Take one silent movie, add one amazing organ
In Frederick, the Weinberg Center for the Arts has a grand old movie theater with a Wurlitzer organ. Arriving there in 1926, the instrument is the only theater organ in all Maryland still in its original installation.
And it could not be more installed. The organ sits beneath the center of the stage, rising and lowering at will, with pipes running under the stage and behind side walls, all venting sound into the open through grates. For theater work, the organ is significantly more complex than your standard church organ. Weinberg organists mock church players. I'm not kidding. It's great. Along with the usual keys and pipes, there are buttons and back-end mechanisms to make the sounds of dozens of different instruments, like bells, drum hits and even horse-clopping.
Why would an organ need horse-clopping? Silent movies. An organist in old times would accompany the movies all day long. The advent of talkies nearly killed off this machine. But for some reason, the theater kept it. Various restorations and acts of love followed. Read details.
All of this history leads to the present day, where throughout the year the theater screens silent movies and an organist plays nonstop for an hour and a half, or however long is necessary, often writing their own scores in the weeks before a screening, to bring the film to your ears.
Lori and I saw the legendary Douglas Fairbanks swash-buckle his way through 1926's The Black Pirate, one of the first Technicolor pictures. It was the Pirates of the Caribbean of its time. Critics hated it. Audiences loved it. The plot was thin, but stunts and effects were great. In that film-making era, how Fairbanks cut his way through the ship's sail and rode his way down as he sliced without visible wires, I have no idea.
The same goes for a scene of dozens of rescue troops swimming under water at once. Did they use a giant tank? The scene, as old as it is, still throws you off-kilter. I wish there were a YouTube clip of it. Other parts I wish were on YouTube? A converted pirate keeping himself awake to protect the pirate by leaning on multiple knives. A compilation of every instance men in bathing suits tackled each other. The ship explosions.
All of the scenes were innovative and inspirational, in their own ways. How might the storytelling get him down from the topsail? How might you do an underwater scene when you didn't even have sound? How might the pirate keep himself awake? How might he improvise? Even with the constant, amusing bathing-suit tackling, how might you give everyone in a shot something to do, lacking good coordination tools?
Also, it's 1926. You're experimenting with color. What do you do?
The organist's stamina was amazing, never letting up during the film. He also gave a good introductory talk and stuck around for questions after. You couldn't ask for much more for $7 on a Saturday afternoon.
For food after, Bryan Voltaggio's new Volt Lunchbox was nearby. As casual as original Volt was pricey, the spot was open until 6:30. Five-dollar sandwiches (get The Pilgrim, PDF menu), chocolate milk, soups, salads, and cookies were fresh, tasty and capped a Frederick win.
January 26th, 2012 at 11:09 PM
[...] liked The Artist! A lot! Really! Lori and I saw it at the end of the long weekend we began seeing an actual, old-time silent film. The new-time near-silent film was surely one of the best movies of '12. No [...]