Back in 2019: Silent Movie Innovators Bowers & Blaché

Good news for silent movie aficionados: a new Blu-ray set spotlights stop-motion animation innovator Charley Bowers, while a new documentary now in movie theaters covers the career of filmmaking pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché. There is also a new DVD collecting the few existing films starring World War I era comedians Eddie Lyons & Lee Moran.



The Extraordinary World Of Charley Bowers isn't the first Charley Bowers collection; that was a 2-DVD set issued back in the 1990's.



The Extraordinary World Of Charley Bowers is, however, the first collection on Blu-ray and includes newly found titles not on the previous DVD release.



First heard about this Bowers Blu-ray when the collection was announced in 2014 and am happy to see it officially out!



The animation and sight gag-packed Bowers Comedies get the restoration treatment on Blu-ray from Lobster Films, distributed by Flicker Alley.



The films of Bowers, the indescribable comic, animator and illustrator, who blended live-action silent era comedy with innovative stop-motion techniques akin to what Willis "King Kong" O Brien and Ladislaw Starewicz were doing, are more akin to the way-out visionary ideas of Ernie Kovacs than to any of his 1920's contemporaries.



The Charley Bowers Blu-ray is available for pre-order and will be officially released on June 25.



For more on the films of Charley Bowers, check out author Imogen Sara Smith's outstanding and scholarly article on the animator/comedian in Bright Lights Film Journal.


Courtesy of Be Natural Productions


Another extraordinary visionary, high atop the short list of the most important and groundbreaking figures in the history of movies, who was there blazing new trails with the Lumiere brothers at the very beginning: producer-director-writer-cinematographer and head of Solax Studios, Alice Guy-Blaché.



In Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the very first filmmakers (arguably, the first narrative filmmaker), the cinema's first mogul gets her due.



The new film by Pamela B. Green tells the Alice Guy-Blaché story via a host of recently discovered photos and historic footage.



The following trailer for Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché reveals that, rather astonishingly, a fair number of movie stars, filmmakers, producers and directors had never heard of Alice Guy Blaché.



Frankly, that causes us at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog to shake our heads in disbelief.



We were thrilled and delighted to devote a post to the original Kickstarter which raised the initial funds to get the ball rolling on its production.



As Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy Blaché was in production, a few more of Mademoiselle Blaché's long lost films - it's been estimated that she made over a thousand - turned up. Some are on the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers Blu-ray and the Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology collection from Flicker Alley.




While it's true that very little was said about her in film history courses 40 years ago - her entire cinematic legacy was lost back then - Alice Guy Blaché's legacy as a female moviemaking powerhouse before the rise of Mary Pickford as producer-star, before the word "filmmaker" existed, has received much long overdue acclaim, including several books, theatrical showings of the aforementioned Kino Lorber collection Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, and a comprehensive Whitney Museum exhibit, over the past decade.



Those who saw her films on Turner Classic Movies in 2013, as well as on the big screen as part of a presentation by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival a few years ago, certainly are well aware of Alice Guy-Blaché.



Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is the first documentary about Blaché in quite a few years to hit the film festival circuit and receive a theatrical release, but not the first documentary about Alice Guy Blaché.



With the research of historians Anthony Slide and Alison McMahan, who have championed her work for decades, The National Film Board of Canada produced The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché, which included interview footage of Alice from the 1950's, in 1995.



For more info on Alice Guy-Blaché, see:

Women Film Pioneers Project

Auteur! Auteur!: 'Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché'

Alice Guy-Blaché, Forgotten Film Pioneer

A four book series, The Life and Work of Alice Guy-Blaché by Janelle Dietrick:



Alice & Eiffel: A New History of Early Cinema and the Love Story Kept Secret for a Century

Illuminating Moments: The Films of Alice Guy-Blaché

La Fée Aux Choux: Alice Guy's Garden of Dreams

Mademoiselle Alice: A Novel




Two books by Alison McMahan

Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema

The Solax Films of Alice Guy Blaché



Completing today's post on silent film rarities, a limited edition DVD collects the few surviving films of the prolific comedians Eddie Lyons & Lee Moran.



