Chapter 55
Movies at the Mission and at UNM
Movies at the Mission and at UNM
Before We Proceed...
I thought I knew a little bit.
I didn’t know nuttin’.
What I thought I knew was that, beginning in 1921,
a handful of cities in the US saw the opening of small cinemas that concentrated on finer films,
as distinct from the run-of-the-mill Hollywood releases.
As far as I can determine, one of the main catalysts for this small “art-house” movement
was a 1919 German film called
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
which first played on these shores in April 1921.
The movie provoked protests (at least in Los Ángeles, as anti-German sentiments were still raging),
but it also elicited admiration and it attracted large audiences.
These small “art houses” failed rather quickly,
as far as I know, but, over the long haul, they had an effect which still reverberates to this day.
Well, that’s what I thought I knew.
Then I ran across this syndicated article, and I was stunned:
That was published in February 1917, before Buster Keaton had appeared on camera,
before Charlie Chaplin had made The Immigrant,
before Harold Lloyd began using the glasses character,
before True Heart Susie,
half a year before Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
half a year before Polly of the Circus,
before there was more than a handful of movie palaces.
The foresight that these Photoplay League people had simply stuns me.
I discover that this Photoplay League was operational no later than
June 1916!!!!!
That’s even before
Intolerance was completed!!!!!
The Photoplay League wanted to find audiences for finer films rather than cookie-cutter Hollywood pabulum,
and wanted further to guarantee that those audiences would turn out en masse to support those finer films.
My head is spinning.
It was 20 years before Albuquerque got its own version of a photoplay league, or, more precisely, a film society,
and, as we discover to our sorrow, it had limited success and quickly folded.
Other groups took its place, though.
Another thing to remember is that if you missed a movie when it was new, well, tough, you missed it.
Chances of its ever being shown again were usually nil.
Oh, a few movies that still had some pull were reissued,
but, for the most part, once a movie had played its day or two, or, sometimes, its single week,
in any particular market, it was gone for good.
It wandered across the country, playing its day or two in various cities and villages,
and once it had finished its trek, it was relegated to the rubbish bin.
I have heard Buster Keaton fans complain that Rudi Blesh got many of his descriptions of Buster’s movies all wrong.
I tried to explain that, when Rudi wrote his book in the 1950’s, he could not turn on his laptop and stream the videos to check his memories.
He could not even drive over to the nearest Blockbuster to rent the VHS.
He was relying on his 30-year-old memories, which, for most of those movies, was literally all he could do.
When Robert Payne decided to write his book, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charles Chaplin
(NY: Hermitage House, 1952), he immediately ran into a serious problem.
Now, Chaplin’s movies were among the very few that were revived, that were kept in release,
that were shown here and there, from the time they were first released until well past 1952.
Not all of them, but a selection of the earliest ones, certainly.
Yet even with Charlie’s movies, there remained this serious problem.
He explained (p. x):
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...a whole generation has arisen which
knows almost nothing of his work.
We can hardly blame them: it is not their fault that the
early comedies are often difficult to procure. Mostly we see
them by chance. I saw The Circus and Tillie’s Punctured
Romance recently in a warehouse in Greenwich Village, and
would not have known they were being shown unless a Czech
barber had told me about them. I found Carmen in an obscure
underground theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, which
closed after the showing of a few films. One A.M. and The
Kid were mercifully revived recently by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. I saw a torn and silver-splashed
copy of The Pilgrim in Kunming, A Dog’s Life in New
Delhi, and a whole series of fading one-reelers in Paris, where
copies printed in World War I were being shown nearly
thirty years later. City Lights I have seen four times in the
past year, but I saw Modern Times for the last time fifteen
years ago, and what is written here is based on a fallible memory
and the lengthy report of a recent private showing from
a friend. In the last months I have obtained nearly all the
Keystone, Essanay and Mutual comedies from various Hollywood
and New York agencies. Nearly all these films are falling
to pieces. They have been cut abominably, sound has
been added, many are faded and spotted, and in a few years
nothing will be left of them. Someone must get to work. I
have read that film more than forty years old gradually decomposes.
There is need for the art-restorers of film....
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Oh that makes me curious.
I had to check.
The “obscure underground theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, which
closed after the showing of a few films” was almost certainly the Flicker Silent Movie,
6726 Hollywood Blvd, which showed Burlesque on Carmen
in August 1950.
