will Rogers' career in silent pictures. The film was shown as part of the "Dutch New York" exhibit.

I have to say Mark Roth's DVD (available from his label ReelclassicDVD) looked really good projected. No noticeable artifacts, and image quality was pretty good considering it was a transfer from a good 16mm print. I noticed a lot of artifacts in the Kino DVD of "The Ring of the Nibelungen" which I played for at Bard in August...surprising considering that release is on dual-layer discs.

A closer view of my Kurz set-up. folding chair was a little low for me, but manageable.

This historic 1800's house is part of the original museum; the show was held
in the newer building, very modern-looking (like something out of "Sleeper")

A view out the window/terrace at the back of the meeting room the show was in,
giving you a pretty good idea where most Yonkers-ites were instead of at the show.

Washington Irving exhibit in the hall outside the Hudson room.

Closer view of one of the images on the wall.

Fall 2009 kicks off

2009-09-11T13:24:00.000-04:00

Here's a snapshot of what's what with me. It's going to be a very busy and exciting fall, with 15-20 shows each month. I'll try to be better about posting, and will try to retro-actively post about the shows I did in August bit by bit.

I'm back in NYC, after a great week in Tromsø, Norway. At right you see me with Martha Otte, festival director of "Stumfilmdager i Tromsø", on opening night. I accompanied MoMA's new print of The Mark of Zorro on the Miditzer, and the film brought the house down, and everyone was wowed by the sound of the theater organ. Probably the 2nd time the sound of the Wurlitzer has been heard at a silent film in Norway (the first being my accompaniment last year in Tromsø of Nell Shipman's Something New).

In Norway when an audience's applause builds and builds, it morphs into a rhythmic clapping (about 120bpm, quasi march tempo). It just does that. All by itself. I should ask about that one of these days...

Have hit the ground running and am catching up on emails from theaters, orchestras, etc and tidying up travel arrangements for out-of-town shows between now and Xmas. I think we're going to be able to route the Miditzer through a different/better sound system at the Lincoln this year and be able to access the sub-woofers under the stage, so those 16' bass notes will be felt as well as heard. The Yamaha HO1 Modus piano (left) has arrived at MoMA's Bartos theatre, and will be there for the duration of Charles Silver's An Auteurist History of Film -- well, for the 6 months of silents anyway.

Down-to-the-wire...we have now at long last secured a venue for the Silent Clowns Film Series, the Arclight Theatre on W 71st, just off Bway (no link here because the theater has no website). It's a church basement theater, but much nicer than what you're probably picturing. We have to bring in and hang our own screen and I'll come in a couple times this month to rassle with their upright to get it in shape, but at least we've got a place to hang our hats. This space hunt was a real nail-biter, and I've been looking for a venue since February. Having to relocate is an added stress to our usual pre-season prep, and the lack of venues (esp the affordable kind) in the Upper West Side made for a heck of a challenge. We'd hoped to return to the West Side Y's "Little Theater", now that it's all beautifully renovated, but they want $1,000 a show (!). We will present our holiday/Dec show in partnership with the Museum of the City of NY, which works out well since Dec 6 wasn't avilable at the Arclight.

This Sunday I'll accompany The Headless Horseman, starring Will Rogers, at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. They'd wanted to do something to tie in with their "Dutch New York" exhibit, and I suggested this film since it was also shot in the Hudson Valley, and since the DVD edition already has my score credit on it. The museum worked out a license with Mark Roth at ReelclassicDVD for the show, and will cover my transportation since I have to bring my Kurzweil (their acoustic grand is unavailable right now). This is my 3rd or 4th show for the Hudson River Museum.

Okay...my time's up. Gotta go! See you at the silents!

Ben

ReelclassicDVD now accepts online orders!

2009-08-29T18:33:00.000-04:00

ReelclassicDVD now accepts orders online with payments by credit card or PayPal. Up to now orders had to be placed by emailing or phoning in your CC info, but the company's just upgraded their website so customers can buy directly over the website and pay securely online as well.

ReelclassicDVD has released many rare silents over the last few years. I've been scoring for Mark Roth's fine DVD-R label from the beginning some years back. Unlike most of the other DVD-R labels, Mark's initiative has always been to release silents with new scores from us accompanists, rather than create a pastiche of music from instrumental recordings. He's put out a lot of great stuff that is too small-potatoes for Kino to spend time on but are important enough for us silent film fans to want to have in our collections.

Click here to check out ReelclassicDVD's long list of releases.

Vermont radio interview

2009-08-14T15:44:00.001-04:00

I was on the Mark Johnson Show on WDEV on Thursday morning, Aug 13, for about half an hour at the top of the show. I was promoting the Chaplin show in Manchester VT (Aug 15) and the Lloyd show in Rupert VT (Aug 23), among other things. Listen in!

Steamboat Bill in Culpeper

2009-07-24T18:05:00.000-04:00

I know, I know...haven't posted in a long time. This is gonna be a quickie, 'cause I'm running off to Culpeper and D.C. for a weekend of shows. Steamboat Bill Jr at the LOC Packard Campus theater in Culpeper VA on Sat 7/25 and The Gaucho at the NGA on Sun 7/26. It's a restored U.A. feature weekend!

Here's a link to a real nice article in the Culpeper newspaper that I was interviewed for. Click here to read it.

See you at the silents!

Ben

music scanning and other progress

2009-06-18T15:37:00.000-04:00

June 18 -- My brains and time are primarily occupied with any and all work on finishing up the sheet music book these days, and I've managed to wedge in time to check out a piano for MoMA's Bartos theater, and have been working out details for my August shows in VT and a couple new film series for the fall. [I'm writing this while scanning in piece after piece of vintage photoplay sheet music; at this very moment it's The Bold Riders by Gerard Carbonara.]

On Wednesday, after finishing up going through sheet music in the collection of MoMA's film department, I went to the Yamaha showroom on Fifth Avenue (the former Aeolian building) to take a look at a piano for the Celeste Bartos theater at MoMA. Thus far, silent film exhibition in that theater (in the new Educ bldg) has been very sparse, and I've used the Miditzer for those shows. However, starting in mid-September I will be accompanying silents twice a week going into April 2010 for An Auteurist History of Film. The first 4 or 5 months' programs are films that may be best suited by piano accompaniment, and so we are trying to work out a way to get a piano into the theater. What we looked at was this "Modus" model. It's based on the slim-line Clavinova and it plays and sounds great. Plus it looks like it should be in the home of Mr. & Mrs. Arpel in Tati's Mon Oncle. I don't know what we'll ultimately wind up using, but I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing this instrument. Click here to go to Yamaha's page for the instrument for info and media clips. The series, which we're all referring to as "The History Cycle", is organized (MoMA's word for "curated") by Charles Silver, and will actually go on for a couple years but the silents end in the spring.

[Now I'm scanning "Storm, Strife or Tempest" by Charles Ancliffe…]

Another series brewing is at the Baptist Temple in Brooklyn, a couple blocks from BAM. There is a gorgeous Steere & Sons orchestral organ in there, and the church and local chapter of the AGO (American Guild of Organists) are collaborating to make the series happen. When I started playing the organ several years ago, this was an instrument I was able to practice on several times. An orchestral organ's sound is somewhere between a church organ and a theatre organ. It has the flutey sounds of a church organ and a lot of the reed and string-ey sounds of a theatre organ, plus some more modest-sounding brass and tuned percussions (harp and chimes) and doesn't have the show-y sounds of a theatre organ (tibias, bright brass, etc.). In spite of the theatre organ's being called a unit orchestra, this Steere & Sons probably leans more toward an orchestral sound than a Wurlitzer often does. The instrument's in great shape, thanks to Keith Bigger who has lovingly and with great dedication maintained and repaired it for many years. Click here to go to the AGO's web page for more info and pics of the organ and the church. We're working out film titles and dates, and once this is all solidified I'll post here and list the shows on my regular website.

