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29 May 1940: Buster Keaton and Eleanor Ruth Norris are married
by Superior Court Justice Edward R. Brand.
After two nightmarish marriages, Buster struck gold.
Coincidentally enough, Edward R. Brand was the son of Harry Brand,
Buster’s previous publicist.


Revival Cinemas?
In the 1940’s and 1950’s?
Really?

Richard J. Anobile’s photonovel includes a transcript of Ray Rohauer’s on-stage interview with Marion Mack at the Ontario Film Theatre, housed in the Ontario Science Centre, 770 Don Mills Road, Toronto, on Monday, 18 December 1972. The interview was conducted on stage at a screening of The General. Marion mentioned that when the movie had first opened (she surely meant at the Metropolitan in Los Ángeles, 11–17 March 1927), she and her husband purchased tickets to watch it. She went on to say, “And in later years, every once in a while I used to go to one of the revival theaters when THE GENERAL was showing. At first I used to tell them I was the co-star, but I think they either didn’t believe me, or it meant nothing to them.”


That drove me crazy, because I had been unaware of any revival cinemas. The first commercial 35mm revival houses appeared in 1960, and in the US The General had ceased circulating in 1931 and was not available again commercially in 35mm until 1970. So, what was Marion talking about? I could not make any sense of her claim. Yes, there was a little cinema in Los Ángeles, run by John and Dorothy Hampton, that devoted itself to silent films, but even so, The General was simply not available. Was Marion referring to screenings of MoMA’s 16mm print in museums or classrooms or churches or libraries? Perhaps she was, but those aren’t exactly revival cinemas.


Then Olga Egorova sent me a news clipping from March 1941. It was Louella Parsons’s syndicated INS gossip column, which told an anecdote about Buster attending a screening of The General at a revival cinema just a few days before. What?!?!?!?!?!!!! How could that be? I spent six days scouring the newspapers of the time, and that is how I discovered a subculture that is now completely forgotten. What follows is what I discovered and how I pieced the shards together to form some sort of story that probably resembles the truth. If you catch any errors or omissions, if you have more details, I’m all ears. Please write to me to tell me what you know. Thanks!


Almost from the beginning, there had been occasional revivals and even a few reissues. The revivals were usually accidental. A cinema needed a film, but the only affordable item from the local exchange was an obsolete and antiquated print that had been collecting dust for a decade or more. It’s never a good idea to go dark, and so if a moldy oldie was all that was available, then the cinema would anger its loyal patrons by showing them a moldy oldie. That was usually why films were revived. Simple as that. It was really quite rare for a cinema deliberately to book an older film.


There were intentional revivals, of course, a great many of them, entire series of revivals, but they were at museums and in classrooms and in churches and synagogues and libraries and private clubs. The revivals were not held in cinemas. More often than not, they were 16mm prints from the Museum of Modern Art, though other distributors also made 16mm films available for such purposes. It was tax-exempt nonprofits that booked these films, usually as part of an educational program.


Well, what do I know? When Olga sent me Louella Parson’s gossip column of 10 March 1941, I realized that my understanding of cinema history was all wrong. Yes, there were revival cinemas that regularly booked silent films, intentionally, as early as 1940, and even earlier than that. I fell to the floor. Olga was right!


Here is one such rental catalogue from as early as 1918, published in Buffalo of all places: Library of Safety Standard Films. Note the disclaimer on page 2: “Every film listed is on Standard Safety non-inflammable material and bears the approval label of the National Board of Fire Underwriters FOR USE WITHOUT FIREPROOF BOOTH. Because these Standard Safety films cannot be run on theatre machines, we cannot violate the contracts of the theatre men with the producers by renting a particularly popular subject to a competing theatre. It is for this reason that practically all the film producing companies give us permission to reproduce from their original negatives new prints for use in our library.” Steep that paragraph in your memory; let it hover behind your thoughts as you read the rest of this story.


Bud Abbott’s Windsor House



Let us start with a venture that was not a cinema, but it will tie in to the common pattern. Bud Abbott (yes, of Abbott and Costello) owned and operated a restaurant. This is of no particular interest to me except for its series of Monday-night shows, not all of which were announced in the newspapers. Though nightclub performers sang songs and whatnot at this location, this was a restaurant, not a theatre. There was no auditorium, no proscenium, no booth. It was just a restaurant. It was surely not licensed to show 35mm film. The screenings could only have been 16mm. Herb Sterne was the programmer. He was a playwright among other things, as well as a personal friend of D.W. Griffith (Herbert Sterne, 6 January 1906, NYC – 4 June 1995, Woodland Hills, SSN 545-14-8957). Since he was the programmer, I am quite certain he chose films from his own private collection. How did he obtain a collection? Yes, he could have rented them, of course. After all, rental catalogues included these titles. For instance, page through the National Cinema Service Film Rental Library Catalog of 1942/1943. There were surely plenty of other such services on both coasts. The reason I suspect that Herb Sterne had his own collection is simply that other Southern Californians who programmed exactly the same films simply showed their own personal collections, as we shall see.


