What Jay Ward Did to The General |
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ACHTUNG!
If you have not already seen The General, please do not watch this YouTube video.
It is inauthentic and will give you a wrong idea about the film.
Instead, get the Kino
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Do not watch the above YouTube video until you see the below Blu-ray.
This is the disc you need to look for. This one, with this cover, product number K669. No other. No other video edition measures up to this one: 
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Jay Ward’s edition of The General mystified me.
It drove me crazy for decades.
Then Keith Scott, in his book,
The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose
(NY: St. Martin’s Press, November 2001),
explained the basics on pages 299 and 300.
At long last, I began to understand.
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Let’s begin before the beginning.
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Jay Ward Productions had been working with Raymond Rohauer since the early 1960’s,
when Rohauer licensed footage to Ward for a TV series called “Fractured Flickers.”
I think their first feature-film reissue was, yes, believe it or not,
The Birth of a Nation, for which Jay Ward commissioned a new score.
I had heard occasional mention of this in the past, but only in relation to Rohauer, not to Ward.
A surprised viewer at the time commented that the left side appeared to be missing all the way through.
This person wrongly assumed that the poor composition was the result of extreme parallax in the viewfinder.
Nope!
It was the result of slipshod lab work.
To make way for the music track, the lab workers lopped off the left side of the image.
That, apparently, was a cheaper solution than reducing the image to fit onto the sound format.
A search through online newspaper archives does not reveal any release dates.
I suppose this was shown only as part of Rohauer’s traveling Griffith retrospective?
I would pay good money to see Jay Ward’s edition of The Birth of a Nation,
and I would give my right arm to get a good video copy.
As for the other Griffith films mentioned in the above article,
I suppose Jay Ward scored them, too, but only for the traveling retrospective.
I simply MUST find these editions!
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In 1965, Ward and Rohauer created The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy,
and in 1969 they reissued it together with a threesome of W.C. Fields short films.
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As you can see, Jay Ward Productions now doubled
The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy with
One Hour with W.C. Fields, which was sometimes advertised as The Great One.
This latter feature was actually three short films under the control of Raymond Rohauer,
which Rohauer would later copyright in his own name in
1972:
The Barber Shop,
The Pharmacist, and
The Fatal Glass of Beer.
These items were sometimes combined with
The Jay Ward Intergalactic Film Festival.
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In 1969 or early 1970, Jay Ward Productions acquired a full-aperture fine-grain of The General from MGM,
which had just suffered a hostile takeover and was selling off (or often just trashing) anything the new owners deemed useless.
Whether it was Jay Ward Production that purchased it directly from MGM at this time,
or whether it was Rohauer who had earlier purchased it and loaned it to Jay Ward Productions,
I do not know.
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Bill Scott was Jay Ward’s business partner and Skip Craig was their editor.
They were all enamored of the vaudeville comics, of Buster Keaton, and of The General.
Bill and Skip enthusiastically updated The General.
Milt Larsen, owner of the Magic Castle, supplied a collection of nickelodeon mood music from 1912
(most likely this one).
Joe Siracusa crafted a score from those old cues and Lou Fratturo rearranged the tunes for Siracusa’s band.
We do not know who the musicians were, but we can make an educated guess
that Joe was on percussion, that George Rock was on cornet and trumpet, and, maybe, that Johnny Guarnieri was on piano.
Other musicians were likely alumni of the Spike Jones City Slickers.
Rich Harrison created the sound effects.
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Bill and Skip
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There had been some damage to the original camera negative by 1947 or 1948,
when United Artists made this fine-grain for MGM.
That damage resulted in a jump in the action in Reel 5.
As Johnnie (not Johnny!) screeches his train to a halt to break the telegraph wires,
the train suddenly jumps ahead in
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They needed to convert the silent image to sound,
and this they did by instructing the lab (I do not know which lab)
to reduce the size of the image from about .723"×.980" to about .620"×.864".