[…scanning "Allegro Scintillante" by Kempinski now...]

In the last week or two I've selected the August film programs I'm doing in Hamilton (The Kid Brother), Manchester Center VT (Chaplin Mutual shorts) and in Rupert VT (Grandma's Boy plus two shorts). The latter two are 16mm, my prints. The Rupert show is in the oldest church in Vermont, where there is a beautful 2-manual Estey organ with a big TPO-like tremolo, and is being co-sponsored by the local chapter of the AGO.

The rest of June is gobbled up by frantic rewrites on the book's text, last-minute scanning, plus shows of Biograph shorts (Neversink Valley Area Museum), The Birth of a Nation (MoMA), and Chaplin's The Kid (C.A.C.).

See you at the silents (or the asylum)!

Sherlock Holmes, with John Barrymore

2009-05-30T23:13:00.000-04:00

June 7 -- I was hired by Kino in March to record a score for the silent film of Sherlock Holmes (1922) starring John Barrymore, and got my promo copy of the Barrymore box set that it's part of the other day. Packaging and esp the artwork is very nice, and this should prove to be a nice set for the overlooked silent film work of John Barrymore.

One thing I appreciated about the call was the request that I do the score on theatre organ. This was another opportunity to help make the sound of the organ part of the silent-film-on-DVD landscape as well as to show off the Miditzer. The other scores on the set are by Bill Perry (piano) on Beloved Rogue, Mont Alto on Dr. Jekyll.

Sherlock Holmes is not necessarily The Last Command or Orphans of the Storm or Wings, but it is definitely worth seeing. Plus it's got a great cast that includes a young mustache-free William Powell, plus Roland Young, Gustave von Seyffertitz, Reginald Denny, and the pretty-although-not-much-in-the-acting-department Carole Dempster (who I'm guessing is the reason the GEH restoration has a funding credit to Hugh Hefner).

My process for scoring a feature for DVD usually involves watching the film a few times once I get the MOS screener. First time is to watch the picture (or revisit it, if it's a familiar film), and the second and/or third is to make mental and written notes about scenes and mood shifts. If there's time, I then put it aside for a few days to digest the film and think about what the film's dramatic themes are and about the main character's journey. It's also time used to figure out the musical feel of the score, and often this is impacted by factors like transfer speed where the film will need a little more or different help.

I set up the Miditzer and improvised and worked out themes for a while, and then recorded the score in three sections. Sometimes I can get all the way through at one shot, and sometimes I hit a couple of really awfully wrong notes and will stop, back up and start recording another segment. I've learned to musically resolve what I'm playing on a fade-out, so that I have a clean edit point if I need it.

The DVD comes out in July 7th, and you can order it on Amazon by clicking here. I hope people like the score, but more importantly, I hope people like the film because of it.

Here are some frame grabs from the screener (you'll see the VTC, or visual timecode, at the bottom).

Cruel & Unusual: shows #1 - #4

2009-05-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

Our first four Cruel and Unusual Comedy shows at MoMA have gone extremely well. We've had great houses – I'd guestimate 200+ people, and lots of new (and younger!) faces – at every program. Eileen Bowser came to our first show, and will be guest speaker at our last show on June 1st. It's the automobile program, which she spoke at when we did our class in Nov/Dec; when we were coming up with show concepts we wanted Eileen to speak and, at the time, was writing something about Mack Sennett and Henry Ford, and Sennett's adopting the assembly-line production techniques of the automobile factory. So that became one of our shows.

The films have gotten lots of laughs, especially the last two. The Gratuitous Violence and Kids and Animals programs have a lot more out-and-out slapstick in them than the drag and race programs' films did. The Violence show went extremely well, with Mack Sennett frying Ford Sterling in the electric chair and Paul Parrott and Kalla Pasha attacking each other and vomiting being big hits.

We've had great publicity as well, with Dave Kehr mentioning the series at the top of his regular Thursday "Film Series and Movie Listings" column two weeks in a row, plus the Village Voice, and several blogs including the Sundance Channel's.

Musically, it's been a little trying but having survived every single Slapsticon I've gotten used to playing for several programs of non-stop slapstick. During the pause between each film, if I haven't come up with something beforehand as a main theme to weave through the score for a short, something will either pop into my head in a split-second or sometime I just put my hands on the keys and a tune just comes out. Often I'll try to create a melody that fits the rhythm of how you'd say the title of the film, as if a piece of popular sheet music had come from/for the film. [My score for The Wonders of Magnetism on the Edison set uses a theme that goes "Tho-o-o-ma-a-as ED-i-son...hey, he's a real smart guy!"]

Sometimes, because there are only so many things one can do with comedy music, a familiar melody accidentally gets improvised in the heat of the moment. A friend who was at the 4pm show on Weds 5/27 told me afterward he caught me stuck on a theme that bore a striking (though totally inadvertent) resemblance to "What Would We Do Without You?" from Sondheim's "Company", and I've avoided the rhythm of that piece ever since, just to be safe. Sometimes you improvise something that sounds familiar to you and get right off it, and sometime it sounds similar to something someone in the audience, even without trying. At the April 19th Silent Clowns' Chaplin program someone asked me if I'd played a theme from Limelight during one of the films (I hadn't).

One happy accident that fit another one happened at the first show. In the brief pause before the Arbuckle Good Night Nurse was to start, I was trying to come up with a theme to play, and the theme I'd written years ago for the Lupino Lane Good Night Nurse popped into my head and I began playing it. I looked up from the keys to see to my -- and everyone's -- surprise...the Lupino Lane Good Night Nurse (with foreign flash titles). I heard a little groan from the audience, but didn't want to stop the show. I stopped playing for a moment and announced to the audience that this was another silent comedy called Good Night Nurse, starring Lupino Lane, and that it was really funny. Which it was, and it played really well. WDidn't really bother us, as the Arbuckle is on DVD and the Lupino Lane is rarely shown . A number of people came up to Steve and me aftwards asking about Lupino Lane and telling us how much they liked the short. We've sorted this all out now, ordered the Arbuckle, and this will open our last show so we can include this in the series.

Can't believe the series will be over on Monday!

See you at the silents!

Village Voice article on "Cruel and Unusual Comedy"

2009-05-20T22:34:00.000-04:00

Leonard Lopate on WNYC

2009-05-19T15:07:00.001-04:00

May 19 – Steve and I were on the Leonard Lopate Show this afternoon. This was my third time on the show; I'd been on (solo) in 2006 for the MoMA Arbuckle series, and in 2007 as sidekick to Jessica Rosner plugging Kino's Reel Baseball DVD (which she produced). I had a great time, and it was great to see (show producer) Melissa Eagan again. I snapped this photo (above) before we went in. That's Lopate on the left, and guest Eric Sanderson (author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City on the right. Just pretend Steve and I are sitting where Sanderson is.

The segment went well and we covered most of the main points of the series. Managed another plug for MoMA's education programming while mentioning our course version of C&U offered last Nov/Dec, and tipped my hat to Eileen Bowser while we were discussing the "Ford vs. Sennett" program. Although Steve and I were kicking ourselves for not talking about Ron's and Charles's involvement when the topic of grouping the films by social issue came up – which was, basically, Ron's concept and was key to getting the series both organized and successfully pitched to the dept – overall, Steve and I thought the segment went well.