To my surprise, it was common to show silent movies at nightclubs.



The above article skirts the issue of legality, copyrights, royalties.
Below the article is a pair of advertisements for suppliers.
Was it those two suppliers who offered the movies shown at nightclubs?
There were other suppliers as well, but the trades did not go into much detail.
I wish I could find the catalogues for all these 16mm distribution companies.


One of the following films, Arctic Adventures, an unauthorized abridgment of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, came from Cine Film Products of Paterson, New Jersey. I would love to learn more about that firm. I would love to find its catalogues. It seems to me that Cine Film Products purchased its prints from larger supplier, whose identity is unknown to me. I wonder if Cine Film was the source of the other films in the Windsor House series.


Here is a list of most of the silent-movie programs at the Windsor House:


Mon 27 May 1940 Fatty and Mabel Adrift
His Prehistoric Past
Her Indian Hero
Shadows of Doubt
Mon 03 Jun 1940 [NOT ANNOUNCED]
Mon 10 Jun 1940 Dancing Mothers (Clara Bow, Alice Joyce, Conway Tearle)
a Harold Lloyd-Bebe Daniels comedy
Mon 17 Jun 1940 [NOT ANNOUNCED]
Mon 24 Jun 1940 The Spanish Dancer (Pola Negri, António Moreno, Adolphe Menjou, Wallace Beery)
a Larry Semon comedy
Mon 01 Jul 1940 Beau Brummel (John Barrymore, Carmel Myers, Mary Astor, Irene Rich)
Mon 08 Jul 1940 The Americano (Douglas Fairbanks)
Mary Pickford
Wm. S. Hart
Mack Sennett
Mon 15 Jul 1940 The Forbidden City (Norma Talmadge, Thomas Meighan)
Mon 22 Jul 1940 Tiger Rose (Lenore Ulric, David Belasco)
Easy Street (Charlie Chaplin)
Mon 29 Jul 1940 [NOT ANNOUNCED]
Mon 05 Aug 1940 A Pair of Silk Stockings (Constance Talmadge)
Never Weaken (Harold Lloyd)
Mon 12 Aug 1940 Daddies (David Belasco, Mae Marsh)
The Immigrant (Charlie Chaplin)
Mon 19 Aug 1940 [NOT ANNOUNCED]
Mon 26 Aug 1940 A Mack Sennett comedy (Carole Lombard, Sally Eilers)
The Coming of Amos (Jetta Goudal, Rod LaRocque)
Mon 02 Sep 1940 Charley’s Aunt (Sydney Chaplin)
The Female Impersonator (Charlie Chaplin)
Mon 09 Sep 1940 The Virgin of Stamboul (Priscilla Dean, Wallace Beery, Tod Browning)
Captain Kidd’s Kids (Harold Lloyd, Bebe Daniels)
Mon 16 Sep 1940 [NOT ANNOUNCED]
Mon 23 Sep 1940 Shore Leave (Richard Barthelmess, Dorothy Mackaill)
a Mack Sennett comedy with Carole Lombard, Sally Eilers, and Daphne Pollard
Mon 30 Sep 1940 The Lost World (Lewis Stone, Bessie Love, Wallace Beery)
a comedy with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand
Mon 07 Oct 1940 Shadows (Lon Chaney)
Lady of the Law (Texas Guinan)
Mon 14 Oct 1940 The Grinning Gringo (Douglas Fairbanks, abridgment of The Lamb, 2 reels)
The Cat and the Canary (Laura LaPlante)
Mon 21 Oct 1940 Arctic Adventures (Charlie Chaplin, a pirated abridgment of The Gold Rush)
The Wishing Ring (Vivian Martin)
Mon 28 Oct 1940 The Thieves of Bagdad (retitled edition of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp)
Veiled Adventure (Constance Talmadge)
Mon 04 Nov 1940 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Ronald Colman, Mary McAvoy, Bert Lytell, Irene Rich)
The Bull Fighter (Eddie Quillan, Mack Sennett, 1927)
Mon 11 Nov 1940 The Rink (Charlie Chaplin)
The Drop Kick (Richard Barthelmess, Hedda Hopper)


Oh, you thought that was all? Ohhhhhhh noooooooo. For starters, take a look at this. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.