Lyons & Moran were very talented and funny comic actors, at first part of a troupe directed by Al Christie that made the Nestor Comedies series.



Key in a sophisticated comedy and farce lineage, along with the duo of John Bunny and Flora Finch and the marital comedy stars Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew, the witty comic actors were very important in the history of screen humor and among the first to establish the Al Christie studio's situational comedy approach.



Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran co-starred in dozens of sophisticated farces with hints of slapstick and silliness - over 300 films - for Nestor and Universal from 1912-1921.



The Lyons-Moran Comedies' influence continued after the team broke up in 1921. Charley Chase, who, along with future Our Gang diector Robert McGowan, worked as a writer/director on the sophisticated comedies of Mr & Mrs. Carter DeHaven in 1920, began his career making uncredited cameos in Eddie Lyons & Lee Moran Nestor comedies, before joining Mack Sennett's Keystone as a stock company member in 1914. Chase was and eventually would, in collaboration with co-director Leo McCarey at the Hal Roach studio, blend elements of a sophisticated comedy approach with goofy sight gags and judicious moments of outrageous slapstick.



They also wrote and directed a fair number of their own starring vehicles, especially in the last series for Universal, the Lyons-Moran Star Comedies.



Whether the duo were a comedy team in the same sense as Laurel & Hardy remains debatable - this blogger thinks the troupe as a whole, which also featured comediennes Victoria Forde, Edith Roberts, Betty Compson, Billie Rhodes and Charlotte Merriam, constituted the comedy team - at least now it is possible to see a few of the Lyons & Moran films on DVD, thanks to the Library of Congress and the efforts of Rare Silent Films in Portland, OR.



Even more amazing is that the Early Universal Shorts of Lyons & Moran DVD is labeled volume 1; the incredibly low survivability rate on Lyons & Moran films makes one wonder how there could be actually enough existing titles to make a volume 2. Maybe there are. . .

Remembering The French Pioneers Of Early Cinema On Bastille Day!

Earlier today, started writing this post to raise our champagne flutes both to France and the early innovators of cinema in celebration of Bastille Day. This day in 2016 has turned out to be a crushingly sad one for France and the world - yet again - giving us all the more reason to raise that toast to the innovators who invented cinema and our friends and film historian counterparts there.

When it comes to filmmaking, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, sons of prominent portrait painter Antoine Lumière, were responsible for many early innovations in the field of photography and in the development of the movie cameras.



From the section on the Lumière brothers from the comprehensive and splendid Early Cinema.com website:

By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinématographe. Patenting it on February 13th 1895, the Cinématographe was much smaller than Edison’s Kinetograph, was lightweight (around five kilograms), and was hand cranked. The Lumières used a film speed of 16 frames per second, much slower compared with Edison’s 48 fps - this meant that less film was used an also the clatter and grinding associated with Edison’s device was reduced.



In 1895, the Lumières would be doing public screenings using the Cinématographe to project their films featuring scenes from everyday life.



These scenes being an immediate hit with audiences, they augmented them with film of dancers and other performers. Many of these Lumière Brothers productions - and films made not long afterwards by Georges Méliès - can be seen on the DVD The Movies Begin.





The Lumières would very soon be followed by producer, director and Solax Studios founder Alice Guy Blaché. When it comes to filmmaking outside of the "trick film" exemplified at the turn of the 20th century by Melies and his editor Ferdinand Zecca and (slightly later) Segundo de Chomón, it was Solax Studios founder Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) who got there first.



Blaché, the cinema's first mogul, is arguably the best known of the female producer-directors who blazed trails in the beginning. She beat everyone else, including Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith and Allan Dwan, to the punch, experimented with color technology, made sound films and also was a mentor to Lois Weber.



It would be an understatement to suggest that the pioneering producer-director wasted no time mastering the new technology.



Alice Guy Blaché was hands-on with the new and innovative motion picture camera technology in Paris and would be making short films for Gaumont as early as 1896-1897.