I arrived home, and the phone rang. My wife answered it and handed it to me...it was Stuart Oderman, who had just heard me on the radio. Hadn't talked with him in a while and we chatted at length. He's playing on Friday at the Neversink Valley Area Museum for a progam of Gish films – the museum is near Cuddebackville, where DWG shot a lot of pictures – and I'll be there on June 26 for a similar program of Biograph shorts.

See you at MoMA!

WFMU radio interview

2009-05-18T21:36:00.000-04:00

May 18 — Steve Massa and I were on WFMU tonight for a full hour on "The Speakeasy with Dorian", hosted by Dorian Devins and co-hosted by Bruce Bennett. Bruce is a great film writer who I reconnected with in 2000 when he wrote a profile on me and Stuart Oderman for TimeOut New York during MoMA 2000. Bruce and I went to NYU at the same time and were in the same dorm (Brittany, on 10th and Bway), and he talks about hearing me play for Bill Everson's classes during the interview. Bruce also wrote a piece for the New York Sun about the Mabel Normand Head Over Heels show I did at Walter Reade (which Steve introduced).

Below are photos I snapped of Bruce and Dorian before we got started. There wasn't time to talk a group photo afterwards, as the next show's personnel came in when we were done and we had to scoot.

Steve and I were on for the whole hour, and had a great time. I even threw in a few plugs and thank-you's for MoMA's education department, projectionists, my band score premiering in Milford CT next month et al. It was a great show, and a good dry-run for Lopate tomorrow.

listen to Steve and Ben on "The Speakeasy with Dorian" with Dorian Devins
and co-host Bruce Bennett on WFMU on May 18, 2009 (approx 1 hour)

Au Bonheur Des Dames - 2nd performance (w/audio)

2009-05-17T21:52:00.000-04:00

May 16 (Sat) – Had two great shows of "Museum Trip" in Brooklyn with Parallel Exit, and then got a second crack at Duvivier's "Au Bonheur de Dames" at MoMA. Made some improvements in the Duvivier score second time around in terms of underscoring choices, wanting to make it play better this time and having had a chance to digest the film.

* * * *

After a run-through and two performances of The Museum Trip in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I hopped on a B61 bus and thence to an A train to MoMA; fortunately, the scrambled weekend rerouting of the subways caused the A to run part of the trip on the F line, and since the F trains were running on the E line for part of their Manhattan sojourn, my train went to 53rd and 5th, across from MoMA.

I had a 5pm show of Au Bonheur de Dames, a repeat of the film I'd played for on Weds. Having seen the film and not only had my own reaction to the film's seemingly disjointed scenario, and had that seconded by audience members I spoke with after the first performance (see previous blog posting) I was paying even closer attention to the film for foreshadowing this time. Most of the story elements that either seemed to come out of nowhere were actually planted early in the film, but just not very specifically. I was able to underscore these moments in a different way this time to help give the audience clues.

The daughter who is taken very ill at the end of the story is seen coughing a bit in early scenes, but is not given a close-up or title card to point this out. The father's going postal at the end of the film is a result of a building frustration with the competing department story and its contruction work, but this again is not shown in a pointed manner, and could easily be missed. The boss at work whom the main character seems to fall in love with despite his being a creep, can actually be seen as a mroe sympathetic character, but to American eyes perhaps, this middle aged man with a moustache looks more like a sexual threat to the young woman. Playing him with more sympathetic underscoring takes some of the lecherous edge off him (although he is already married).

Also, on a second pass after having not only played for the film but also have a few days to digest it, made the film's theme – bonheur vs. progress – clearer. After the show one of the senior regulars at the show shared with me that she'd been to the department store shown in the film – it is a real place, and not a set –and that seeing the ornate dome in real life was breathtaking.

Here's the first 7 mins of the score, starting from just after the main titles:
(music copyright © 2009 by Ben Model all rights reserved)

Tomorrow, Steve Massa and I will be on WFMU plugging Cruel and Unusual Comedy, and will be on Leonard Lopate on Tuesday doing the same. I'll post/embed these broadcasts.

See you at the silents!

Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930) - dir Julien Duvivier

2009-05-14T21:11:00.000-04:00

I've now played for all four of the Julien Duvivier films in the series at MoMA, with two repeats to come. So far my favorite is La Vie miraculeuse de Therese Martin, perhaps because its storyline is much more simple than the other 3 pictures. All of them have stunning visuals, very nice cinematography and a great deal of use of superimpositions (often multiples or matted tryptichs) to show what is going on in the mind of a particular character. The plot lines of the other 3 are not as airtight – interesting, considering 2 of them were based on novels – and story developments appear or disappear without justification. Au Bonheur des Dames ("Women's Pleasure"), based on a Zola novel, is the loosest with characters and their storylines coming out of nowhere or being discarded. Its stunning production design, cinematography and layered visuals are smoke-and-mirrors that keep you entertained.

But it's precisely this aspect that makes the Duvivier films particularly juicy ones to accompany because there is so much visually to respond to dramatically; whether the storylines are thoroughly carried out or not there is at least a lot of drama in the scenes both in terms of the acting and the visuals. This is often a factor with film accompaniment. Some of the Russian pictures are very simple plot-wise but there is a lot of drama to work with. The toughest films are ones that have less to offer dramatically (Griffith's Dream Street comes to mind...).

I had a hard time deciding what genre/flavor the film was as I accompanied it, and as I discussed the film with some audience members after the show realized I wasn't crazy...the film does have a few different styles and plots. It starts off as a jazz age department store drama, then it's about the girl's father's failing business, then she gets a job as a model at the dept store and there is a near-catfight in lingerie among the girls in the dressing room, then some lecherous business with two different bosses trying to make a move on her, then another subplot with a Baron who is helping finance the dept store, then they all have a "let's go to Coney" sequence (only we're in France), then the girl's brother's fiancee is suddenly near-death ill, then construction on the new dept store make a lot of noise and causes the father to go nuts and shoots a bunch of people in the dept store, only to get run over...then time passes and the new dept store is finally built, the girl tells one of the lecherous bosses she's always loved him (?!) and a skywrite writes the name of the store "Au Bonheur des dames" in the sky but the "Au" fades away leaving "bonheur" or "happiness"...and fade out.

You can rent or buy the DVD of this from Facets, who also sells/rents Poil de carrotte. These DVD's are U.S. releases of the French Lobster DVD's of these films, which feature musical scores composed by Gabriel Thibedeau and performed by an octet (there is a female vocalist who sings in a number of places in Au Bonheur).

Below are a bunch of screen shots from the film, just to give you an idea of the production design and scale and the cinematography. This film repeats at MoMA on Saturday, and so I'll get another crack at this one.

Edgar Jones in "Border River" (1919)

2009-05-09T10:23:00.000-04:00

I have just scored and uploaded to YouTube a 16mm print I picked up on eBay a year (or so) ago, called Border River (1919) starring and directed by Edgar Jones, who made dozens of films -- mainly westerns -- throughout the teens and early twenties. There are no FIAF holdings on this title, and this show-at-home print, probably made in the '40s on Dupont stock, may be the only existing print. Probably most notable about the film is the love interest role played by a 20-year-old Evelyn Brent; this was her 16th film according to her IMDB listing.

This is my third "direct-to-YouTube" release. In the past few months I've scored and uploaded my Kodascope or show-at-home prints of Neely Edwards in The Little Pest (1926) and Lige Conley in Fast and Furious (1924).