Eddie Kohn’s Movie Parade

The Movie Parade is what Olga Egorova told me about at the end of March 2024, and her revelation knocked the wind out of me. I don’t think she could have realized how radically this would upset my conclusions about cinema history. Since I had never heard of the Movie Parade, the first thing I had to do was locate it, and I quickly discovered that it was in Hollywood, operated by an Eddie Kohn, who was a film agent, at one time for the Bob Goldstein agency, later for Franklyn Underwood of the Twentieth Century-Fox scenario department (see The Hollywood Reporter vol. 40 no. 2, Thursday, 17 June 1937, p. 3). Kohn devoted his Movie Parade exclusively to revivals of silent pictures. His screening room was up a flight of stairs above, I think, a storefront restaurant, probably the Aulic Club Café, a/k/a (Edward) Tierney’s Place, a/k/a Consolidated Distillers, Ltd., a/k/a The Pall Mall, a/k/a the Hot Spot.


This edifice seems to have been built in 1912. Nope nope nope nope nope. Bill Counter has determined that it was built before 1907. By 1912 the upstairs was used as a funeral parlor operated by Gates & Crane. The upstairs hall in 1930 was the Hollywood Humanist Society under the directorship of Theodore Curtis Abel, a Unitarian minister. Beginning in about January 1937 it was called the Creative Theater managed by someone named Karol Morell Waxman, with Lester Shafer and Thad Sharetts also on staff. It lasted only half a year. In 1938 the L.B. Williams real-estate office rented the space to train salesmen.


Was the Movie Parade a commercial venture? I wasn’t sure, but I supposed it was tax-exempt. WRONG ! It was a commercial venture. The full name of the venue was The Movie Parade Museum of Silent Pictures. Curiously, its programming was extremely similar to the programming at the Windsor House. I bet most or all of these films were 16mm prints in Kohn’s personal collection.


The building was brick and was built as storefronts; it surely did not have a fire rating for 35mm film screenings. It was on the second story above a restaurant, reachable by what appears to have been a very narrow staircase. That was absolutely not the construction permitted for 35mm projection.


By the way, Eddie was not alone. From Saturday, 9 November 1940, and for the next two months or so, the Tele-View newsreel cinema switched policy and operated as a revival house, and then quickly switched again to reviving exclusively westerns, upon which management changed its name to the Hitching Post. That was surely a 35mm operation. Surely. The films it ran were surely leftover prints collecting dust at the exchanges, available for a mere few dollars each, flat rate probably.


Time to learn what little we can about the building at 1737 North Highland Avenue. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Los Ángeles, 1919, Volume 10, revised up to November 1950, shows us where 1737 was. Shall we take a look?




1737 was most likely a narrow staircase to the second floor. The yellow outline that indicates RAISED over 1733 and 1735 was probably the assembly hall, which at various times was repurposed as a performance space or as a screening room.


I can find no clear photographs of 1737 North Highland Avenue. Here. Allow me to steal an image that appears on Bill Counter’s blogspot. The photo is twenty years newer than the Movie Parade, alas, and much had changed by then. We are facing south. Take a look:




The photo, or at least the scan of the photo, is too blurry to allow me to pick out which building the Movie Parade was once in. Still, though, I have a suspicion. Allow me to enlarge a detail. I plugged in the street numbers, and I think I’m right, maybe, possibly, perhaps.




The building that I marked as 1733/1735/1737 looks like a newer building, less than two stories. Darn it!


Bill Counter looked at my detective work and gave me an F. He thinks the Movie Parade was further north, behind the camera. So, let us walk southwards to Hollywood Boulevard, turn around, and then look towards the north. He thinks it’s the building circled in red:




Let us look at Windsor House and Movie Parade in parallel. You will notice that there was one screening in particular that interests us.


WINDSOR HOUSE
THE MOVIE PARADE
Mon 18 Nov 1940 (1 show)
 Kismet (Otis Skinner, Rosemary Theby)
Mum’s the Word (Virginia Pearson)
Wed 20 Nov 1940 (8 days)
 Charley’s Aunt (Sydney Chaplin)
The Grinning Gringo (Douglas Fairbanks, abridgment of The Lamb, 2 reels)
The Fireman (Charlie Chaplin)
Shadows of Doubt (Mary Pickford)
Mon 25 Nov 1940 (1 show)
 The Vagabond (Charlie Chaplin)
Hands Up! (Raymond Griffith)
Thu 28 Nov 1940 (7 days)
 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Ernst Lubitsch, Ronald Colman)
Step Lively (Harold Lloyd, Bebe Daniels)
The Desert Rat (Franklyn Farnum)

