The Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival is three days of films, lectures, and fun named in honor of the man who, as co-founder of Essanay Studios with George K. Spoor, brought the movies to Niles: "Broncho Billy" Anderson. Get festival passes or advance tickets for individual shows here.
This year's Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival includes extremely rare Essanay Studio Films, tributes to Women in Film who starred for Essanay in the early days of movies, ultra-wacky comedies featuring Mack Sennett Productions headliner (and, later, an excellent and most prolific character actor) Billy Bevan, Lenticular Kodacolor home movies, a film about Greta Garbo made for Turner Classic Movies by Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stansbury among several documentaries on classic movies (The Love Goddesses, The Movies Go West, The Western Costume Company), a presentation by Bison Studios historian and author Marc Wanamaker and a Focus on Film Collectors noting their contributions to preservation of our cinematic heritage.
Friday, July 26 7:30 p.m.
The Love Goddesses
(1965, Walter Reade-Sterling Presentation)
Director Saul J. Turrell’s exploration of sex in the movies. From the silent era and Clara Bow to Cinemascope and Marilyn Monroe, see how the movie industry’s depiction of sex has changed through the decades. Here's an excerpt from it.
Preceded by the documentary, The Western Costume Company (1951)
From the NESFM website: This noteworthy business has been a landmark in Hollywood for decades. Not only has it been supplying “Western" costumes to movie producers, but costumes, armor, weapons, medals, furniture, and props of all kinds from all periods of history. We are shown through the various department of this huge facility, and follow a beautiful and fancy costume from its inception on a designer's drawing-board through its assembly end eventual clothing of a model, along with a number of other unusual and beautiful costumes used not only by motion picture studios, but by theatrical and television producers as well.
Saturday, July 27
11:00 a.m. Walking Tour of Niles
11:00 a.m. movies (FREE program) - Broncho Billy: The First Reel Cowboy (1998, Arkansas Educational Television Network)
This short film details the career of Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson, the very first cowboy movie star. Featured in more than 200 westerns, he preceded the likes of William S. Hart and Tom Mix as the silver screen's cowboy headliner.
G. M. Anderson, as star, producer and director, was instrumental in the formation and development of the western movie genre.
The influence of Broncho Billy is still seen today in films depicting the Old West.
The museum thanks the creators of this documentary for allowing us to screen it.
The Movies Go West (1974, Bell) This film is one of the first visual explorations of the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company as it existed in Niles 100 years ago. Filmmaker Geoffrey Bell was at the helm for this project, which was narrated by Hal Angus, one of the players at the old studio and husband to the head of the scenario department, Josephine Rector. The Niles Museum's Rena Kiehn elaborates:
The Movies Go West includes invaluable images of Niles in the 1970's, including film taken of the original barn that Broncho Billy settled in when first arriving in town, before building a then state-of-the-art studio a block
away.
1:00 p.m. The Women of Essanay
A selection of Essanay Film Manufacturing Company films made in Chicago and Niles, featuring top movie actresses of the day, including Ethel Clayton, Martha Russell, Dolores Cassinelli, Ruth Stonehouse, Eleanor Blevins, Marguerite Clayton, Evelyn Selbie, Bessie Sankey and Margaret Joslin. The program also includes stories about those who were instrumental behind the scenes and involved with getting the productions completed.
A special screening of Garbo, the Photoplay Productions (Kevin Brownlow, Christopher Bird and Patrick Stansbury) documentary celebrating the centenary of the birth of the iconic movie star of iconic movie stars. It covers the early years of Greta Garbo in Sweden, her movie career, early retirement from showbiz and subsequent life in NYC. It features interviews with Greta's friends from later life, friends and such filmmakers who worked with her as Clarence Brown.
7:30 p.m. Flesh And The Devil
(1927, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) In Greta Garbo’s breakthrough picture she delivers a luminous performance as a new type of vamp: less consistently cruel and more subtle than earlier styles. Director Clarence Brown recalled, “Flesh And The Devil was my first picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and it really made Garbo.” Her name was listed under the title, which would change after the film’s phenomenal success. She became the most famous woman in the world and the leading film actress. Starring Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, and Lars Hanson. Directed by Clarence Brown.