Because the film runs around 24 mins at 21 fps, I had to break it up into three sections for YouTube, which you can watch here, below. I've uploaded the film in "HQ" mode, so if you've got a good internet connection and video card you can watch it in better quality. The three sections are embedded here as a playlist, so when part 1 ends part 2 will follow, etc. Enjoy!

Radio City Music Hall Wurlitzer (again)

2009-05-06T21:12:00.000-04:00

May 6 – was back at Radio City Music Hall for some practice time on the Wurlitzer today, in prep for next week's SVA graduation. Turns out I won't be using the organ at the ceremony -- nothing to do with RCMH, it's just that the sample recordings I'd sent in didn't quite fit right. I'm actually not sure the theatre organ would be right for the diploma ceremonies myself, but wanted to give it a shot.

At any rate, I did get to spend about an hour and a half playing and finding my way around the instrument. A few tour groups came through, and I made sure to play something that sound more like music than poking around and noodling where there were people in the theatre. One school group had a handful of kids who broke away from their group on stage and came over to ask about the organ.

At any rate, I'll still be playing for the graduation exercises there next Friday, and will be on the RCMH's Steinway concert grand improvising music while the grads come up to get their diplomas. Wonder who's the keynote speaker this year. (Last year it was Franch Rich.)

Here's a recording of a few minutes of my rehearsal time. Keep in mind that I'm making this all up, so there are some musical gaffes here and there. Sound quality isn't optimal because of where I put my recorder (next to the console...which is why you hear my pedalling in the quieter section); also the instrument hasn't been tuned in a few months (but it will before next week). However, you are getting to hear the RCMH Wurlitzer, and you may want to listen with headphones so you can feel that bass.

Here's a close-up of the console --

and a view of the empty theater from where the console is --

Had some screening time at MoMA this afternoon to work out the "live restoration" of Lizzies of the Field with a projectionist, before we show that film at the June 1st Cruel and Unusual. We did a trial run of the changeover from the 35mm of reel 1 to the 16mm print at its "in-point" and it looks pretty good. Bruce Lawton has done this sort of thing for a film at the Silent Clowns a few times, and that's what had given me the idea to try this at the C&U class in November. I think our audience at MoMA will get a kick out of getting to see this "complete" version of Lizzies (I know Steve and I will).

"Poil de carotte" at MoMA (2nd show)

2009-05-04T20:16:00.000-04:00

May 4, 2009 – played for "Poil de carotte" again at MoMA this afternoon, without incident. Score went better (for me, anyhoo) as expected.

Recorded blogcast and my score, as I did yesterday (see below). Here's a chance to see how when I play for the same film twice in two consecutive days the score is different, althoug some elements, moodwise, may be similar. Blogcast outlines impressions of the show as well as some info about a screening of Lizzies of the Field at MoMA.

Blogcast:

Score recording (pauses heard are for live, spoken translation of intertitles, which didn't get picked up by my mike)
(© 2009 by Ben Model all rights reserved)

Poil de carrotte

2009-05-03T17:58:00.000-04:00

May 3, 2009 - played for Poil de carotte ("Carrot Top"), the 1925 silent directed by Julien Duvivier. I recorded my blog entry as a blogcast/podcast on my digital recorder while walking home from MoMA after the show (so that's why I sound a little out of breath), rather than come home and do a lot of typing.

Below are my blog podcast and the first 6 or 7 mins of my performance. Not exactly going to give Paderewski a run for his money (note clam hit in first bar or so), but here it is "hot off the presses" nonetheless. Tomorrow's repeat will go better.

Blogcast:

Score recording (pauses heard are for live, spoken translation of intertitles, which didn't get picked up by my mike)
(© 2009 by Ben Model all rights reserved)

The DVD, released by Lobster in Europe (and rentable from Facets here), includes a spoken intro by Serge Bromberg (don't break your mouse clicking on the image below...it's just a screen-grab):

April update

2009-04-20T23:12:00.000-04:00

Today Steve Massa and I were at MoMA screening Thanhouser films with Charles Silver for a program we're working on for October. The program will help the Thanhouser Film Corp. celebrate the company's centenary; Ned Thanhouser will be doing a program with the LOC as well as at MoMA during the last weekend of October, and we were screening MoMA's holdings on Thanhouser films. Saw a few real gems, like The Marble Heart and A Dog's Love starring Shep the dog. Here's a photo of the studio, located at the intersection of Warren, Grove and Center streets in New Rochelle, from the Thanhouser website. The website offers 9 dvd volumes of films, and there will be more released in October.

While we were at MoMA Steve and I picked up freshly printed copies of the May members calendar, with Cruel and Unusual Comedy listed inside. Steve and I are putting finishing touches on our online film notes for the shows, which we are posting on a blogspot site, and will make those "live" in a couple of weeks.

Last Thursday I accompanied Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother at Wesleyan University. This was my fourth annual show for them, and one of the treats doing shows there is getting to see Jeanine Basinger (pronounced BAY-singer, like a vocalist fom San Francisco). She is a delight and such a big fan and proponent of silent film. I brought my 16mm print of Dog Shy with Charley Chase to open for the feature, and the film absolutely killed (no surprise) and Jeanine and I and some fans who stayed around afterward talked about how great Chase is and how his films should be seen more. Also chatted about Lloyd and his mastery. As always, I brought the Miditzer to their beautiful theater – also the first place I ever used the Miditzer for a performance – and their state of the art sound system made the instrument sound amazing.

Have been plowing through photoplay music from the collection donated to the Silent Clowns a year ago by Ted Simons, over 360 pieces of vintage silent film music in arrangements for small orchestra. A week or so ago I went through the 5 boxes of music, organized them all by series and cataloged them, and pulled the piano/conductor parts. Some of it is really great, and could stand on its own. I'm earmarking pieces I like for the Schirmers book as I go.

Had a great Silent Clowns show of Chaplin shorts on Sunday. One of our best turnouts of the season, and a great show put together by Bruce. It's also our last show at the New-York Historical Society, where we've been since 2005 (and were also there from 2000-2002). A number of our regular audience members have been coming up to me or emailing me with ideas of places to check out and its been really touching seeing all this support.

There are loads of other things brewing, shows being booked or percolated, and I'll be gearing up soon for the Julien Duvivier retrospective at MoMA that'll include a number of his silents. More info as it becomes solidified, important or cool.

Up next, it's Arbuckle/Keaton shorts in 35mm at the Cinema Arts Centre!

See you at the silents!

Cruel and Unusual Comedy in MoMA calendar

2009-04-06T12:39:00.000-04:00

Just got the PDF of MoMA's May/June 2009 members calendar, with the full listings for Cruel and Unusual Comedy in it. Am posting the pertinent pages from the calendar here; click on the images below to see them larger.

Unfortunately, due to space restrictions, there was no way to include info or a blurb about each individual program or any of the films, aside from title, date and running time. Steve Massa and I are creating our own online film notes for the shows on our own (not-affiliated-with MoMA) website, and those will be up in early May.

WNYC art.culture podcast

2009-04-03T20:55:00.000-04:00

Margaret Pickering interviewed me after Wednesday's show of Wild Bill Hickok. She's a blogger on WNYC's culture page. This podcast appeared on their page today and runs about 10 mins 20 seconds. The segment with me is brief, and starts at around 08:40.

Click on the image below to go to WNYC's art.cult page.

Wild Bill Hickok at MoMA

2009-04-02T15:14:00.000-04:00

Just played show #2 of Wild Bill Hickok (1923) will William S. Hart. Yesterday's show went well, and today's went a little better. I was a little more focused and also backed off a little more. On the second pass I was also able to get a better handle on a western-type flavor on the theatre organ, something that comes much easier on piano. Had fun (both times) using the piano rank for the saloon scenes.