By the time the first great screen comedian, Max Linder, had become a frequent movie headliner in 1906-1907, Alice Guy Blaché had made hundreds of films. Comedy buffs will note that Alice Guy Blaché is tremendously important to the history of screen humor as both the first comedy filmmaker and the first to film the famous "mirror gag". It's in her 1912 Solax film His Double, which can be seen here, on historian Anthony Balducci's website.



The inventive Ms. Blaché also originated this classic comedy bit for her 1906 film The Drunken Mattress.



Although long overdue recognition, respect and acclaim may not have come in her long lifetime, her contributions to filmmaking were recognized in 1953 when she was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.

A comprehensive Alice Guy Blaché, Film Pioneer exhibition did hold forth (and wowed audiences) at the Whitney Museum Of American Art in November 2009 - January 2010.



Saw the following film, Falling Leaves, at the 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival and found it touching, beautifully filmed and very advanced for 1912.



There will be more clips in Be Natural, a documentary on the life and films of Alice Guy Blaché, currently in production.

UPDATE 2 Seeing Alice's Films A Fool and His Money (1912) from Be Natural on Vimeo.

UPDATE 43 The Intern & The Ocean Waif from Be Natural on Vimeo.


Thanks to Dr. Jane Gaines, Professor Of Film at Columbia University and students from both Columbia University Libraries/Information Services' School Of The Arts and Barnard College have created the The Women Film Pioneers Project website to shine the klieg lights on the largely untold story of Alice and other pioneering women filmmakers.





While he may have not been the first comic to make a movie, the dapper Parisian boulevardier was the first movie comedian to headline a continuing series: the great Max Linder (1882-1925), the man in the silk hat.



Author Trav S.D. elaborated on the influence of Linder's comedy on Keystone and beyond in his piece For Bastille Day: How the French Invented Film Comedy, excerpted from his book Chain Of Fools: Silent Comedy And Its Legacies, From Nickelodeons To YouTube.





Max would be an enormous influence on Mack Sennett (see the "Mack as Max" Biograph short subject The Curtain Pole) as well as Charlie Chaplin.



Here are some clips from Max' pre-1910 films, transferred from the 9.5mm format by Unknown Video.







The Kino Lorber compilation of Max Linder films for the Slapstick Symposium series, which includes his later films, is something we at Way Too Damn Mazy To Write A Blog recommend highly - on Bastille Day or any day.



We close with a charming cartoon made about dogs, fleas and Paris for MGM by Tex Avery, followed by two renditions of La Marseillaise (the first from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog favorite Casablanca).


Tex Avery - The flea circus - Video Dailymotion... by cartoonworld4all

The Women Film Pioneers Project by Paul F. Etcheverry

"Actors - BE NATURAL!" Alice Guy Blaché

"Later, I expect to do five reel comedy dramas, that is, if we kind find the right kind of stories, but believe me, it is some job." Fay Tincher

"Alice Guy Blaché's His Double featured the first known version of the mirror routine to be recorded on film." Anthony Balducci



Today's post begins with a fact unbeknownst to many: the movie biz, in the very early days, was, to a significant degree, BUILT BY WOMEN. Although the formidable actress-mogul Mary Pickford was acknowledged (then and now) as a powerhouse on many levels, this fact about the pre-World War I history of movies tends to be forgotten. Dr. Jane Gaines, Professor Of Film at Columbia University and students from both Columbia University Libraries/Information Services' School Of The Arts and Barnard College have created the The Women Film Pioneers Project website to shine the klieg lights on this largely untold story.



As the website notes, the project spotlights "150 career profiles of female silent-era producers, directors, co-directors, theatre managers and company owners, scenario writers, scenario editors, studio accountants, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, animal trainers, and camera operators."



After 1920 and the rise of the studio system, at least until Ida Lupino started making hard-hitting noir thrillers in 1949, female directors and cinematographers proved few and far between in American films. There were screenwriters (Frances Marion, Anita Loos), but few women who helmed features besides Dorothy Arzner.