Opening the Saturday night show, two Mack Sennett comedy shorts featuring goofball du jour Billy Bevan, leader of The Charge Of The Mustached Brigade!
The Golf Nut (1927, Mack Sennett Comedies) Co-starring Vernon Dent. Billy plays a wacky photographer and terrible golfer who brings unmitigated disaster to the links.
Ice Cold Cocos (1926, Mack Sennett Comedies) Billy and his pal Andy Clyde impersonate two ice-delivery men in a suburban town. Mayhem ensues.
Jon Mirsalis, Kurzweil Keyboard Accompaniment
Sunday, July 28
10:45 a.m.
Special Behind-the-Scenes REAL vs. REEL program (FREE program)
Vintage Los Angeles film studios expert and special guest Marc Wanamaker will share some behind-the-scenes images and amazing tales of REAL California history intertwined with motion picture history, the REEL kind. He will share images from two recent books he co-authored: Hollywood: Behind the Lens - Treasures from the Bison Archives (with Steven Bingen) and Hollywood’s Trains and Trolleys (with Josef Lesser).
12:30 p.m.
Hidden Colors of the California Nursery and Beyond: Lenticular Kodacolor Home Movies (FREE program) Back for its second year, with different films! See rare home movies of the Niles Nursery and beyond in color for the first time in 90 years! Local horticultural historian Janet Barton and our museum's own Zack Sutherland walk you through this long-defunct technique of color film processing, and the resulting footage taken in Niles and elsewhere in California. Piano Accompaniment by David Drazin. (High-definition Digital presentation)
2:30 pm - Focus On Film Collectors featuring The Isle of Hope (1925, Richard Talmadge Productions)
Film collector Michael Aus was scrolling through eBay one night when he found a print of The Isle of Hope, a formerly-lost film for sale. After acquiring the only print, Aus deposited the film here at our museum – thus giving us an opportunity at this year's festival to demonstrate how film collectors have been essential
over the decades to making rare or lost material visible to the public.
The Isle of Hope is a stunt-filled adventure feature film starring Richard Talmadge, a former circus tumbling performer turned movie actor and producer, later turned Hollywood stuntman. Also featured are Helen Ferguson (a former player at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company in Chicago), James A. Marcus,mand George Reed. (High-definition digital presentation)
4:30 pm Film Is Dead, Long Live Film! (2024, Cold Eye Films)
This award-winning documentary explores the vanishing world of private film collecting: an obsessive, secretive, often illicit realm of basement film vaults, piled high with forgotten reels. Condemned as pirates and hounded by the FBI, film collectors have long lurked in the shadows. Yet their efforts have resulted in the survival of countless films that would otherwise have been lost to history. Journeying to film festivals, dealer rooms, archives, film storage and workspaces, and ad-hoc screening rooms, a trove of interviews is amassed which
profiles the people involved with collecting and preserving film, underscoring their motivations and legacies. Produced and directed by Peter Flynn.
Preceded by short subjects from the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's archive:
Ringling Brothers Circus Parade (1902) A visiting circus and onlookers in a street scene.
Suzie Loses Her First Tooth (early 1920s) This early example of an infomercial is an animated tale of heroes and villains in a battle over dental hygiene.
Piano Accompaniment for shorts by Bruce Loeb.
The Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival shall hold forth at the Edison Theater and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum at 37417 Niles Boulevard, Fremont, CA 94536. 510-494-1411.
There will be Special Festival Hours for the museum and store.
This frequently cartoon-centric blog notes that July 14 (tomorrow) is the natal anniversary of animation great William Hanna, the ridiculously prolific producer, director, animator, partner of Joe Barbera in Hanna-Barbera Productions and co-creator of the Tom & Jerry series.
His seven decade animation career splits into two lengthy portions: first, the 25+ year stretch making theatricals, mostly for Metro-Goldwyn Mayer release, through the 1930's, 1940's and first half of the 1950's, then an even longer stretch (through the end of the 20th century) co-heading Hanna-Barbera Productions, the studio that would be a phenomenally successful producer of cartoons for television.