Tried using "Old Dan Tucker" as a final theme today, sort of the way "Jubilo" works in the Will Rogers picture of the same name. I'm not sure if "Old Dan Tucker" fits the character of Hickok, but the song is identified with him onscreen at the beginning and about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way in.

Character actor Leo Willis turns up in a small role at the beginning of the film. He's one of Lloyd's brothers in The Kid Brother, and turns up in tons of other Roach films and other comedy shorts. I found this photo of Willis seen at right on ancientfaces.com and was posted there by his great-granddaughter.

A woman chatted me up atfter the show, asking about the Miditzer. I did my usual Miditzer talk – plugging the instrument, its creators, MoMA's purchasing the equipment, and the importance of hearing that sound at silent film shows. In talking about the lack of theater organs in NYC, she mentioned that there was a movie palace hwere she grew up, in Idaho called the Egyptian. Irony strikes again, as this is the theater where the Treasure Valley Youth Symphony has performed my orchestral scores for the last 6 years, and I've actually been there twice now (2006 and 2008). The Egyptian in Boise, ID has a Robert-Morton theatre organ which is an original installation.

One more show of Wild Bill tomorrow, then on Sunday it's So's Your Old Man at the Silent Clowns.

See you at the silents!

Newsday article on Joan of Arc show

2009-03-28T16:32:00.000-04:00

This is an article/interview from 3/19/09's issue of Newsday promoting the Cinema Arts Centre show of The Passion of Joan of Arc which we did on 3/24/09. Click on the image to see it larger.

Wild Bill Hickok and The Passion of Joan of Arc

2009-03-26T22:02:00.000-04:00

Tuesday morning, after a day off to rest and recover from Cinefest, I was at MoMA for a press screening of Wild Bill Hickok (1923) starring William S. Hart. At right is a still I found online of Hart as Hickok, with Abraham Lincoln and General Custer (well, actors playing Lincoln and Custer). The running time is 55 mins, but it was released at 7 reels – Anne Morra told me it was released at this length but was edited down soon after it was released.

This was a Hart I'd not seen before, and the press screening was being held as part of a press conference to promote a new photography exhibit at MoMA about the old west. There's a film series to go with it, and this is the silent film in the group. It's a good film, full of what you expect from Hart: gunfights, unrequited love, friendship with his horse, tears from old Bill (of course), and some great Western stuff.

This was a nice chance to preview the film before playing for it next week (April 1, 2 and 3 at 1:30 in the Bartos Theater, on Miditzer). Not that I wouldn't have a problem playing for it "cold" at the first show, but it gave me the chance to find out ahead of time that I need to look up the melody for "Old Dand Tucker". Hart sings it to his horse at the beginning of the film, and is seen later in the film playing the tune on a fife. I may bring it around a 3rd time when he and his horse ride off into the sunset.

Here's a video of the tune found on YouTube, played on a fife, as a demo of rudimentary drumming:

And here's another video, with the lyrics:

After the show, went home, took care of some "agent business" (bookings, etc.) packed up my laptop and Miditzer peripherals and headed out to the LIRR for the evening's show of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc at the CAC in Huntington. Image of Dreyer seen at right is from the Carl Dreyer website – click on the image to go to the site, which is hosted by the Danish Film Institute.

Print was the 35mm from the BFI. It's a real nice, sharp print, and has the film's original Danish intertitles with English subtitles supered over them. The film went over extremely well, even for me. I find sometimes that Dreyer's Joan can be like watching paint dry, but I think the combination of our running it at 24fps and accompanying it on (theatre) organ helped me really connect emotionally with the story and Joan's journey, and I really liked the film this time.

Had a chance to use percussion, sparingly, and had a couple nice moments where the chimes were very effective. I'm never sure about using these, but I had a few comments from audience members afterward about what an emotional effect they had. Sometimes the tuned percussion can be shticky, something I'm always concerned about. We had a nice big crowd for the show, and they all really enjoyed the film. I'm looking forward to next month's show of Arbuckle-Keaton shorts.

I'm finding that in accompanying films on the organ in some cases I go on the journey with the characters on a deeper level emotionally than I do with piano. Depends on the film. Some pictures, like Old Ironsides and Underworld, where I'm not getting as much from the performers, I don't necessarily notice it. But a couple months ago I played for The Last Command a couple times at MoMA and found myself spent at the end of the film, moreso than usual. I hope audiences are having the same reaction.

Still managing to book or confirm something nearly every day, and am still playing catch-up a little after being out of town for Cinefest. Sunday is Foolish Wives at the Silent Clowns series; Bruce always programs a drama in each season as a nice change of pace. I watched the DVD of it the other day. I don't think I've seen the film since I played for it in Everson's class back in the early '80s. Bruce is picking a comedy short with Mae Busch in it to open for the feature.

See you at the silents!

Cinefest 2009 in Syracuse

2009-03-22T17:34:00.000-04:00

March 20-22: Syracuse, NY – I'm killing some time before my JetBlue flight outta Syr, and thought I'd post here. Just finished 3 days at the 29th annual Cinefest here in Syracuse. The festival runs 4 days, but I couldn't get here for the first day, because I had a show of Broken Blossoms in New Rochelle on the 19th. That show went well; audience was all seniors but we had a nice crowd (including my mom and a couple of other relatives), and the film played really well.

At Cinefest friday night, I wound up playing for a silent called The Circle, based on the Somerset Maugham play. A nice late '20s melodrama with one of my favorite character men in it, Creighton Hale, to keep things light. Saturday's 35mm show at the Palace Theater (hey, ma, I finally played the Palace!) was great. All silents, all but one of which were from LOC. We each played for one or two of the six features screened between 8:30 and 3:30, using Philip's Kawai digital keyboard and amp. The theater is a historic one, built in the late 1920s and is a great place to see silents and older films. It's one of the aesthetic things I enjoyed about Cinefest, and which I really like about the Cinesation in Ohio, where all the film screenings are held in the town's 1916 Lincoln Theater, originally built as a Triangle.

Pictured above are the four accompanists for the 2009 Cinefest: (left to right: Donald Sosin, Makia Matsumura, Ben Model and Philip Carli.

I wound up mostly seeing the silents that were screened, back at the hotel (Holiday Inn), and spent the rest of the time either napping or hanging out and schmoozing. One of the great things about Cinefest is that it was a great chance to meet a lot of people I only knew over e-mail, both classic film afficionados and archive/industry folks. I also got to chat with a lot of people who read this blog and who have downloaded my altscore scores. This was very satisfying – you put things "out there" online and there's no real way to find out who's reading this or if it's of interest to anyone. Google analytics gives you numbers, if you set up the code on your site correctly, but it's nice to meet some of my "readers". There were also a number of people from the NYC contingent who I usually only see for 10-15 minutes before and/or after a show, and this was a nice chance to hang out with them (especially since I wasn't in charge of anything here).

While there weren't any standouts among the silents for me, I think it's because they were all really good films, all slightly obscure titles (for me, anyway) that I was glad I got to see. I think I did all right on my playing. The piano at the hotel was a Yamaha Clavinova, another nice instrument with a good sound, provided by a local Yamaha dealer (thanks to Makia). I'll post photos of the Palace Theater in a separate post, so you can get a good look at the place.

Tuesday I'm playing for a press screening of the William S. Hart Wild Bill Hickok at MoMA in the morning, and then that night I'm in Huntington for Dreyer's Joan of Arc. Rest of the week will be more "office" work and other projects. Mostly, I'm looking forward to being home with Mana and Molly.