The smaller image was then shifted to the right to allow room for a soundtrack on the left.
There was a further problem:
No cinema was able to project even that smaller image anymore.
Widescreen was here to stay, and so 28% (or more!) of the height would be lopped off of modern American movie screens.
What to do?
We do not have the story, but it is clear that Bill and Skip tested the film to see what further adjustments they would need to make.
They ran their reduced image of .620"×.864" through the usual American widescreen mask of .446"×.825"
and they must have been delighted to discover that it worked.
Yes, the cropping was too tight for some scenes, but nothing essential was lost and audiences would be able to follow the story.
There was no need for further reformatting.
They inserted the captions at the usual American 1:1.85 safe area, and all was well —
provided, of course, that projectionists were careful to keep the image exactly centered, not too high and not too low.
I can assure you, as I personally witnessed, that not all projectionists were careful.
On the contrary!
They ran it as far off center as they possibly could, and the result was an utterly incomprehensible viewing experience.
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 The Academy image as transmitted on Showtime, imperfectly. |
 The height as cropped at American cinemas of the time. |
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Jay Ward submitted the film to the Copyright Office in early 1970
and received copyright registration LP38511 on April 1, 1970.
The “New Material” was specified as “new titles, editing & other revisions.”
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The distributor was Jay Ward Productions’ usual choice,
Joseph Brenner Associates, a
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The General was accompanied by A Night with the Great One,
a collection of three W.C. Fields shorts supplied by Raymond Rohauer:
Pool Sharks (1969 reissue, with Rohauer’s titles and an uncredited organ score;
left side missing, as it was in the prints in the 1970’s;
to see the rest of the image, watch this),
The Golf Specialist (which Rohauer would later copyright in
1972), and
The Dentist (which Rohauer would later copyright in
1972).
The earliest booking that I can find was in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
on the night of Friday, September 25, 1970,
when it was shown outdoors during a
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Since Jay Ward Productions and the Rohauer Collection had a longstanding business relationship,
when cinemas booked The General from Rohauer,
he began to ship out this Jay Ward edition, unless requested otherwise.
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Jay Ward Productions in 1975 put together a new double bill:
a documentary called The Golden Age of Buster Keaton and Three Shorts,
which consisted of
One Week,
The Paleface, and
The High Sign.
Again, Joe Siracusa selected the vintage nickelodeon music and the usual suspects performed it,
supplemented by Johnny Guarnieri’s original piano bridges.
There were cartoony sound effects, presumably by Rich Harrison,
and the opening and closing credits were reset to include some of these names as well as a 1975 copyright.
Alas, no American distributor wanted to touch these items.
Both films were eventually released in England, though information is scarce.
In the US, after a wait of four years, Golden Age went straight to HBO in July 1979.
It was repeated in May 1980 and then it vanished forever.
Three Shorts was broken up into three shorts.
The High Sign was shown, unannounced, on a premium cable station as filler.
One Week was shown on British television.
The Paleface was released on a German VHS.
Where else these may have turned up, I do not know,
but we do know that Rohauer began to ship these out instead of his previous editions.
Some people were upset and even outraged by the music and sound effects,
but that’s a matter of opinion.
Speaking for myself, I love them.
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Also in 1975, Jay Ward Productions created a new edition of Sherlock Jr.,
reformatted to the Academy aperture.
From what I can tell, this reformatting was faulty, zoomed in too far to the center,
and so all four sides were lost.
The music consisted of scratchy 78’s from the 1920’s,
almost all of them from 1924, the same year the film was made.
I presume that it was again Bill Scott and Skip Craig who worked on this edition, but I do not know that for sure.