He was involved in sensational, Oscar-winning theatrical cartoons, and at least up to the early 1970's, excellent TV series.
The animation studio and production company was founded on July 7, 1957 by Tom and Jerry creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, with financial backing by film director George Sidney. It was headquartered on Cahuenga Boulevard from 1960 to 1998, then subsequently at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Sherman Oaks.
Bill and Joe elaborate in this 1990 interview.
Mr. Hanna began his animation career with the Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising studio in 1930. Even knowledgeable animation buffs forget, due to the 1960's popularity of such TV series as Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat, that the work of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera in movies dated back to the early days of talkies.
Bill Hanna directed To Spring, one of my all-time favorite cartoons and arguably the most memorable of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Happy Harmonies series, produced by the aforementioned Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising.
The Tom & Jerrys, aided and abetted by such super talented animators as Irven Spence, Kenneth Muse, Ray Patterson, Pete Burness, Mike Lah and Ed Barge, would rank among the very best and brassiest cartoons from the 1940's and 1950's.
Along the way, the series won a slew of Academy Awards.
The creative and rhythmic synchronization with Scott Bradley's dynamic music, a key cornerstone of the Tom & Jerry cartoons, is already apparent by 1942-1943.
While the Oscar-winning Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943) demonstrates a bit of the animation style inspired by Disney and Rudy Ising (seen in such initial entries in the Tom & Jerry series as Puss Gets The Boot), the transition towards the faster, wackier WB-Tex Avery approach is well underway.
The Tom & Jerry cartoons successfully combined Disney/Harman-Ising style character animation with "Warner Brothers rowdyism."
Two of this blog's favorites, both influenced by the go-for-broke sensibility of Tex Avery (the guy who invented Warner Brothers rowdyism): Quiet Please! and Tee For Two.
An entire episode of the long-gone but always outstanding Cartoon Logic podcast by Bob Jacques and Thad Komorowski was devoted to Tee For Two, arguably the most devastatingly funny of MGM's Tom & Jerry cartoons.
Of everything made for the silver screen for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, including such feature-length animated films as Charlotte's Web (1973), the seamless blends of animation with live-action in two outstanding MGM musicals starring Gene Kelly (Anchors Aweigh, Invitation To The Dance) are tops.
Love the Sinbad sequence from the latter film.
For the most part, as an old geezer these days, I enjoy the Hanna-Barbera made for TV cartoons a lot more than my younger, louder and more opinionated self, who looked down on all TV-toons (sans The Flintstones and The Jetsons) not made by Jay Ward Productions, did.
Now watch the 1950's and 1960's H-B series and appreciate everything from the pleasing design and color palette to the soundtracks (Hoyt Curtin!) to frequently inspired voice acting of Daws Butler, Don Messick, Alan Reed, George O' Hanlon, Jean Vander Pyl, Bea Benaderet, Janet Waldo, Arnold Stang, Mel Blanc, Allan Melvin, Howard Morris and many more.
IMHO, one's view of Hanna Barbera Productions has something to do with when one grew up. Those in my age group were little kids watching Saturday morning toons when Ruff & Reddy, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear hit the airwaves, and older kids when its excellent action-adventure show Jonny Quest began its year in prime time in 1964.
Those cartoon loving kids who were 1950's babies) lost interest in Saturday morning TV, even the likes of Atom Ant and Secret Squirrel, as the 1960's wore on and Jay Ward Productions' Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (including Wossamatta U) continued running in syndication.
By the time Scooby Doo became an enormous hit and a signature series Hanna-Barbera Productions would be remembered for, as much as The Flintstones and The Jetsons, the 1950's kids were watching the likes of Creature Features - and asking why such series as Wacky Races and Scooby Doo weren't funny like Jay Ward's George Of The Jungle.
Are Scooby Doo, Shaggy, Scrappy Doo, Josie & The Pussycats, The Grape Ape, Jabberjaw, Laff-A-Lympics, etc. the faves of kids who watched these shows on Saturday morning and are now entering their fifties? Maybe. I don't know.
