MOVIE NIRVANA

Give the public what it wants to see, and they’ll turn out. That old show-biz adage came to mind as the modest-sized James Bridges Theater at UCLA was filled to capacity for two special programs in the UCLA Film and Television Archives’ Festival of Preservation.

Granted, this wasn’t a turnout to rival Pirates of the Caribbean, nor was the audience demographic the kind Hollywood courts so aggressively. But those of us who gathered on July 27 to see a selection of newly-restored Vitaphone shorts and a feature film unseen since 1928 (The Barker) were every bit as enthusiastic as any kid heading to see the new Disney film.

The newest collection of early-talkie shorts, preserved in cooperation with the Library of Congress and that remarkable volunteer organization called The Vitaphone Project, was manna from heaven for those of us who love vaudeville performers. These one-reel films, made from 1927 to 1930 and never shown since that time, capture the work of some remarkable singers, comedians, dancers, and all-around entertainers. There’s no way to adequately describe them, but when I tell you that show-business veteran Adele Rowland strode on screen and held this audience in the palm of her hand—just as if she were standing on stage in 2006—I’m not exaggerating.

Some acts, like the singing quartet The Revelers, were popular recording artists whose work can still be purchased today. Rowland, sad to say, did virtually no recording, so this short is all the more precious. Other entertainers including the rapid-fire comedian/ bandleader Jack White (“Four of spades?” “Right!”), deadpan comedic dancers Shaw and Lee, monologist Jay C. Flippen, and fey bandleader Dick Rich entertained us royally.

These films have been preserved from original 35mm negatives, married to 16-inch transcription discs that in some cases were lost for seventy-five years. Since 1991, The Vitaphone Project has uncovered hundreds of discs and, even more importantly, located individual funders to underwrite their restoration. Some of those donors are relatives of the actual vaudevillians; others are diehard enthusiasts.

Jay C. Flippen is best remembered today as a character actor from movies and television, but he was a well-known monologist when he filmed this Vitaphone short in 1928

Bob Gitt, of the UCLA Archive, introduced the evening and also presented a long-dormant 1928 feature, The Barker, which was made by First National Pictures in the Vitaphone format just before the studio was absorbed by Warner Bros. While the movie was a hit with critics and the public, it was purchased for remake by Fox in the early 1930s. Warners was obliged to provide a print to Fox but did so as cheaply as possible, using short ends and leftover film stock; the resulting print had clumsy splices in almost every scene! Gitt explained that a patient laboratory technician double-printed the frame immediately before and following each splice in order to remove the unsightly material from the image.

As for the soundtrack, UCLA had Vitaphone soundtrack discs for everything but reels 2 and 9. Then, as only can happen in stories like this, a donor turned up with the missing discs! But when Gitt went to rerecord the tracks, he discovered to his chagrin that a film can had fallen on the container holding those precious shellac recordings and cracked Disc 9 into three parts. Fortunately, he knew the expert to call who could glue those sections back together; then a rerecording wizard managed to remove every pop and click from the soundtrack.

Dorothy Mackaill and Milton Sills are barely remembered today, but they were big stars when they made The Barker in 1928--and they both had good voices. Sills died of a heart attack in 1930 at the age of 48

This extraordinary effort enabled us all to enjoy The Barker after seventy-eight years of dormancy. It’s a very entertaining film that blends silent and talking scenes (with orchestral underscoring—possibly a first) in a remarkably seamless manner. Milton Sills plays a carnival barker who’s determined that his son won’t follow in his footsteps, but when the boy (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) turns up during a summer break from law school he reluctantly allows him to travel with the troupe. Sills’ lover (Betty Compson), jealous of the attention Sills lavishes on his son, goads—and even pays—her pal Dorothy Mackaill to seduce the boy. You can figure out the rest of the story, but it’s done extremely well, and the performances are strong and vivid. (I’m even fonder of the 1933 remake, Hoopla, with Clara Bow, but that’s nit-picking.)

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The Barker is just the latest of literally hundreds of films rescued and restored by Robert Gitt, who joined UCLA twenty-nine years ago and essentially invented the archive’s preservation program. In the process he set a world standard for this demanding and little-understood line of work.