See you at the silents!

Mar 6: The Freshman at MoMA

2009-03-07T17:37:00.000-05:00

Mar 6: played for Lloyd's The Freshman at MoMA. Had a pretty full house and the film went over really well. This is the 3rd time I've gotten to play for it in the last several months. While it's one if the iconic Lloyd films, I still like Kid Brother and a couple others a little better. Still, The Freshman doesn't really get shown that much and it should. I was surprised that, during the whole Adam Sandler lawsuit thing over his The Water Boy, no one seized on the free publicity for The Freshman and showed it then.

When I played for it last July during MoMA's "Dali Laughs" series, my wife and daughter and a friend of hers came to the show. Afterwards the three of them were trying to do Lloyd's little "call me Speedy" jig and just couldn't get it. They're all theatrical, dancey gals and I realized the reason they couldn't do it was because it can't be performed in real life the way it appears on screen. At the time I was preparing my talk on "undercranking" for the NY Clown Theatre Festival and slowed the jig down to real-time speed to see what the jig looked like.

Playing for this film reminded me that I've been meaning to upload the clip to YouTube, and so I've just done that. Here it is:

Mar 5: Underworld at MoMA

2009-03-07T16:45:00.000-05:00

Mar 5 - arrived at MoMA early to throw the Miditzer together for a show of Josef von Sternberg's Underworld with George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent and Clive Brook. Oh, yeah, and Larry Semon in a character part. Brook comes off better than Bancroft as an actor, and Brook's screen presence is great for silents; perhaps that's why Bancroft did better in sound films. Still, it's fun picture, and Larry Semon does a nice job as comedy reliefe, as does Jerry Mandy as one of the other "mugs". I have an old show-at-home of a 1919 "mountie" 2-reeler starring and directed by Edgar Jones with Brent in a supporting role. The show was well-attended.

The print looked okay, about the same as the print we got from Paramount when we ran it at the Cinema Arts Centre last year. At the CAC show I brought a 16mm of Golf with Larry Semon to open, just to show people who Semon was, and the film played really well. I haven't seen the new print(s?) of Underworld that were done by Paramount a year or two ago, but I'd imagine/hope they're a bit sharper than these two 35mm's I've now seen, which seem a tad dupey in parts.

Mar 4: Beau Brummel & The Iron Horse

2009-03-07T16:14:00.000-05:00

Mar 4 - I can't put my finger on why, but Valentino's Monsieur Beaucaire and Barrymore's Beau Brummel are two of my least favorite mid-20's silent dramas. Perhaps there's something about putting either of these two dynamic personas in a European powdered-wig melodrama. Beau Brummel also ends a few times. Don't get me wrong – I'd never turn down a chance to play for either of these pictures...a gig is a gig, after all.

My day started with a matinee of Beau Brummel at MoMA, part of the series connected with the Madalena poster exhibit. Accomp was on Miditzer, as these 1:30 W-Th-Fr matinees are held in Bartos, where there is no piano (yet). Barrymore has a number of nice moments, though and at 12 reels you really appreciate these charm moments when they happen.

Next, I was off to Grand Central to head off to Ossining to play for John Ford's The Iron Horse at the Ossining Public Library. The film was being shown as part of a Ford series, with lecture & discussions by Mark Hasskarl, director of the Danbury Public Library. I'd done a Sherlock Jr. show with Mark a few years ago for a series he'd done at the now-defunct Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, back when he was at the Chappaqua library. Ironically, it was not this connection that led to this show...rather, Ossining's programming person Bonnie Katz had met me at the Burns Film Center last September when I played for Lang's Destiny and when Mark wanted to include The Iron Horse she contacted me for live piano, rather than just run the film with the score that's on the disc.

The new "Ford at Fox" DVD of The Iron Horse looks great, and a lot of digital clean-up and image stabilization was done. Unfortunately the film looks like it was transferred at around 20 fps, a bit slow for a 1924 release, and you can lip-read everthing, plus the comedy bits with J. Warren Kerrigan don't play right and didn't get laughs during the show.

The Ossining Library is a beautiful new building and the auditorium boasts brand new DVD player, a/v, projection, a nice big screen and a well-maintained Steinway D grand. The show went well, and the people who came really enjoyed it. I shifted into my "playing-for-a-film-being-run-a-bit-too-slow" mode, and the score went fine. Unfortunately, I had to scoot to catch my train back to NYC and had to miss Mark's talk. He's very knowledgeable and his intro to the film was quite good. The nice thing about the commute to and from Ossining is that it's about an hour, and I got in two much-needed naps courtesy of Metro North.

I'll be playing for The Iron Horse again in November at the Cinema Arts Centre, with a 35mm print from Fox.

Mar 3: The Whirl of Life - Vernon and Irene Castle

2009-03-05T22:17:00.000-05:00

Tues, March 3 – played for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) and The Whirl of Life (1915) at the Bruno Walter Auditorium, where the Donnell programming is now presented. This was part of a series of films curated by Joe Yransky related to the "Curtain Call" exhibit at the Lincoln Center Library. Both films were presented in 16mm and, while a bit fast at 24fps, variable speed is not possibel there...but faster is always better than too slow.

Here's a clip from the middle of the score for Oz, which I recorded with my Zoom H4 sitting on the piano's folded down music rack, pointing into the piano (with the lid on short stick):

Both films really came to life during the show. The Whirl of Life, which stars Vernon and Irene Castle, has a melodramatic plot device in which Irene is kidnapped by a rival producer bent on ruining the Castle's so his show will be a hit. The whole storyline seemed a bit silly to me when I screened this, but the audience was really with it, cheering for Vernon, as well as for his dog and a squad of marines, during the rescue and chases, and I took this and the audience's vibe into consideration and really went for it. Joe told me later this storyline was deliberately done as tongue-in-cheek, and we were both pleased at how well the audience (consciously or not) picked up on this and really enjoyed it.

I recorded the whole show, and the sound quality came out quite well. I'm really impressed with the H4. Afterwards, since I was at the library, I returned a few silent film DVD's I'd borrowed to prepare for shows. Have I mentioned what an amazing resource the NYPL is for silent film on video? I believe I have...

Mar 2: NYU Cinema Studies - Antonia Lant's class

2009-03-05T21:04:00.001-05:00

Monday, March 2 – I played for a selection of animated shorts and films made by women at Antonia Lant's film history class at NYU. Antonia came to a Silent Clowns show several years ago and introduced herself, and I've played once a year at her class ever since. Antonia's book (co-editor) Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema is shown at right. Click on the cover image to buy it online.

When I come to Antonia's class to accompany films, she gives me a bit of time to talk about the history and tradition of silent film music and about my work, and to take questions from the students. This year's group were pretty vocal and had a lot of good questions. I also like playing for Antonia's class because I learn a lot from her lecture. I play for a different session each year, usually because of my availability; prior years have been experimental film, Danish film, early cinema and Biograph shorts, etc.

This time it was a pair of Emile Cohl animations, and then Winsor McKay's How a Mosquito Operates, Gertie the Dinosaur and The Sinking of the Lusitania. I hadn't seen Mosquito since I was in college, at a showing at the old Thalia (Steve Sterner was probably at the piano), and same for Lusitania which I saw as part of John Canemaker's animation history class. All the films in the class were screened from DVD's, and unfortunately the editon of Gertie was incredibly slow...maybe transferred at 16-18fps.