A topic for an additional post would be the last gasp of Hanna-Barbera in the 1990s and the resulting series produced for Cartoon Network, some of which (Johnny Bravo) are among my favorites among all of the studio's TV shows. The What A Cartoon series - all 33 episodes are on a YouTube playlist - included Hard Luck Duck, one of the last films with William Hanna's name in the credits. Don't know to what degree Mr. Hanna was involved in this production and other very good films H-B was making for Cartoon Network at the time, but the fact that Bill started making cartoons in 1930 and was last credited on a film in 1999 is impressive.
What got this scribe through the too-many months of COVID related lockdown in 2020-2021 and the unending years of pure awfulness that followed? Standup comedy and our pets (a.k.a. official mascots)! One standup comic we like a lot is Patton Oswalt, who links to National Fried Chicken Day as follows.
When it comes to the topics of fried chicken and fast food in general, can't think of anyone funnier than Jim Gaffigan.
Jim is in frequent rotation here, as is Mr. Oswalt.
Just realized that fried chicken is just about the only food that's NOT in the Saturday Night Live Taco Town sketch, which features Jason Sudeikis, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg.
Shifting from comedy to food, the skilled and frequently very funny chefs at Babish Culinary Universe have tried to replicate the epic Taco Town mega-taco-gordita-crepe-pizza, etc.
Tops in the category of the funniest, most informative and most scientific of cooking show hosts? Hands and measuring devices down, that would be Alton Brown of "Good Eats."
How to we top Alton? Chicken-centric tunes from long, long ago.
The British blues band Chicken Shack didn't play Chicken Strut or ChIcken Scratch as part of their repertoire, but there is a familiar face here - singer/songwriter/keyboardist Christine McVie, a year or so prior to her joining Fleetwood Mac to counter the departure of guitarist Peter Green and a few years before the band's pop juggernaut years in the latter 1970's.
So, the official post for National Fried Chicken Day 2024 ends as many Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog posts do, with cartoons from long long ago.
RE: Sudden Fried Chicken (1946), a Famous Studios cartoon directed by the great Bill Tytla, the animation by such talented Fleischer veterans as Orestes Calpini is invariably quite good and the voice work by Sid Raymond, Jack Mercer, Arnold Stang and others is also terrific.
On one hand, the premise of marital abuse as yuk-yuk comedy falls as flat as a poorly cooked pancake. On the other hand, the cartoon becomes quite funny about 4 minutes in, starting with Herman the Mouse smoking cigarettes.
How storymen Jack Mercer and Carl Meyer missed the opportunity for a hilarious topper gag in which horrific Henrietta Hen, after seeing Henry as an hard drinking ultra-macho tough guy, instantaneously becomes a sex-crazed love machine a la horny hot-to-trot hillbilly Possum Pearl (the star of a very enjoyable Noveltoon cartoon Jack Mercer wrote the story for a decade later), we'll never know. Blame the Hays Office!
Viewing the Noveltoons' Herman & Henry series makes one wonder if someone on the Famous Studios staff in the mid-1940's was stuck in a hideously awful hell on earth marriage. Readers, if you find yourself in a similar situation, GET OUT IMMEDIATELY AND RUN! RUN FAST AND FAR! DON'T TURN BACK!
Closing this National Fried Chicken Day tribute: the Jay Ward Studio's Super Chicken.
Am pondering the outstanding animation voice artists of yesteryear yet again. . .
After all, all-time greats Walter Tetley and Janet Waldo recently received richly deserved and long overdue spotlights on this blog. We'll kick today's cornucopia of cartoons and clips off with Jim Backus!
Another inspired cartoon voice artist many of us animation buffs first encountered (as was the case with Mr. Backus) via starring roles in 1950's and 1960's sitcoms was Bea Benaderet.
Another ubiquitous actress in animation, especially with Walt Disney Productions, was Martha Wentworth.
