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While I realize it is certainly true that many think a movie made more than ten years ago is an antique my job as a self funded programmer attempting from 1968 onwards when I first heard of him was and always has been to do in Toronto what Henri Langlois had done and was doing in Paris at The Cinémathèque Française .

However unlike Langlois (or anybody else) I devise ad campaigns for my programs (mostly street flyers), I speak before them, I educate my audience. With silent films I create scores using previously recorded music. Before I do that I let the picture speak to me.

While it is true that the established film community and academia cast a cold and a withering eye on my work it is also true that the established arts communities have always cast a cold and a withering eye at the new. Jazz when it began was whore house music. The movies when they began were cheap entertainment for the unwashed.

I long ago learned that success comes not from meeting the expectations of those who wander into my programs but from surpassing them. I once heard a kid walk out saying, “I did not know anything this good was legal.”

At one presentation at a university to several hundred students their teachers said, “Don’t get angry. They are going to talk and laugh throughout the program.”

The producers made the mistake of recording the orchestra performing the music for LOVE (1927) with John Gilbert with a student audience. Guffaws from the student audience ruin the experience.

John Herbert, author of the pivotal Canadian play, FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES, told me that when the play was performed early to a student audience in Stratford, Ontario the Director of Stratford stooped thew play, walked on stage and said to the laughing students, “Could you please behave like a real audience?”

Real audiences made that play the global success it became.

Said Oscar Hammerstein III, “Being knowing and blasé is really the sign of a very unsophisticated person, The most sophisticated thing we can say is, ‘I know nothing about that. Please tell me.'”

I said to those teachers, “Not today.”

Then after introducing the program I showed them the picture.

At the conclusion the students rose and applauded for a good ten minutes. Their instructors said, “That’s strange. They have never done that before.”

I don’t always introduce my programs.

Sometimes I give talks I think no one wants to hear. Afterwards I learn that people clung on every word.

Not every one of course.

One writer said, “I forgot to bring a sandwich to eat while Reg Hartt spoke.”

As we see here not everyone liked the Marx Brothers. Well, not everyone liked Churchill.

Our academics, from my experience, have everything in common with the Pharisees and the scribes but nothing in common with Christ.

I’m not saying they are all like that.

As my programs were funded out of pocket for them to continue I had to reach people. This is exactly what everyone in the arts not on government funding has to do.

My father’s brother served as Director General of Public Works Canada which is as high as one can get in the Civil Service in this country. He wanted me to apply for government funding. He said, “Your work certainly warrants it.” I told him I chose not to. He said, “You are crazy.” Then he said, “There is only one person on earth I want to meet.” I said, Who?” He said, “Jane Jacobs.” I said, “She is my friend. I will introduce you to her.”

Jane Jacobs is the author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES. Her last book, DARK AGE AHEAD, is must reading.

Her children tell me, “Our mother loved you.”

Praise like that is better than reviving an Academy Award.

Why?

Because Oscars are given for acting which is just lying so well people believe it to be true.

Jazz is now heard in the churches which were the first to condemn.

The brothels are now all closed.

Movies are now seen almost exclusively by the educated.

The unwashed have better things to do with their time.

Mack Sennett thought Charles Chaplin was too young. “Can I please fire the little limey,” Sennett wired his New York bosses because Chaplin refused to do things the way Sennett and everyone else was doing them. Sennett’s bosses wired back, “Don’t you dare.”

Critics complained D. W. Griffith was not making films like everyone else. They wrote his use of close-ups of faces and body parts was frightening and jarring and interfered with the actors’ acting. They wrote his cutaway in distance, space and time were confusing. The critics were all learned people. His reviews were so bad his employer Biograph threatened constantly to fire him.

What about the great unwashed that were the audience? If the learned could not follow what was happening in his pictures what about the unlearned?

Biograph, I learned, realized 1000% profit on their investment in his pictures.

Told the audience has the mental age of a child Buster Keaton gave it some thought. Then he said, “That is not true.”

Of course it isn’t. The best always know that.

 

 

 

 

 

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