It was a different story in the early days of cinema.



When it comes to filmmaking, it was Solax Studios founder Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) who got there first. Along with Arzner and the prolific Universal Pictures director Lois Weber, Blaché, the cinema's first mogul, is arguably the best known of the female producer-directors who blazed trails in the beginning.



Blaché was hands-on with the new motion picture camera technology in Paris and making short films for Gaumont as early as 1896-1897.



She beat everyone else, including Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith and Allan Dwan, to the punch, experimented with color technology, made sound films and also was a mentor to Lois Weber. By the time the first great screen comedians, Max Linder and Marcel Perez, had become movie headliners in 1906-1907, Alice Guy Blaché had made hundreds of films.



Comedy buffs will note that Alice Guy Blaché is tremendously important to the history of screen humor as both the first comedy filmmaker and the first to film the famous "mirror gag". It's in her 1912 Solax film His Double, which can be seen here, on historian Anthony Balducci's website.



The inventive Ms. Blaché also originated this classic comedy bit for her 1906 film The Drunken Mattress, before the rapid rise to stardom of Max Linder and Marcel Perez, before Ben Turpin in Mr. Flip, before Mack Sennett, before ANYONE.



Although long overdue recognition, respect and acclaim may not have come in her long lifetime, the comprehensive Alice Guy Blaché, Film Pioneer exhibition did hold forth (and wow 'em) at the Whitney Museum Of American Art in November 2009 - January 2010. There is also the forthcoming documentary about her career by Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs (note: the Kickstarter fundraiser noted in the following trailer was successful).



There were also exceptionally creative women who specialized in the field of comedy. Among the all-time favorites at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog remains the multi-talented Mabel Normand.



The queen of the lot at Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, before that a Gibson Girl, key player at Biograph and later a Goldwyn feature film star, "Madcap Mabel" could write, act and direct with imagination and distinction.



Mabel proved herself resourceful both in front of and behind the camera in numerous classic comedy short subjects, and at one point directed then fresh-off-the-boat former Fred Karno Troupe star and new Keystone addition Charlie Chaplin.



She also had prominent roles in two of the first American comedy feature films, Tillie's Punctured Romance (starring Marie Dressler, Charlie Chaplin and most of the Keystone roster) and the enormously popular hit Mickey (1918).



The latter, a starring vehicle for Mabel, pre-dated Chaplin's The Kid in theatrical release by two years and made a mint for Mack Sennett. Its unprecedented box office success prompted Samuel Goldwyn Productions to sign her to a feature film contract.



So, in the "good news - bad news" department, Mabel continued as a top box office feature film star, but did not work behind the camera again after the freewheeling days of Keystone.



Then, as now, one showbiz pattern doesn't change. When talented comedians and comediennes transition from short films to features and become "movie stars" - then as now - the spark and originality that made them great in the first place often gets substantially watered down in the "toning down for mass audience consumption" process.



It happened to Mabel at Goldwyn, as it would for her friend Roscoe Arbuckle at Paramount (and, for that matter, to John Candy and other more recent comedy kings and queens when cast in feature films).



Filmmaker Anthony Mercaldi and historian Marilyn Slater, author of the Looking For Mabel website (and source of these wonderful stills), have been working on a documentary about her life.



Hopefully, this will go some distance towards counteracting the avalanche of misinformation and gossip about Miss Normand over the decades.



All efforts to set the historical record straight regarding Mabel - well, as much as possible for a subject who passed away 84 years ago - are most welcome. After all, by the time the likes of Vsevolod "V.I." Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein were enthusiastically investigating the history of filmmaking, Mabel's time in movies was coming to an end.



Also prominent among the director-writer-comediennes was the versatile and ever-inventive Fay Tincher (1884-1983), subject of the posting right here on April 17.



Fay's funny and outrageous performances as Ethel The Stenographer in The Bill The Office Boy series for Komic made her a major movie star in 1914.



She went on to co-star in a series of 5-reel dramas and comedies with DeWolf Hopper at Fine Arts Film Company, distributed by Triangle.



