Back in November of last year, I wrote a post about a Kickstarter campaign entitled “Accidentally Preserved”—a project initiated by silent film historian-accompanist Ben Model to raise funds ($3,600) for the production of a
For a pledge of $25 or more, you could make a little film
preservation history by seeing this project to fruition—and you’d also get a
mention in the closing credits…
Holy smoke! That's meeeeeeeeee... |
MOD Create-A-Space at Amazon.com. It’s gotten some nice write-ups from good movie folk like cartoon guru Jerry Beck and
It’s extremely well-produced, for starters—a lot of time,
effort and professionalism went into the making of this DVD . A major plus is that a lot of info about the
shorts on the disc is included on screens preceding each presentation…and in the
case of three of the shorts—The Lost
Laugh (1928; with Wallace Lupino), Wedding
Slips (1928; with Monte Collins) and The
Water Plug (1920; with Billy Franey)—Ben and silent film historian Steve
Massa (author of Lame Brains & Lunatics, just released by BearManor Media) provide
audio commentary choc-a-bloc with tantalizing tidbits of history for silent comedy geeks
like me.
A good bit of the DVD's content consists of one-reel “Cameo” comedies—these one-reelers were distributed by
Educational Pictures (“The spice of the program”) as a companion to their
two-reel “Mermaid” comedies. I’m going
to go on record here and say that while one-reel comedies aren’t my particular
cup of Orange Pekoe (I tend to agree with historian David Kalat, who once
opined that one-reel shorts are “the ugly stepchildren of silent comedy”) the
more of them I watch, the more I’m being won over. If a one-reeler has particularly strong
gags—like Preserved’s Cheer Up
(1924), which features an almost forgotten comedian named Cliff Bowes—I’ll
generally overlook the shortage of time to develop character. (Bowes’ Cheer
Up has a riotous bit where he’s spun around and left upside down when his
rival attacks him with a hand drill.) I
also enjoyed a comedy on the DVD entitled Loose Change (1928), starring Jack
Duffy as a thrifty Scotsman who solves his reluctance to take cabs by employing
a bit used by Harold Lloyd in Safety
Last (1923)—bumming a ride from an ambulance.
Another favorite: an abstract from a Clyde Cook comedy (the full version is a two-reeler), The Misfit (1924), which features a funny gag in which Clyde paints himself into a predicament... |
...but ingeniously finds a way out. (Well, for the time being anyway.) |
There are additional items included on the Accidentally
Preserved disc besides silent comedy: The
House of Wonders, a two-reel industrial short from 1931 touting Elgin
watches (you might be familiar with Elgin as the people who sponsored Groucho
Marx’s You Bet Your Life before he started telling prospective DeSoto
customers “Tell ‘em Groucho sent you”) and an Out of the Inkwell cartoon from 1922, Mechanical Doll, which will be of major interest to animation buffs
(they really are inventive cartoons, and Doll
is no exception). Three Stooges devotees
will be intrigued by a one-reel Monte Collins comedy, Wedding Slips (1928), directed by future Columbia Shorts Department
head Jules White. This comedy is also an
example of how fragile many of these treasures are: the emulsion of this print
started to buckle a few months before the DVD
went into production and a transfer was made in the nick of time (the
decomposition is noticeable in the main titles and in the last few minutes of
the short).
In his write-up for Accidentally Preserved at the Paper
of Record, Dave Kehr remarks: “This compilation is aimed at specialists, but it
is a sterling example of the kind of home-brew work that is now possible in
film preservation, and where much future effort will doubtlessly lie.” If you’re as passionate about this as I am,
maybe you can shift some of those funds you were planning to pony up for that
Zach Braff movie (seriously—a follow-up to Garden State ?) towards the eventual sequel (Accidentally
Preserved II: Texas Blood Money), which I will keep you posted about
when it is announced. In the meantime,
you can purchase the original disc over at Amazon…and take it from me, it will
be money well-spent. There’s additional
information (including notes on the films) at the DVD ’s
website.
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