Mon 02 Dec 1940 (1 show)
 Orchids and Ermine (Colleen Moore, Jack Mulhall)
The Ropin’ Fool (Will Rogers, Irene Rich)
Thu 05 Dec 1940 (7 days)
 The Lost World (Lewis Stone, Bessie Love, Wallace Beery)
Chaplin & Langdon comedies
Mon 09 Dec 1940 (1 show)
 The Covered Wagon (J. Warren Kerrigan, Lois Wilson)
The Knockout (Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle)
Thu 12 Dec 1940 (7 days)
 Behind the Front (Wallace Beery, Raymond Hatton)
A Night at the Show (Charlie Chaplin)
Mon 16 Dec 1940 (1 show)
 Romola (Ronald Colman, William Powell, Gish sisters)
Thu 19 Dec 1940 (7 days)
 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Lon Chaney)
A Night in the Show (Charlie Chaplin)
Safety Last (Harold Lloyd)
The Forbidden Woman (Jetta Goudal)
vintage newsreels
Mon 23 Dec 1940
 The King on Main Street (Adolphe Menjou, Bessie Love, Greta Nissen)
a Nick Stuart/Sally Phipps comedy
Thu 26 Dec 1940 (held over)
 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Lon Chaney)
A Night in the Show (Charlie Chaplin)
Safety Last (Harold Lloyd)
The Forbidden Woman (Jetta Goudal)
vintage newsreels
Mon 30 Dec 1940 (1 show)
 The Spanish Dancer (Wallace Beery, António Moreno)
Aladdin (Virginia Lee Corbin, Francis Carpenter)
Thu 02 Jan 1941 (held over)
 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Lon Chaney)
A Night in the Show (Charlie Chaplin)
Safety Last (Harold Lloyd)
The Forbidden Woman (Jetta Goudal)
vintage newsreels
Mon 06 Jan 1941 (1 day)
 Peck’s Bad Boy (Jackie Coogan)
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Thu 09 Jan 1941 (7 days)
 The Covered Wagon (J. Warren Kerrigan, Lois Wilson, Ernest Torrence, Alan Hale)
Robin Hood (excerpts, Douglas Fairbanks)
The Great Train Robbery
Laurel & Hardy
Charlie Chaplin/Mabel Normand
vintage newsreels
Mon 13 Jan 1941
 His Wonderful Chance (Rudolph Valentino, Eugene O’Brien)
Thu 16 Jan 1941 (held over)
 The Covered Wagon (J. Warren Kerrigan, Lois Wilson, Ernest Torrence, Alan Hale)
Robin Hood (excerpts, Douglas Fairbanks)
The Great Train Robbery
Laurel & Hardy
Charlie Chaplin/Mabel Normand
vintage newsreels
Mon 20 Jan 1941 (1 show)
 Nomads of the North (Lon Chaney)
One Week of Love (Elaine Hammerstein, Conway Tearle)
Mon 20 Jan 1941
 The Covered Wagon
The Lost World
Thu 23 Jan 1941 (7 days)
 Manhandled (Gloria Swanson)
The New York Hat (Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore)
Charlie Chaplin
Texas Guinan
Mon 27 Jan 1941 (1 show)
 Eyes of Youth (Clara Kimball Young, Valentino, Milton Sills)
Thu 30 Jan 1941
 East Lynne (Alan Hale)
Easy Street (Charlie Chaplin)
Mon 03 Feb 1941 (1 show)
 Lucretia Lombard (Norma Shearer)
also Kathlyn Williams thriller
Sat 01 Feb 1941 (7 days)
 Manhandled (Gloria Swanson)
East Lynne (Alan Hale)
Easy Street (Charlie Chaplin)
Thu 06 Feb 1941 (7 days)
 Beau Brummel (John Barrymore)
Will Rogers
Laurel & Hardy
Mon 10 Feb 1941 (1 show)
 Dancing Mothers (Clara Bow)
Shanghaied (Charlie Chaplin)
Thu 13 Feb 1941 (7 days)
 The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
Behind the Screen (Charlie Chaplin)
Soldier Man (Harry Langdon)
Mon 17 Feb 1941 (1 show)
 The Bright Shawl (William Powell, Dorothy Gish, Edward G. Robinson, Jetta Goudal, Richard Barthelmess)
Thu 20 Feb 1941 (held over)
 The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
Behind the Screen (Charlie Chaplin)
Soldier Man (Harry Langdon)
Mon 24 Feb 1941 (1 show)
 The Cure (Charlie Chaplin)
Jack and the Beanstalk (Virginia Lee Corbin, Francis Carpenter)
Thu 27 Feb 1941 (held over)
 The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
Behind the Screen (Charlie Chaplin)
Soldier Man (Harry Langdon)
Mon 03 Mar 1941 (1 show)
 The Safety Curtain (Norma Talmadge, Eugene O’Brien)
Alice Howell comedy
Thu 06 Mar 1941 (7 days)
 Dancing Mothers (Clara Bow)
THE GENERAL (Buster Keaton)
Every Inch a Man (William S. Hart)
Sunday only, added attraction: The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, with an experimental short and Easy Street.
Where on earth did this print come from? It might have been pirated from the MoMA 16mm which had just begun to circulate a year previously, but I really doubt it. Almost certainly it was the 40-minute abridgment that United Artists had created for 16mm film clubs back in 1928 or thereabouts.
This is the piece that Olga emailed to me, the one that boggled my mind. I was compelled to check on Newspapers.com and yes, she was right. This syndicated column was indeed published across the US at about this time. The above gossip tells us nothing about who accompanied Buster into the Movie Parade. It certainly seems that, for whatever reason, Eleanor was not there. One person who probably did show up, though not on this particular night, but sometime during the week, was Marion Mack, who likely attended together with her husband, Louis Lewyn.
Mon 10 Mar 1941 (1 show)
 The Ice Flood (Viola Dana)
Broken Ways (D.W. Griffith, Blanche Sweet, Henry Walthall)
Thu 13 Mar 1941 (7 days)
 The Spanish Dancer (Pola Negri, António Moreno)
The Cure (Charlie Chaplin)
The Collegians
Mon 17 Mar 1941 (1 show)
 Outside the Law (Lon Chaney, Priscilla Dean)
Alice Howell comedy
Thu 20 Mar 1941 (14 days)
 Way down East (D.W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, R. Barthelmess)
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Mon 24 Mar 1941 (1 show)
 The Submarine Pirate (Sydney Chaplin)
The Sensation Seekers (Lois Weber, Billie Dove)
Mon 31 Mar 1941 (1 show)
 The Grim Gunman (aka Wolf Lowry, William S. Hart)
Chaplin comedy
Thu 03 Apr 1941 (7 days)
 The Americano (Douglas Fairbanks)
Chaplin
Will Rogers