Here are the pieces:
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Clarence Williams,
Long, Deep and Wide
(Broadway (9) – 1347, 1928)
Fletcher Henderson, Houston Blues (Columbia – 164-D, 1924) Fletcher Henderson, Muscle Shoals Blues (Columbia – 164-D, 1924) Fletcher Henderson, That’s Georgia (Columbia – 202-D, 1924) The Georgians, Mindin’ My Bus’ness (Columbia – 102-D, 1924) Kansas City Five, Louisville Blues (Ajax (6) – 17072, 1925) Perry Bradford’s Jazz Phools, Hoola Boola Dance (Paramount – 20309, 1924) The Georgians, Doodle Doo Doo (Columbia – 142-D, 1924) The Georgians, Savannah (Columbia – 142-D, 1924) The Georgians, My Best Girl (Columbia – 252-D, 1925) Fletcher Henderson, Naughty Man (Columbia – 249-D, 1925) The Chicagoans, Chicago Blues (feat. The Bucktown Five) (Gennett – 5418, 1924) Bix Beiderbecke, Really a Pain (Gennett – 5419, 1924) The Bucktown Five, Hot Mittens (Gennett – 5518, 1924) Fletcher Henderson, Feelin’ the Way I Do (Silvertone – 3023, 1924) |
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Delicious music that is every bit as playful as the movie,
but, predictably, there were complaints that it did not fit the film’s action.
Again, that’s a matter of opinion.
Personally, I enjoyed it, thoroughly.
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As you can see from the display ad reproduced above,
this edition of the film accompanied Randy Finley’s reissue of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and the Fox Movietone
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Enough of that aside.
Let us return to the topic at hand, the 1970/1971 reissue of The General.
When the double bill of The General and A Night with the Great One
came to its quiet, unnoticed end after a mere year and a half,
The General continued to appear here and there.
It was broadcast on a scrambled pay service called ONTV on May 30, 1979,
based in Corona but available throughout Southern California.
Perhaps it was shown on other TV and cable stations as well,
but probably the final booking was in April 1986 on the Showtime premium service.
After that, Jay Ward Productions withdrew the film and it has never been seen since.
In its place was Raymond Rohauer’s 1979 edition, printed from the same
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Courtesy of a collector who captured a Showtime transmission on VHS back in April 1986,
we can at long last view this edition again.
The quality of the dub is rather poor, cursed with images that are too dark and too soft and beset with
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Well... uh... I could be wrong.
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The General was designed for something like a 1:1.60 crop,
but, by the wildest coincidence, it was framed so loosely that it can withstand a modern 28% crop of 1:1.85.
The result is not perfect, but darned near.
So why was The General composed this way?
Read Carr & Hayes’s Wide Screen Movies (McFarland, 1988), pp. 5–10,
and follow that up with a vintage article by Harry Rubin,
“The Magnascope,” in The Motion Picture Projectionist of November 1928, p. 13,
and pay especially close attention to the diagram.
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Magnascope was meant only for a selected one or two scenes in only a few movies,
scenes that would be improved by an enormous image on a mammoth screen.
Predictably, some cinema managers were so entranced by Magnascope that they ordered their projectionists
to crop all films, beginning to end, at each particular cinema’s individual Magnascope setting,
and most cinemas set Magnascope for a widescreen crop.
That shoddy practice began in December 1924 with the release of Paramount’s North of 36.
In response, some cameramen began to compose their films for cropping.
Buster and his crew composed Battling Butler and
The General for about a 1:1.60 crop,
and College for about a 1:1.75 crop,
but when they began Steamboat Bill, Jr.,
they apparently said that enough was enough and they refused to play that game anymore.
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Though the Jay Ward Productions edition of The General is an alteration and therefore inauthentic,
it is nonetheless enjoyable and it is an important part of the historical record.
I wish that the current owners, whoever they might be, would relent and issue this edition on
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An even better idea?
Release a box set of all the Jay Ward reworkings of Buster’s films:
The General (1970),
The Golden Age of Buster Keaton (1975),
Three Shorts (1975), and
Sherlock Jr. (1975).
I would pay good money for such a collection.
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#30#
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