After leaving Fine Arts, she formed The Fay Tincher Comedy Company to produce and star in comedies for World Film Corporation.



Unfortunately, none of the three films (Main 1-2-3, Some Job and Oh, Susie, Behave) survive. All that exists from the 1918 productions are stills.



Christie Comedies signed Fay to headline "2-reel specials" in 1919. In an alternate "wishful thinking" universe, one would have liked to see Fay write, direct and produce her own films for Christie. It didn't happen.



As it turned out, very likely as a response to the Mack Sennett Studio's popular western comedies starring Polly Moran as Sheriff Nell, the Christie studio cast Fay in a series of westerns as a take-no-prisoners pistol packin' mama.



While such starring vehicles as Rowdy Ann and Wild & Western, without a doubt, remain extremely funny and her originality and screen presence undeniable, these action comedies, no doubt, were not exactly what Fay had in mind when she signed with Christie in the first place.



Of course, latter-day silent movie buffs wish that Al Christie had said "Fay, here's your production unit, go ahead, write and direct the 5-reel features you want, pick your crew, just bring 'em in on time and on budget. Have fun." Based on Fay's incendiary and creative performances onscreen, one imagines she would have brought ingenuity, verve, independence and out-of-the-box thinking - yes, the very traits still not exactly prized by Hollywood - to such an assignment.



Other comediennes were known to have, as did many silent era headliners, produced, worked on scenarios and at least co-directed their own series. Yet another was the brilliant comedienne and character actress Gale Henry, who organized her own production company after starring in 1-reelers for the ridiculously prolific Universal Joker series in 1914-1917.



Much of the career of Gale Henry - and that's hundreds of comedy shorts made by Universal, Nestor, L-Ko and Bull's Eye/ Reelcraft during the WW1 era - has been lost due to vault fires and the Nitrate Won't Wait phenomenon. That includes an overwhelming majority of the short subjects she headlined (including the Lady Baffles & Detective Duck series), as well as hilarious character roles in a good many feature films.



Fortunately, her scene-stealing turn with Raymond Griffith in Open All Night, and howlingly funny supporting parts in the films of director/writer/comic Charley Chase survive - and demonstrate that Gale was one of the most talented comediennes to ever appear in films.



After she left the silver screen with a bang with a memorable appearance in the 1933 Charley Chase short Luncheon At Twelve, Gale, with her husband, Henry East, became prominent in a very successful second career supplying studios with top-notch canine talent - and that meant only the best barkers, including the immortal Asta from Metro Goldwyn Mayer's Thin Man movies!



The difficulties inherent in research on pre-1920 cinema are many and involve the following questions. How does one corroborate information, debunk misinformation and double-check stories when every one of the subjects, their friends and contemporaries have been deceased for many decades? And how does one confirm historical accuracy, given faulty memories and penchants for throwing former colleagues under the bus?



is a dilemma all historians must wrestle with - hopefully with the success of "Bull" Montana, Gorgeous George, Ravishing Ronald, Randy "Macho Man" Savage or Leila Ali. Noting the extent to which writers adore hyperbole, about the best one can do is, should a statement or note be based on conjecture - and, in all honesty, has never been adequately corroborated or confirmed - then admit it up front and not make any pretense that the statement is factual! And it gets really crazy when the topic of comedienne and comic actress Thelma Todd arises.



In the case of Mabel Normand, there have been so many totally uncorroborated allegations put forward as fact, both during her lifetime and well after her untimely death, than one simply doesn't know where to begin.



In the cases of comediennes Fay Tincher and Alice Howell, they dropped so thoroughly and completely out of sight after leaving show business that interviews from their days in movies are all we have to go on.



Many of the old Hollywood secrets died with these stars and the whole truth will never be known.



As more formerly lost films are discovered, however, there will be more added to the story.



So, today, we respectfully tip the Marlene Dietrich top hat to these great artists of silent movies - and all the researchers and research subjects in the The Women Film Pioneers Project.



The truth is there in the finished films.