The “cue sheet” was the most common type of film score during the silent era. These were road maps for the conductors and musicians in movie houses. They were rarely if ever made in collaboration with a film’s director, and there was no requirement that they be adhered to. Most of the cue sheets I’ve seen are for feature length films. However, some comedy shorts had their own published cue sheets. Press books for new releases were sent out to theaters mainly to help local theater managers know how to promote or advertise a given film. There are stills included, pre-written articles, ad artwor ..read more

Every year in December, 25 films are added to the National Film Registry for their being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and are selected by the Librarian of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board. Given the connection to Batman that Roland West’s THE BAT (1926) has, I’d say it deserves to be on the National Film Registry. I’ve already shared this with the 681 backers of the Kickstarter for the restoration of THE BAT that my Undercrank Productions is readying for release in the fall of 2024, and am sharing this idea here as well in case you and others ..read more

Had it not been for the fact that I was on vacation for about two weeks in June and my seeing a slew of LinkedIn messages congratulating me when I got home, a big anniversary of mine would not have occurred to me. It has been 40 years since my first performance at MoMA, accompanying D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). Around the time of my graduating from NYU undergrad film school in 1984, when I was still in my dorm room but not moved out just yet, I received a phone call. It was from Robert Beers at the Museum of Modern Art, informally known to many of us simply as R. Beers. He wanted to k ..read more

The Il Cinema Ritrovato is held every year in Bologna, Italy and is a prestigious international festival of classic and silent film. The festival has an awards competition for Blu-rays and DVDs that were released the previous year. 5 awards are given out for different categories, and also each of the competition’s jurors selects a release for a Personal Choice Award. We submit one or two Undercrank Productions releases every year, and one of them often gets nominated as one of the many finalists. The competition is stiff, as there are submissions from Criterion, Kino, Flicker Alley ..read more

It’s always fun finding another nugget of evidence as to how far back the practice of silent era sped-up film projection went. During the pandemic, I made a reading project of going through issues of the Moving Picture World from 1916, and then on to 1917. I’d stopped this a couple of years ago, but have recently picked it up again. This time, however, I decided to read issues from 1915. I didn’t get very far into January 1915 before hitting something that gave evidence of an increased projection speed as a general practice. Not far at all…only about a quarter of the way in to the January 2, 1 ..read more

On Saturday May 18th I will be giving a presentation entitled “Laughter Restored: Discovering Rare Gems of Silent Film” at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Restored and Rediscovered Festival. This will be a first for me, as I’ve not given this presentation before. I’ll be talking about how I became a boutique home-video label, without intending to. Undercrank Productions was born in 2012 via a coalescence of ideas I’d had: I had a stack of rare silent shorts in 16mm that no one could otherwise see, there was this new form of fundraising called Kickstarter that artists and creators were discoverin ..read more

I’m posting this in May 2024, and I realize that it’s entirely possible that if you’ve found this post later in the year or some time in 2025, most of the embedded videos may be blank. For now, a brief story about how some TikTok videos I made after teaching class sessions led to my being invited to participate in the making of a video by and for Wesleyan University’s Office of Social Media. It’s exhausting doing social media posts, doing one’s work and then trying to step outside of yourself to document something about it to post that’s attention-grabbing or intriguing enough to survive the e ..read more

In this episode: Ben recaps his month’s activities in March 2024, talks about the subtleties of underscoring dramatic moments when a main character thinks through an important decision, a creative way to invent main themes for a program of 7 animated shorts, accompanying a 1914 “Italian Diva” melodrama, and picking up on something about the film from its spoken introduction that affected the score created during the show; plus live-performance excerpts from scores for “Shoes” (1916) by Lois Weber at NYU, a restored Koko the Clowns cartoon at MoMA, and “Sangue Bleu” (1914) at Casa Italiana Zeri ..read more

Last week, I had another one of those film accompanist experiences where a spoken introduction helped shape the way I played for the film. There is currently a major gallery exhibition at the MoMA honoring the work of artist Joan Jonas. In conjunction with this exhibition, the film department has organized one of their “Carte Blanche” film series to tie in with the galleries, in which Jonas has selected several films to be screened that are favorites of hers. The series’ opening night selection was the silent film, A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Joan Jonas introduc ..read more

Episode 62 Show Notes: “Round-up of January 2024 shows, and more” Theme & Introductions Introduction Silent Movies are thriving! Increased restorations in homevideo; increased awareness of the importance of physical media Undercrank Productions is likely to have at least as many new releases in 2024 as it did in 2023 Live Performances of Improvised Scores Sky High (1922) starring Tom Mix at the Library of Congress Packard Campus Ben adapted his piano themes from the Blu ray to the theater organ at Packard Walker Digital Theater Organ With Buster Keaton in Cops (not Ben playing) The I ..read more