The 16mm exhibitors in and around Los Ángeles followed the above recommendations exactly.
Note the film suppliers advertising on this page.
I suppose some of the films shown in and around LÁ
came from those suppliers — or were copies of films from those suppliers.


Mon 07 Apr 1941 (1 show)
 The Busher (Thomas H. Ince, John Gilbert, Colleen Moore, Charles Ray, Mickey Rooney)
Thu 10 Apr 1941 (held over)
 The Americano (Douglas Fairbanks)
Chaplin
Will Rogers
Mon 14 Apr 1941 (1 show)
 The Trap (Lon Chaney)
Larry Semon comedy
Wed 16 Apr 1941 (8 days)
 Grand Duchess & the Waiter (A. Menjou, F. Vidor)
Tarzan (Elmo Lincoln)
Chaplin comedy
Mon 21 Apr 1941 (1 show)
 Stella Maris (Gladys Bockwell, Mary Philbin)
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Thu 24 Apr 1941 (7 days)
 The Cat and the Canary (Laura LaPlante)
The Trap (Lon Chaney)
Haunted Spooks (Harold Lloyd)
Mon 28 Apr 1941 (1 show)
 Double Crossed (Laura LaPlante)
Oh Baby (Madge Kennedy, David Butler)
Jetta Goudal drama
Thu 01 May 1941 (28 days)
 Charlie Chaplin: The Immigrant
Easy Street
The Vagabond
Shanghaied
Behind the Screen
The Fireman
The Adventurer
(celebs attend)
Mon 05 May 1941 (1 show)
 White Tiger (Priscilla Dean, Wallace Beery)
The Grinning Gringo (Douglas Fairbanks, abridgment of The Lamb, 2 reels)
Thu 29 May 1941 (added)
 Charle’s Aunt (Sydney Chaplin)
Charlie Chaplin: The Immigrant
Easy Street
The Vagabond
Shanghaied
Behind the Screen
The Fireman
The Adventurer

Last day at the old address.
Mon 12 May 1941
 (no show; series has ended)
Thu 05 Jun 1941 (7 days)
 Intolerance (D.W. Griffith)

First day at new address, 1455 Gordon Street, Hollywood.


Did you read the article above? Read the article above. Then read the article below:




The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a tax-exempt nonprofit 501(c)(6) organization. For whatever reason, it decided to coöperate with Eddie Kohn to present a series of films, presumably 35mm nitrates it had newly acquired for its archive. Since the Movie Parade could show only 16mm safety film, it was time to make a temporary change. That is why I assume that, together, AMPAS and the Movie Parade found a suitable fire-resistant building, this tiny boring squat little edifice two miles away at 1455 Gordon Street:



Once again, I am stealing this from Bill Counter’s blogspot.
Could the building originally have been so squat?


Shall we investigate? Okay, you talked me into it. What can we learn from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps? 1919, Volume 9, revised up to November 1950.




Yup. A single story, a mere 12' tall. This was probably a private screening room for use by movie studios. I strongly suspect that the auditorium floor is sunken considerably below ground level.


Zo, the Movie Parade moved to Gordon Street, but why let 1737 North Highland go fallow? Eddie Kohn, with a mere temporary change of name, kept a good thing going.