The Flicker opened in early September 1949 and lasted only 13 months.
Payne commented on how hopelessly battered the prints from the Hollywood and NY agencies were.
Well, that is why they had been withdrawn from release: They were too battered to make it through a projector anymore,
and I’m surprised they were kept in inventory rather than scrapped.
There was little incentive to pull out the negatives (or dupe negs?) to make more.
Box-office returns did not justify the effort and expense.
The hopelessly battered Keystone films with sound added were
Mabel’s Strange Predicament,
A Film Johnnie (retitled A Film Johnny),
Mabel at the Wheel (retitled Hot Finish),
Twenty Minutes of Love,
Caught in a Cabaret, and
The Property Man, all formerly released by Exhibitors’ Pictures Corporation, possibly sold to Jack Hoffberg Productions.
There would also have been
Dough and Dynamite,
His Trysting Place[s], and
His Prehistoric Past from Fred Futter.
(Caught in a Cabaret was available, actually, both from Exhibitors’ Pictures Corporation and from Fred Futter.)
One further battered Keystone film was
Laughing Gas, from the mysterious Edwin G. O’Brien.
Then, of course, Tillie’s Punctured Romance seems to have been in circulation continuously,
in
The hopelessly battered Essanay films with added sound were
His New Job,
In the Park,
A Jitney Elopement,
The Tramp,
By the Sea,
Work (retitled The Paper Hanger),
A Woman,
The Bank (retitled In the Bank),
Shanghaied, and
Triple Trouble, all from Jack Hoffberg Productions,
which had acquired them from Exhibitors’ Pictures Corporation (aka King of Comedy Film Corporation).
The other hopelessly battered Essanay films with added sound were
The Champion,
A Night in the Show (retitled A Night at the Show), and
Police, all from Edwin G. O’Brien, again, whoever he was, who may have had some or all of the others, too.
That’s 12 out of a total of 16 that Payne was able to chase down and study.
Anything Payne could not chase down was presumed destroyed.
The dozen films from the Mutual Film Corporation had gone
to
Republic Pictures which reissued them as a series of “Chaplin Classics.”
That was circa 1920.
Then they went to
Impossible for me to trace the other screenings that Payne mentioned.
Then, two years after Payne published his book,
Blackhawk Films of Davenport, Iowa, somehow began to dig up more of Chaplin’s Keystone and Essanay films.
Where Blackhawk found them, I have no clue.
The Blackhawk materials were probably not copies of the materials held by Hoffberg or O’Brien or MoMA.
In November 1954, Blackhawk started selling just three Chaplin Keystones.
Over the next quarter of a century, Blackhawk slowly but surely found more and more and more,
and some of those materials were supposedly one step removed from pristine.
The materials had probably all been trimmed and altered somewhat through the years, but at least they still existed, by some miracle.
Blackhawk even found the original camera negative of Tillie’s Punctured Romance and began selling 8mm and 16mm prints in
September 1971!
Amazing.
Of course, I presume the neg had been trimmed, but still! Amazing!
Where on earth did Blackhawk find the original camera neg?
What I wouldn’t give to know how and where and by what means the Blackhawk folks traced those films down.
It doesn’t seem possible, but they did it.
The
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Now it is time to get to the story of movie presentations by and at the University of New Mexico.
I dreaded to do that, because I thought the story would be deadly dull and totally dry.
Instead, I am delighted to report that this story, or rather these stories, are most intriguing.
The history is much richer than I could have imagined.
Will you agree?
If you have any standing interest in UNM, yes, you will agree.
If you have no interest in UNM, you will disagree.
The Foreign Language Group of U.N.M.
I never knew about this. Did you know about this? I don’t think you knew about this.
A club associated with the Department of Modern Languages arranged for a film series at the Mission cinema downtown.
Did you know about that?
These were not older films, since older films were not available.
As you should know by now, once a film finished its run across the USA, it was withdrawn
and often all copies were destroyed.
That’s why there were no older films in this series.
On the other hand, this series broadened Albuquerque’s options.
Exotic films from Germany, Austria, Italy, France, the USSR, England, México, and even Japan and China,
which no cinema manager would have even considered, suddenly started streaming into town,
and, if I am reading between the lines correctly, the attendance, though not spectacular, was certainly respectable.
