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1960: Griggs Moviedrome

If you would like to see the MoMA edition that circulated for some four decades, this 16mm bootleg might be about as close as you’ll ever get to the experience. Many of the titles are missing, and a few are inserted into the wrong places, and we see those same faults in the Nordwestdeutscher version and later still in the Thunderbird version. Nordwestdeutscher did attempt to make at least one repair in 1963 (“Yes, you are the real Maria”), but still inserted it two seconds too late.

This public-domain edition was issued in 1960 by an outfit called Griggs Moviedrome, with or without a hyphen. This was duped from a 16mm dupe of the MoMA edition.



The Griggs 16mm edition is missing the left side and much of the height as well. Surely that was because the MoMA 16mm prints were also missing the left side and the height. The Griggs edition was entirely silent (double-sprocket).

Griggs Moviedrome was the child of John Meyer Griggs, who founded it I suppose sometime around 1955. He died in late February 1967, at age 58. Bob (Robert E.) Lee of the Essex Film Club took over the company a few months afterwards, and it was in or just before March 1973 (NOT 1980!) that he recorded Stuart Oderman (without credit) accompanying on piano. After Bob died in 1992, David Shepard bought most of the collection.

Curious to hear it myself, I just purchased the UAV United American Video Corp. 5350 VHS from 1990. If you’re curious, too, you can still get this score from ReelClassicDVD.com. Here’s Wesley G. Holt’s opinion of Oderman’s piano score:

Another 1970s version of Metropolis was constructed with a jazz piano score by Stuart Oderman. Prints were circulated by Griggs Moviedrome and later surfaced in the video age on a Japanese “import” LaserDisc (IVCL-1011S) and on VHS tape (United American Video #5350). Oderman’s music is generally laid-back, casting a tranquil aura over the film.... But it’s definitely not for everybody: My wife, for one, labels this version “Charlie Brown Goes To Metropolis” — referring to the similarity of Oderman’s easy-going piano style to that of Vince Guaraldi, who scored the “Peanuts” holiday cartoons in the ’60s....

Yeah, I can understand that criticism. Oderman’s score is not jazz, by the way; it consists of typical silent-movie cues, surely pulled from a collection or from a book of such cues. I have heard all those pieces elsewhere but cannot identify them. Not a bad score, really, but it just doesn’s even begin to compare to Huppertz’s orchestral score. Huppertz knocked the ball out of the park back in 1927, and not even the best of his competitors has come even close.

You want to hear a sample? You win. Below is a sample, with the top of the image bent over to the left, which is oh so common on prerecorded VHS tapes. Someday if I get rich I might purchase a broadcast-quality S-VHS recorder with a built-in time-base corrector, and that should straighten out the top of the image. Is it worth it to spend a couple grand just to unbend some lousy old tapes that are hopelessly outdated?


Stuart Oderman’s piano score is probably still under copyright, and so the above fair-use sample will have to suffice. Below is the full 16mm Griggs Moviedrome edition, but without any audio at all, the way it was originally issued on double-sprocket stock. This is the way it was issued on Beta and VHS by Goodtimes Home Video, and this edition in this format is now truly in the public domain, but only in the US:

Here it is, badly cropped. It runs nearly 95 minutes at 24fps. You will notice that a few frames are duplicated at 0:21:03, when Freder runs past his dad’s desk. Why?


This was part of a series called “First Run Movie.” Fancy that. Whose print was it and what music was on it? Was it perchance the silent Brandon Films print of 1954? Or the silent Griggs Moviedrome print of 1960? Was it perchance broadcast without any accompaniment at all?

Continue to Chapter 23, 18 March 1963: The 1st Nordwestdeutscher Filmverleih (NWDF) Edition