Martha Wentworth and character address Elvia Allman, later in Tex Avery's stock company of stellar voice artists, play the two witches in the following Hugh Harman MGM cartoon, directed by Friz Freleng. Mel Blanc is also on hand as the gravel-voiced raven in this most Gothic piece.
Frank Graham, due to a brief albeit very prolific career and the tragedy of his untimely passing in 1950, is not as well known as the Daws Butlers, Mel Blancs, June Forays and Bill Scotts of the animation world, but did amazing work for several cartoon studios, as well as on radio (for which he created the Cosmo Jones show).
Have a Captain Obvious hunch that the superlative voice work in the following Fox & Crow cartoon is Frank Graham, whose "Lionel Stander" impersonation as the wiseguy crow fits the diabolical quality of this Screen Gems opus beautifully.
Graham also worked with Tex Avery at MGM and played Tex' signature character The Wolf to a T.
Graham's portrayal of the tough guy mouse in Slap Happy Lion is one for the books!
Thinking of Walter Tetley, June Foray, Bill Scott and the many hilarious cartoons made by Jay Ward Productions inevitably leads to a respectful fedora tip to the brilliant Paul Frees!
We'll finish this binge-watch of cartoons and cartoon voice artist clips with the one, the only, the incomparable Mel Blanc.
With apologies to Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, Margie Hines, Kent Rogers, Billy Bletcher, Dayton Allen, Danny Webb, Arthur Q. Bryan, Sterling Holloway, Dallas McKennon, Clarence "Ducky" Nash, Jackson Beck and any other cartoon voice artists we inadvertently left out of today's post, Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog extends big time kudos, bravos and huzzahs to the following: Behind The Voice Actors, Don Yowp, Keith Scott, Devon Baxter, Jerry Beck and the Cartoon Research website for much superlative work chronicling this corner of the cinematic universe. If you haven't done so yet, buy Keith Scott's Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age, 1930-70 books, the last word on these super-talented performers from animation and radio!
We're thinking about baseball, MLB's tribute to the Negro Leagues and the incomparable Willie Mays but also returning to this blog's emphasis on classic cartoons and movies. Kicking this off with a baseball-centric Screen Song cartoon produced by Famous Studios.
Terrytoons had to get their two cents in, and they did just that with this opus, directed by Mannie Davis and starring Gandy Goose and Sourpuss. In the 1940's Terrytoons-Lantz-Screen Gems tradition, this one proves quite a bit funnier than one expects it to be. Love the concept of baseball played by a team of bulls and the Terrytoons crew does a nice job with it.
Any further cartoons about baseball which this blog posted here more than five years ago? Yes. Posted Tex Avery's 1944 MGM cartoon BATTY BASEBALL back in 2016. Having passed the 5 year Statute Of Limitations, we can post it again! It's on the dark side even by Avery standards and acheived a certain immortality for a quite literal interpretation of the phrase "kill the umpire."
In the "Fleischer Studio Does It Right" department, here's a cartoon we posted here back in 2018, Popeye in The Twisker Pitcher. The spinach-swilling sailor remains to this very day in 2024 the only big league hurler to throw pitches like that and not require multiple Tommy John surgeries.
The Cartoon Research website covered, as part of an excellent and comprehensive post on the insanely busy Famous Studios in the early 1960's, the very enjoyable animated adaptation of Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence's record Abner The Baseball. Here's the original record.
This fan of Famous Studios' Modern Madcaps series finds the Abner The Baseball cartoon to be terrific and one of the frequently clever and inventive director/storyman Irv Spector's best.
We tip our well-worn San Francisco Giants baseball cap to "The Old Philosopher" and Irv Spector, as well all involved in creating and researching the Cartoon Research post including Abner The Baseball (Jerry Beck, assisted by Ken Layton, Mike Kazaleh and Paul Spector).
"He's the best center fielder who ever lived, no question." Monte Irvin "The All-Star Game was invented for Willie Mays." Ted Williams
Once in eight or nine blue moons, this blog, mostly obsessed with classic films, comedy, vintage television and animation (and to a lesser degree music), delves into sports. Today, we must do this, with the news that the incredible Willie Mays has passed at 93.