The fact that it was the regular release version, with the wraparound story of fellow cartoonists betting McKay that he couldn't make a drawn dinosaur move, and then the Gertie segment with intertitles cut in, reminded me that I'd been meaning to upload the video of Steve Massa's reenactment of the original vaudeville act to YouTube. I mentioned the difference between the film screened at the class and the "live" version, and how I really got what was such a big deal about the Gertie act when I saw it this way.

I had actually just the other day come across a VHS of this while looking for something else, and have transferred it and uploaded it. I sent the link to Antonia, whose T.A. will post it on the class's "Blackboard" page. Here it is:

The films by or featuring women were Lois Weber's Suspense, an episode of The Hazards of Helen, and Asta Nielsen in Afundgren ("The Abyss"). Again, all three of these had slow transfer speeds (the Nielson was particularly slow, definitely around 16fps). Great for lip-reading, but tough on the accompanist. One of the downsides of DVDs is that one has no control over projection speed. Doesn't matter too much to me, as I've now developed a second manner of accompanying for films run slower than they should be (IMHO).

And as usual the end title for The Abyss got an inadvertent laugh. If you don't know the picture, it's basically a tale of a nice girl running off from her society friends to join a travelling circus, performs a very suggestive gyrating tango, has some awful romantic complications, kills her lover, is taken off to jail, and then the title comes up: "Slut". Which is Danish for "The End" or "Finis", and is pronounced sloot, but to us "Yanks" it still looks like a commentary abour Asta's character.

It was nice to get to play the piano, (see earlier post about the instrument) and it was still in tune from last week's tuning. It needs some regulation work (loss of motion, repetition springs) and could use a polish, but it was nice getting to play an instrument that had a special meaning for my accompaniment work.

White Fawn's Devotion - DVD score

2009-03-03T00:39:00.000-05:00

Last Friday I recorded a piano score for the 1910 1-reeler White Fawn's Devotion which will be an extra on Milestone's upcoming DVD of The Exiles. White Fawn was recently added to the National Film Registry, and this scoring opportunity gave me the chance to see the film. I missed Young Deer's Attack of the Indians (1911) when it was been shown at the Cinesation last September.

The film stars James Young Deer and his wife, as well as several Native Americans (billed in the main title as "red indians"). Young Deer and his wife were of the Winnebago tribe originally, from Nebraska. The film is set somewhere out west, although the film was shot in New Jersey.

I wanted to do a little research musically, so I wasn't just playing typical "indian"-sounding music. I've always meant to do this, and after playing for a couple of Fairbanks pre-Zorro comedies that had scenes of Hopi indians I went online and found the Smithsonian-Folkways website to be an amazing resource.

Remember all those Folkways records of field recording of folk songs, delta blues, whaling songs, etc etc etc? I know I saw these in every library I've ever been in. The collection was acquired by the Smithsonian (a deal I only recently found out that was orchestrated by my late uncle), and is now available online. You can download entire albums ($9.99) or individual tracks (99¢), like iTunes. I found 4 tribal chants of Winnebago indians to download and listen to to create a sound-alike.

What I found interesting is that all four of these, including the tribal war chant, were in major keys. I used this sound, and the scale I heard in all of these vocal recordings, to create White Fawn's theme.

The film was transferred at, I'm guessing, 16 or 18fps, and while the first shot of the film is right at real time (you can lip-read everything, and the gestures seem a little big and deliberate), the remainder of the film seems a tad faster. This works well because there's a lot of action in the rest of the picture.

This was another one of those early dramas where people stand around talking and gesturing, and I find that playing to the gestures and faces helps define for the audience what exactly the drama of the scene is. Click here to read a post from 2007 when I scored an Edwin S. Porter western for the Kino disc of Before the Nickelodeon to see a detailed discussion of this.

Safety Last in Hewlett-Woodmere (Long Island)

2009-03-01T22:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is a photo of the beautiful 200-seat auditorium at the Hewlett-Woodmere library before everybody showed up for today's show of Safety Last. If I'd remembered to charge my camera battery there'd be a photo or two of me and Philip Harwood to post here as well.

Piano was a beautiful Steinway B which, as luck would have it, was just worked over by a local technician who had worked for Steinway for a few decades. The instrument was a delight to play, and the artist bench (padded, adjustable height piano bench) went high enough to be right for me, even though the piano was on casters.

Philip's talk went very well. He had notes to read from but never used them...could've fooled me, with all the dates and details he had mentally at his fingertips. Did a great job of setting the film up and giving some interesting background on Lloyd and the other players. We had around 100 people, primarily seniors, and everyone had a great time.

We ran Ask Father – which my wife and daughter call "the one with the pillow" (I have a real nice 16mm of this one), and From Hand To Mouth, both of which are on the same disc that SL is on. I'd done this same pair of shorts as openers – for the same reason, no disc juggling necessary – at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in October 2007. Ask Father is one of the better one-reelers, plus there's a moment when Lloyd climbs up the side of a building (just one story), and H2M is Mildred's first with Harold...and SL is her last.

Scores went fine, but this feature kinda takes care of itself, and once Lloyd heads up the building I'm playing to the audience as much as I'm playing to the film.

Tomorrow finds me at my old stomping grounds...NYU film school, playing for Antonia Lant's film history class. For the last two years the piano has been unavailable because of renovations to the screening room, and I have brought my keyboard. This year everything is done and I'll be able to use the piano. It's a Baldwin Acrosonic, one which I picked out back in '82 or '83 when I was playing for classes at NYU while going to film school. Everson had gotten the department to buy a piano and I was told to go to a piano dealer in the village and try out a bunch and pick one. I really liked the Acrosonic; it's got a richer sound than most consoles and, as I've learned from my tuning/tech teacher, it really holds a tuning. The instrument was tuned last week for Stephen Horne's talk/performance at NYU, so it'll sound good too.

Radio City Music Hall Wurlitzer

2009-02-26T17:14:00.000-05:00

Here are some photos taken on Tuesday at Radio City Music Hall. I was there as part of an invited walk-through of RCMH held by SVA's creative and tech teams for their annual graduation exercises. Last year I played piano for their graduation, improvising 15-or-so pieces of music while graduates came up one-by-one to get their diplomas. You can read my posting from May 2008 by clicking here.

This year we're trying to see if I'll be able to use the Music Hall's Wurlitzer for the ceremony, and this was a chance for me to saddle up and acquaint myself with the organ, and also to give the SVA people a chance to hear how quiet the instrument can be so it doesn't overpower the Dean(s) reading off people's names.

Here's a view of the whole console. There's actually two of 'em, and this is the main one, on the house left side of the stage.

A closer view of the console. There are 4 manuals (organ lingo for "keyboard") and 58 ranks (sets of pipes), plus tuned percussion. The little white buttons are thumb-pistons where combinations of ranks are stored.

Notice the swiveling organ seat used here, rather than the wide wooden bench. The concept behind the "Howard" is to give an audience a clearer view of the organist's footwork.

Donnell Media Center - now at Lincoln Center Library

2009-02-26T10:23:00.000-05:00

Spent a piece of yesterday screening The Whirl of Life (1915) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) at the NYPL for the Performing Arts. The legendary Donnell Media Center and its film and video collection as well as its staff (as of now sans Joe Yransky, who retired in January) were absorbed by the branch when the Donnell Library was closed in August.

If you are not aware of the collection, it's a phenomenal resource in both the circulating items and those in the reserve collection. There are screening carols for video and 16mm. If you are a silent film fan and can't find something you're looking for, it's possible it may be here.

I'd not seen either of these pictures before, and noted that the Whirl of Life print came from MoMA. The picture stars Vernon & Irene Castle and, as Mr. Yransky has told me, while it purports to take place on Long Island, the film was actually shot in Westchester and in New Jersey.