THE NICKELODEON
1737 N Highland Ave
THE MOVIE PARADE
1455 Gordon St
Thu 12 Jun 1941 (7 days)
 Son of the Sheik (Rudolph Valentino)
Thu 19 Jun 1941 (7 days)
 The Three Musketeers (Douglas Fairbanks)
Thu 26 Jun 1941 (7 days)
 The Unholy Three (Lon Chaney)
Thu 03 Jul 1941 (27 days)
 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
Thu 03 Jul 1941 (7 days)
 The Love Parade (Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald)
Thu 10 Jul 1941 (8 days)
 Greed (Von Stroheim)
Fri 18 Jul 1941 (6 days)
 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Thu 24 Jul 1941 (7 days)
 Anna Christie (Greta Garbo, a talkie)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)

Yes, Bill Counter tells me that there was a cinema inside May’s department store.
He even wrote an article about it.
Wed 30 Jul 1941 (7 days)
 Charley’s Aunt (Sydney Chaplin)
The Lost World (Louis Stone)
Thu 31 Jul 1941 (2 days)
 What Price Glory? (Dolores Del Rio, Edmund Lowe, Victor McLaglen)
Wed 02 Aug 1941 (5 days)
 The Covered Wagon (James Cruze)
The Lost World (Conan Doyle)
Thu 07 Aug 1941 (5 days)
 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Hands Up! (Raymond Griffith)
Wed 06 Aug 1941 (8 days)
 The Thief of Bagdad (Douglas Fairbanks)
Tue 12 Aug 1941 (17 days)
 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Thu 14 Aug 1941 (1 day)
 Underworld (Geo. Bancroft)
Fri 15 Aug 1941 (14 days)
 Thief of Bagdad (Douglas Fairbanks) (last show at 1455 Gordon St)


The AMPAS series was now over, and so Eddie Kohn moved his name back to 1737 North Highland and continued with his 16mm screenings as before.



Back at 1737 N Highland Ave
Thu 28 Aug 1941
(2 days)		 The Forbidden City (Norma Talmadge)
Sat 30 Aug 1941
(5 days)		 The Forbidden City (Norma Talmadge)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Thu 04 Sep 1941
(7 days)		 The Son of the Sheik (Rudolph Valentino)
Thu 11 Sep 1941
(7 days)		 The Bright Shawl (Richard Barthelmess)
Lady of Whims (Clara Bow)
Thu 18 Sep 1941
(7 days)		 Outside the Law (Lon Chaney)
Miss Bluebeard (Bebe Daniels, Raymond Griffith)
Thu 25 Sep 1941
(7 days)		 The Busher (Charles Ray, John Gilbert, Colleen Moore)
The Headless Horseman (Will Rogers)
Thu 02 Oct 1941
(7 days)		 The Eyes of Youth (Valentino, Clara K. Young)
The Grim Gunman (aka Wolf Lowry, William S. Hart)
Thu 09 Oct 1941
(7 days)		 Romola (Lillian and Dorothy Gish)
Thu 16 Oct 1941
(7 days)		 Dancing Mothers (Clara Bow)
A Pair of Silk Stockings (Constance Talmadge)
Thu 23 Oct 1941
(7 days)		 Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Marie Dressler)
The Virgin of Stamboul (Priscilla Dean)
Thu 30 Oct 1941
(7 days)		 Manhandled (Gloria Swanson)
Mormon Maid (Mae Murray)
Thu 06 Nov 1941
(6 days)		 Twisted Trails (Tom Mix)
Wilderness Man (Douglas Fairbanks)
The Pony Express
Wed 19 Nov 1941
(8 days)		 The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
The Cat and the Canary (oriental [sic] version)
Thu 27 Nov 1941
(7 days)		 The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1930 version)
Hymn to the Sun (Corinne and Tito Valdéz)
Thu 04 Dec 1941
(2 days)		 The Lost World (Wallace Beery)
The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
Sat 06 Dec 1941
(5 days)		 The Lost World (Wallace Beery)
Dracula (Béla Lugosi, a talkie)
Thu 11 Dec 1941
(7 days)		 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Lon Chaney)
Dracula (Béla Lugosi, a talkie)
Thu 18 Dec 1941
(7 days)		 His Wonderful Chance (Rudolph Valentino)
Merry-Go-Round (Erich Von Stroheim)
Thu 25 Dec 1941
(7 days)		 The Americano (Douglas Fairbanks)
Peck’s Bad Boy (Jackie Coogan)


The Movie Parade’s last show was Monday, 29 December 1941. The above article probably explains why. The anonymous author of the article cautions exhibitors to use only “legitimate sources of supply” but makes no effort to explain how one could distinguish legitimate from illegitimate. My guess is that the illegitimate sources of supply regularly advertised in The Billboard, and to call them out would be to jeopardize a revenue source and to cause even good customers to flock away. So, at last, I see that some but by no means all of my guesses were right. He ran 16mm and the films he exhibited were in his personal collection. That was the end of the Movie Parade. I have yet to find the ruling, which I hope is still on file, but, to judge from the newspaper articles, it appears that Festival Films decided to press charges not against the pirates, but against one of the pirates’ hapless customers. As for Eddie Kohn, he evaporated. I can find no further trace of him. We know his brother’s name was Bob. We know where he worked in the late 1930’s. Very hard to trace. If I could just learn his full name, or his birth date, or his death date, or his spouse’s name, or his parents’s names, or his address, or something, or anything, I could begin to unravel this mystery.