The passing of Willie Mays happened as this movies and sports aficionado has been, with difficulty, processing the losses of basketball stars Jerry West on June 12, Chet "The Jet" Walker on June 8 and Bill Walton on May 27. While it is no fun being "the R.I.P. blog," that's the reality of today.
Have a soft spot for Willie Mays, a.k.a. the Say Hey Kid, a trailblazer on and off the diamond.
Mays was the best outfielder, the fastest runner, a singularly brilliant baseball strategist, as well as a coach on the field, often trusted by managers to relay the latest and greatest signs to his teammates from his roving outfield post.
There have been great hitters (Ted Williams, Barry Bonds), paragons of consistency in the unparalleled excellence of their all-around game (Henry Aaron, Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio), base-stealing and baserunning daredevils (Jackie Robinson, Maury Wills, Lou Brock, Bobby Bonds, Ricky Henderson, Vince Coleman) who changed the nature of baseball, guys who inspired with clutch hits, amazing throws from the warning track and sheer swagger (Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente). None combined all of the above quite like Willie Howard Mays.
Willie began his career playing with the Birmingham Black Barons at Rickwood Field and was the last living player to have swung the bat in the Negro Leagues. He faced freakin' Satchel Paige, for cryin' out loud!
Willie lived long enough to see the stats from the Negro Leagues officially added to MLB's database.
Willie Mays hit 660 homers (including an inside-the-park grand slam) and would have beat the Babe for the all-time HR record way back when had he not spent 1952-1953 in the U.S. Army, won 12 Gold Gloves, played in 24 All-Star games, stole 339 bases, scored from first base on a bunt, slammed four round-trippers in a game - and was the epitome of cool.
Saw Willie get his 3000th hit at Candlestick Park on July 18, 1970!
The top announcers of MLB were in agreement about Willie.
Willie's 80th birthday at the ol' ballpark in 2011 was a special occasion.
As floored by Willie's passing as we are here, we have also been hit hard by the losses of Jerry West and Bill Walton, two greats of college and pro basketball.
West, with GM Bob Myers and Coach Steve Kerr, would be among the key architects of the Golden State Warriors team that won four championships.
Jerry, a.k.a. The Logo, was an incomparable player who followed his amazing on-court career with a record as an executive and team-builder (for Lakers, Grizzlies, Warriors and Clippers) still unmatched in sports.
Bill Walton? An incredible player for UCLA, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Boston Celtics - and arguably my all-time favorite sportscaster.
Bill Walton could talk both sports and music all day and all of the night, and that was part of his charm.
No doubt it would have been fun to talk music, sports, current events, history, philosophy, the sciences, whatever with Bill! His favorite band did pay tribute to the redhead in a concert the day after his passing.
All of these gentlemen of sport were unbelievably talented and made miracles on the field and the court. Farewell - and thanks for the memories!
Paying tribute to Stan Laurel on his birthday (June 16, 1890)! Here are The Boys on the set of Below Zero, with L&H director James Parrott and Charles Parrott (a.k.a. Charley Chase). Am unsure as to who the two ladies in this shot are; comedy and Hal Roach Studio experts, feel free to comment.
We'll start the Stan & Babe Sunday binge-watching of their excellent comedy short subjects with some silents.
Stan Laurel and Babe Hardy worked in films as solo headliners and/or supporting players for more than a decade before teaming in 1927. Scholars Rob Stone, Moving Image Curator at the Library of Congress and the late David Wyatt of The Cinema Museum in London penned a detailed, witty and informative history of their solo projects, Laurel or Hardy: The Solo Films of Stan Laurel and Oliver "Babe" Hardy. There is now a Laurel Or Hardy Blu-ray available.
Laurel & Hardy, by the rise of talkies a world-famous comedy team, in short subjects enjoyed an extended winning streak. Here are just a few of their incredibly funny starrng vehicles.
74 years after their last film, Atoll K, Laurel & Hardy deliver the laughs!
Repeated laughs are a fabulous way to celebrate Father's Day! Happy Birthday, Stan!