Reproduced courtesy of Historic Albuquerque, Inc., Jim Coad Collection.
On the very right, you can just barely see a tiny hint of the original Lyric at 121 Central Ave NW. This original Lyric was later renamed the Ideal and later yet the Mission. Someone else also uploaded this image onto CinemaTreasures, but misidentified it as the later Lyric two blocks west.
Back in 1913, there was a three-story structure downtown called the Lyric.
The ground-level story and possibly the second story as well were used as a small cinema.
It opened on 16 April 1913 at
121 Central Avenue NW, astride the Combs Hotel
(later renamed De Paul’s Hotel and then Kings Hotel and who knows what-all else).
Five years later, the owner, Fred Cameron, built a new Lyric
two blocks away at
312 Central Avenue SW,
and he sold his 121 Central property to G.B. Donner, who refurbished the old place and renamed it the
Ideal.
Donner’s projectionist was Spot Moore, his orchestra conductor was Fred K. Ellis, and his featured violinist was Miss Irene Partch.
The building then re-opened at the end of August 1918.
According to
CinemaTreasures,
Donner was soon enough gone and the new owner was a Paul Williamson, about whom I know less than nothing.
A later image of the same location, probably circa 1925.
We get a better view of the front of the cinema, and we see that it has by now been renamed the Mission.
Then, a decade later, sound happened, and it was time to upgrade once again.
That was done in 1930, under Williamson and under his manager, Blanche Hatton.
The business was somehow contracted to
Publix (i.e., Paramount Pictures),
which is rather uncharacteristic, because Publix theatres were the size of football stadiums,
whereas 121 Central was
the size of a hat box.
I don’t know how to make sense out of that contract.
Installation of sound equipment was brutally expensive, and so my guess is that the contract shifted that expense onto Publix-Paramount.
What did Publix-Paramount get out of the deal?
I don’t know. That is the part of the equation I can’t work out to save my life.
Once the cinema was contracted to Publix, and once it was fitted up for sound, it re-opened under yet another name, the
Mission.
Now, Publix theatres were all named Paramount; but the Mission was NOT called the Paramount Mission; it was just the Mission.
So, it’s definitive that it was not a Publix cinema;
it was merely an independent cinema that had a booking contract with Publix.
On
16 October 1932, Publix announced that it planned to sell its interests in the Mission and in the Sunshine to
“a new corporation headed by R.J. O’Connell of New York city and William K. Jenkins of Dallas,
at present Publix officials.”
Whether that assignment went through, I do not know.
I think it was in August 1933 that Paramount, whose stock had suddenly become worthless, filed for bankruptcy.
Then what happened?
I have not a clue.
Clueless though I am, I nonetheless can have fun using my imagination.
Zo, in my imagination, I tell myself a story that all was fine until one Saturday morning
when a cigar-chomping Paramount exec and his lackey alighted from the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fé.
The exec decided to inspect Albuquerque’s branch of the magnificent Publix chain.
When he saw that phone-booth-size edifice and got his immense girth stuck in the front door jamb,
he began to call the usher a number of unpleasant names.
The following Monday morning, the phone at Paramount HQ went ringy-dingy-ding,
upon which the manager who signed the contract with the Mission found himself buried up to his neck and stoned to death.
A team of local bodyguards, each equipped with a Thompson submachine gun,
gently explained to the Mission’s owner (Williamson?) that the contract was hereby unilaterally terminated,
which was okay, except that the poor self-effacing fellow was no longer permitted to eat ice cream at the Masonic Lodge.
Left floundering, the Mission owner (Williamson?),
sucked it in and approached the loathed nemesis to say, reluctantly, “Let’s cut a deal.”
That’s just my imagination playing around.
I really don’t know what happened,
except that the Sunshine continued merrily on doing what it had been doing all along,
which was booking Paramount pictures.
As far as I know, the Mission became Albuquerque’s first “art house.”
That happened in April 1936.
You didn’t know that, did you?
Sadly, the building is gone now.
Not a brick of it remains anywhere.
By the way, please do not get confused.
CinemaTreasures wrongly states that the Mission
was at 315 Central Ave NW. NO WAY! NO!! NO!! NO!! NO!! IT WAS NOT!!!!!
315 was Kistler Collister and later it was Montgomery Ward.
There was never a cinema at 315 Central NW. Never!
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