The hall at 1737 North Highland reopened in or just before August 1944 as the Comoedia Theatre, a part of René Plaissetty’s Hollywood Academy of Drama, a venue for live performance. By the spring of 1946 management was supplementing its income by presenting adults-only “educational” sex films. In July 1946 it gave up on the stage and it seems there was a transfer, for it then specialized in foreign films doubled with silent films. Those silent films were the same silent films that others were showing at different venues. They were from a private collection acquired from the same vendor. I wish I knew who owned that collection. The Comoedia seems to have shuttered at the end of 1947. Then in 1949 it became (Jack) Walklin’s Highland Playhouse. After that, I do not know, but what I do know, for certain, is that the entire stretch of buildings on those few blocks was demolished decades ago to make way for monstrous uglitude.




Other Revival Houses

The Windsor House. The Tele-View. The Movie Parade a/k/a The Nickelodeon. Then it went quiet. Why? The answer is obvious from the programming. The pickings were slim. Only a few pictures were available. The house pianist at the Windsor House must have accompanied Herb Sterne’s movie collection. We know that Eddie Kohn hired a pianist to accompany. Who? What happened when he (she?) called in sick? Who accompanied at 1737 N. Highland Ave.? Who accompanied at 1455 Gordon St.? What machines were used? How were the auditoriums set up? Who owned these spaces? Will we ever find photographs?


Though these ventures fell flat all too quickly, should we be surprised that there were more? Well, there were more.



I stole this image from Bill Counter’s blog.



I do not know when the tag line was added,
though it was certainly there by September 1943.
I stole this image from Atlas Obscura.


On Wednesday, 25 February 1942, came the Movie, 611 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Ángeles, built and owned and operated by John and Dorothy Hampton, who devoted it almost entirely to silent films. John and Dorothy were the only employees. If they were the only employees, then where did the music come from? Or was there music? Were the films run in dead silence? Or did John spin discs? I bet he he spun discs. There was a published claim in 1954 that a pianist accompanied, but apparently that was not true. As I had originally guessed, John spun 78rpm discs, as we shall discover in an article below. And I didn’t even need to guess! The answers were openly published! See a web page on The Birth of a Nation to read the following:


Collector and repertory theater owner John Hampton took an alternative approach to The Birth of a Nation. As the co-owner and programmer of the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles from 1942 to 1979, Hampton played an important part in keeping silent films in the public view before the rise of videotape. Hampton supplied the films, which played for weeklong runs, from his extensive film collection, projected the films himself, and supplied the musical accompaniment from his collection of 78 rpm phonographs. The Silent Movie Theatre housed repertory screenings put on by Cinefamily until its closure in 2017, and Hampton’s collection of rare films, which includes a number of unique prints of otherwise lost silent features, is owned by the Packard Humanities Institute, one of the major backers of film preservation in the United States....


There’s more stuff on the Hamptons on that web page. Worth a read.


Though OLD TIME MOVIES was prominently painted onto the front of the building, Mrs. & Mrs. Hampton usually advertised it in the newspapers as “Movie” or “Silent Movie.” I do not know much about the history of this building, but from what little I have gathered, the Hamptons seem to have presented 16mm films, only 16mm. Desperately, manically, maniacally, was I trying to figure out what distributor they used. Then when I discovered they had competitors, I began desperately to wonder what distributor the competitors used. I figured it must have been a single distributor, since they all showed the same movies. As I began to go through the newspapers, day by day, laboriously compiling a list of what was shown when and where and by whom, the puzzle sorted itself out. John and Dorothy never rented a single film in their career. They showed only the films in their own personal collection. The cinema was off the grid. Since they were running only their personal collection, the Movie could not have been a nonprofit. It was definitely a commercial enterprise, one that did nothing better than breakeven business.


I can find nothing in the newspapers about the momentous opening of the Movie: Old Time Movies. I keep searching the newspapers for any ads or announcements or schedules, but until it turned five years old, only incidentals were published.










Then everything went quiet for the next three and a half years. Maybe the place closed down while John languished in his prison cell? The refusal to advertise makes me wonder if the Hamptons originally ran their little cinema as a private club.


Amazingly, in 1945, a year in which the Hamptons did not advertise their little cinema, a rival opened up his own cinema, WITH THE SAME NAME!!!!! and WITH THE SAME PROGRAMMING!!!!! It was Bill Counter who made me aware of that. In disbelief, I dredged the old online newspapers, and I was terribly confused.