Both films looked a little fast at 24fps, and I offered to loan them for the show the pair of custom-rigged Eiki's that Silent Cinema Pres/Silent Clowns owns that run at 21 fps. The Bruno Walter auditorium has a short throw (maybe 35 feet?) and there's room in the booth for these. Bruce Lawton and I use these at the Silent Clowns series et al for films made before 1920-ish and it makes a huge difference.

Here's a link to a blog posting by animator and animation historian Mark Mayerson all about my "undercranking" studies. Lots of nice response postings by other animators.

More show bookings pop up every day, and I'll post about them when the dates get closer. Next week is gonna be a lu-lu:

Mar 1 Safety Last in Woodmere
Mar 2 Antonia Lant's silent film class at NYU
Mar 3 The Whirl of Life at the Bruno Walter
Mar 4 Beau Brummel at MoMA and
The Iron Horse at the Ossining Library
Mar 5 Underworld at MoMA
Mar 6 The Freshman at MoMA
Mar 8 Hands Up! at the Silent Clowns

See you at the silents!

Ben Model

Buster Keaton in "The General"

2009-02-22T20:16:00.000-05:00

Hey, isn't that Al St. John next to the bone-head commander who thinks the Rock River bridge is strong enough to hold his train? Bruce and Steve were talking about this after the show, pretty certain it's Al, and so I grabbed this frame from the DVD. Al's not in the shot of the commander that follows the train's plunge into the river, though.

We had a great season opener, with quite a few kids in the audience. I think if the weather prediction for snow hadn't been a factor (since it turned out to be a light drizzle) we'd have had a bigger crowd. Still The General went over well, as did Mooching Through Georgia – which was released in August 1939, four months before Gone With the Wind. Mooching actually played really well, further convincing us that a lot of Keaton's talkie shorts do play well with an audience. We've run a couple of the Educationals in the past, and they've done well. When we ran One-Run Elmer, which has almost no dialogue, I played to it...and it was really effective.

As usual, the score for The General went really well for the audience, and somewhat unsatisfactorily for yours truly. Playing for this picture is a bit of a paradox for me, as it's one of my favorite silents to present to audience and also one with which I feel I never "click" when I accompany it. Again, I'm the only one who notices, and I'm sure when I figure it out it'll all make sense. Took me a number of shows of The Gold Rush before I felt right about it...before it got taken off the menu.

No performances in the past week, but I spent a bit of time arranging my orchestral score for Cops for high school band. The high schools in Milford CT and Hot Springs SD, who performed my band score for Chaplin's The Immigrant last year, want another one. I've changed keys in a couple places to make things a little easier for the school kids, and got some suggestions from the conductors of the bands and the conductor of the TVYS in Boise as well about making the score more playable for high school musicians with limited rehearsal time.

Also, over the past week, I booked several shows, including the infamous Cinefest in Syracuse that so many of my colleagues who attend have told me about, and attended the always-entertaining Downtown Clown Review.

Up next is my monthly show at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, a program of Chaplin Mutual shorts. It's the same program as the one Bruce and I did at the Burns Film Center, using my 16mm prints. Dylan would prefer to do the show in 35mm, and rightly so, but the Mutuals in 35mm have been elusive or unaffordable and since the CAC is showing Monsieur Verdoux later in the week, we thought we'd slot a Chaplin shorts show in this month. Most of the rest of our shows for the rest of the year are now set; next month is Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.

Will new FilmLinc staff cuts affect "Golden Silents"?

2009-02-13T08:46:00.000-05:00

I saw an article online this morning announcing the layoffs of eight staff members at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Sayre Maxfield, who programs the "Golden Silents" series at FilmLinc, is one of the staffers being let go, as is Will McCord who runs the "Young Friends of Film" program there.

Click here to read the article on indiewire.com that I found – "Under New Leadership and Facing Economic Realities, Film Society Cuts Staff" – and which was posted there late last night. While the article states that FilmLinc says the "Golden Silents" and "Young Friends of Film" programs will continue, an article from July 2008 in the New York Times announcing FilmLinc's new Exec Dir Mara Manus – which you can read by clicking this link – states "While renowned for the annual New York Film Festival and financially sound, the organization rarely draws much public attention."

Hopefully the expansion of FilmLinc to include an additional two theaters – 150-seat and 90-seat – plus an amphitheater for talks and events will mean that specialized progamming like silent films will get more play than just 3 or 4 "G.S." events a year, and that the initiative to bring a greater audience in will mean the one or two silent films series that are programmed each year will lean more toward silent films that will develop a greater audience for the genre.

Still, if $ is the key interest, it could go either way. It depends on the agenda of the people at the top. One arts cinema I play at feels the fewer silent film shows booked each year, the more that silent show will seem like a special event and therefore sell more tickets. Another, the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, feels the inclusion of silent film as part of their cinema landscape is important and offers a monthly series; we program the shows based on what we want to present and have built up an audience for silents there.

With the recent retirement of Joe Yransky (Donnell Media Center), Steven Higgins (MoMA) and now with Sayre's being let go – along with the Museum of the Moving Image's being closed for renovations – it will be interesting to see what effect on silent film in NYC this will have. Meantime, I'm doing what I can to keep silent film on screens – the Silent Clowns Film Series is still going (although we are looking for a new theater to move to for the fall), and the public screening series version of the "Cruel and Unusual Comedy" class I taught at MoMA with Steve Massa and Ron Magliozzi is on the MoMA calendar for five dates in May. Will the Film Forum program any silents this year...? Stay tuned...and support your local silent film shows!

See you at the silents!

Ben

Chaplin undercranking study - boxing

2009-02-12T18:28:00.001-05:00

Here's a clip I just (finally) uploaded to YouTube. It's one of the studies I did for my talk at the Clown Theater Festival last fall, Undercranking: The Magic Behind the Slapstick. There are a few others I need to record narration for, render and upload. Chaplin seems to be the master of this technique of creating a gag that would only appear funny or to even be a gag when the film is run faster.

Stuart Oderman photos

2009-02-12T17:08:00.000-05:00

Just got these photos in from my friend, photographer Steve Friedman, who is also a major silent film fan and Buster Keaton maven. These were taken in the lobby near Titus 1, and the posters you see in the background are from the Batiste Madalena poster exhibit.

photos by Steve Friedman
www.stevefriedmanphoto.com

other accompanists: David Arner, Bernie Anderson

2009-02-08T17:58:00.000-05:00

Silent film accompanist and accomplished jazz pianist David Arner was at last Friday's (Feb 6) showing of The Kid Brother. He came over and said 'hi' after the show and we chatted for a while. I couldn't place where I'd known his name till he mentioned that he played for silents at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, NY. He's played at the Knitting Factory as well, and told me he'd played at the silent film accompanist "summit" that was held at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria in the early '90s. David mentioned something coming up at the National Gallery and at Upstate Films, so check their websites (or his) for info. We exchanged emails, and I've now found his website (click his name, above).

Fellow Lee Erwin student/devotee Bernie Anderson is playing for Ben Hur at Chaminade High School in Mineola on March 1st; there's a theatre organ in the school's auditorium. And as is always my luck with NYTOS events, it conflicts with a show I have. And so, if I were not already helping Mr. Lloyd up the side of the Bolton Building out in Woodmere (show is in Woodmere, not the building), along with film historian Philip Harwood, I'd get to hear Bernie live. [I'd already missed Bernie when he played at the Donnell last year, a booking I'd recommended him for.]