Restoring Becky Sharp (1935) the first three-strip Technicolor feature, starring Miriam Hopkins and Cedric Hardwicke, was one of the highpoints of Bob Gitt's UCLA career

On Saturday evening, July 30, it was my pleasure to host a long-overdue tribute to Bob, who is pulling back on his hours at the archive. (I don’t think he could ever give up what has been his life’s work.) Robert Rosen, the original director of the Archive who is now Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television kicked off the evening, which was marked by tributes from film critic Kenneth Turan, film preservationist Nicola Mazzanti, filmmaker and actor Norman Lloyd (a long time friend of Bob’s), and Curtis Hanson, the talented director who also serves as Honorary Chairman of the Archives. The audience was filled with film buffs, historians, authors, and fellow archivists who hold Bob in the highest regard.

The highlight of this lovely, heartfelt evening was a tribute from some of Bob’s coworkers, who showed a perfect clip from a film Bob restored, John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Of course, it was the scene in which John Wayne’s cavalry troop present him with a watch on the occasion of his retirement. On it is the legend “Lest we forget.”

Immediately following this beautiful scene, his colleagues presented Bob with a similar pocket watch bearing the exact same inscription. Perfect!

Then Bob introduced an 82-minute assortment of short subjects and feature-film excerpts representing some of his favorite material from nearly thirty years of work. It was a wonderful, excitingly eclectic selection, from a rare-as-hen’s-teeth promotional reel for the silent Ruth Roland serial Hands Up aimed at exhibitors to an extraordinary clip from a Mexican feature from 1934 in which Berta Singerman holds a nightclub audience spellbound with a sensuous recitation. A Max Fleischer cartoon, a three-strip Technicolor excerpt from This is the Army, an unintentionally hilarious promotion by Reginald Denny for “Greater Talkie Season,” and other gems were climaxed by a lengthy excerpt from Max Ophuls’ exquisite Letter from an Unknown Woman, in a copy only Bob would have apologize for, explaining it was the archive’s “second-best print.”

Bob Gitt is not a glory-seeker or a public figure but he is a genuine hero to anyone who loves movies and cares about film history. We are all richer for his longtime commitment to this art form, and I’m so glad UCLA rolled out the red carpet to pay him tribute.

Not so incidentally, the Festival of Preservation continues well into August, and if you live in Los Angeles or plan to visit, you ought to know about it. Click here to visit the website.

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While it’s always a pleasure to watch films at the James Bridges Theater, where the projection and sound are impeccable, I must admit that the folks from the Alamo Drafthouse of Austin, Texas have developed a wonderful idea. In years past they’ve shown Jaws on a beach where audience members had to dangle their feet in the water, Goonies at the bottom of a cave, Earthquake on the Balcones fault, and Shock Corridor at an insane asylum.

        Last year they decided to take their show on the road, screening Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the Devil’s Tower, Once Upon a Time in the West at Monument Valley, The Last Picture Show in Archer City, Texas, It Came from Outer Space in Roswell, New Mexico (in 3-D, no less), and best of all, North by Northwest in Bakersfield, CA, where Alfred Hitchcock shot the scene in which Cary Grant runs from the biplane. They even had the showing buzzed by crop dusters!

They’re at it again this year. The tour kicked off on August 2 with a showing of The Warriors in Coney Island. On August 5 they’re running Jaws at Ocean’s Bluff on Martha’s Vineyard; August 8 it’s Clerks in an empty lot across the street from the Quik Stop convenience store where it was filmed; on August 20, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at the Cedar Lane “Save Ferris” Water Tower in Northbrook, Illinois; August 11, Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; August16, The Shining at the unforgettable Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado; August 18, John Ford’s The Searchers at Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley, Utah; August 20, Raising Arizona in Apache Junction, AZ; August 24, The Poseidon Adventure at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, with costar Stella Stevens in person; and as a finale, on August 26, Escape from Alcatraz, yes, on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. Every show is an evening-long event with activities galore.

What a wonderful way to make movie-watching an experience, having fun while celebrating memorable movies of the past. For more details, click here.