I know next to nothing about this Harold W. Kuschner. I find an obituary for a Harold W. Kuschner on Tuesday, 3 April 1962, with no details at all except that he was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. The headstone gives his birth year as 1897, and he is buried together with his wife, Marian L. Kuschner, 1909–1976. Harold’s draft card gives his full name as Harold Walter Kuschner, it gives his birthday as 12 April 1897 in Chicago, and it supplies his next of kin as Rachael Kuschner. The 1930 Census puts him in Los Ángeles already, and already married to Marian for three years, with a brand-new baby girl also named Marian. Both his parents were born in Russia, and the Census has Harold working as a salesman for the distinctively named Wholesale Retail Furniture Company. So I assume this was the same guy, but what was his connection with the Hamptons? He had no connection with the Hamptons. He saw what the Hamptons were doing and so he jumped onto the bandwagon, but, unlike the Hamptons, he would advertise. Ten months later he sold his film collection, his equipment, and his business. To whom? I know not.


Let us examine Harold’s programming. He apparently did a little bit of snooping and found out who John Hampton’s supplier was, and so he started buying a bunch of the same movies from the same underground firm. Like the Hamptons, John added the occasional talkie to the mix. To create his cinema, Harold Kuschner simply rented a microscopically small office on a business street.


The Hamptons would have had no claims on Kuschner’s business. The idea was out in the open and anybody with a grand in his wallet could copycat the business model. As for the films that were still under copyright, Harold Kuschner’s tiny business, just as John and Dorothy Hampton’s tiny business, was so far under the radar that probably nobody would ever notice. Except for Harold Lloyd, of course. Harold Lloyd was not happy with the Hamptons.




OLD MOVIES
484 South San Vicente Boulevard
Los Ángeles
Mon 15 Jan 1945
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
Charley Chase comedy
Mon 22 Jan 1945
Big News (Carole Lombard)
Dealing for Daisy (Wm. S. Hart)
Mary Pickford
Mack Sennett comedy
Mon 29 Jan 1945
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
short subjects
(runs for two weeks)
Mon 12 Feb 1945
Bad Sister (Betty Davis, Humphrey Bogart, a talkie)
Our Gang
2 hours of comedies and cartoons
Mon 19 Feb 1945
The Eagle (Valentino, soundtrack by James C. Bradford)
Fatty and Mabel Adrift
[The CINEMA also experimented with this 16mm programming: The Lonedale Operator (Blanche Sweet), Leading Lizzie Astray (Fatty Arbuckle), Police (Charlie Chaplin). It probably did not do much business.]
Mon 26 Feb 1945
The Covered Wagon
Stop Kidding
cartoon
Mon 05 Mar 1945
The Merry-Go-Round
Charley Chase comedy
Mon 12 Mar 1945
Hi Ho Broadway (a talkie)
Tumbleweeds (Wm. S. Hart)
Mon 19 Mar 1945
Manhandled
a Bob Hope comedy (a talkie)
Mon 26 Mar 1945
The Lost World
Laurel & Hardy

There may be such a moment in some movie,
but it is definitely not in a Charlie Chaplin movie.
Mon 02 Apr 1945 Miss Bluebeard
Our Gang
Zasu Pitts
Mon 09 Apr 1945 Ten Nights in a Barroom (Wm. Farnum)
Edgar Kennedy comedy
Mon 16 Apr 1945 Beau Brummel
Green Snapshots
Mon 23 Apr 1945 The Phantom of the Opera
Mon 30 Apr 1945 Romola

OLD-TIME MOVIE THEATRE
484 South San Vicente Boulevard
Los Ángeles
Mon 07 May 1945
Captain of the Guard (musical)
short subject
(As we could see from the classified announcement earlier, this is when Kuschner gave his business the DBA of Old-Time Movie Theatre.)
Mon 14 May 1945
The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney, not Boris Karloff)
Mon 21 May 1945 A Pair of Silk Stockings (Constance Talmadge)
short subjects
Mon 28 May 1945 The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
Mon 04 Jun 1945 The Spieler
Mon 11 Jun 1945 The Fighting Eagle (Rod LaRocque, Phyllis Haver)
Mon 18 Jun 1945 Little Orphan Annie (Colleen Moore)
Yesterday Lives Again 1900–1920
Mon 25 Jun 1945 The Cat and the Canary
two-reel comedies
Mon 02 Jul 1945 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Sheldon Lewis)
Mon 09 Jul 1945 Kismet (Otis Skinner)
Mon 16 Jul 1945 The Eyes of Youth (Rudolph Valentino_
Mon 23 Jul 1945 Wife’s Relations (Ben Turpin, 1928)
Mon 30 Jul 1945 One Thousand and One Nites (probably The Thief of Bagdad)
Millie the Arcadian Maid (Mary Pickford)
Mon 06 Aug 1945 Local Girl Makes Good (Laura LaPlante, Zasu Pitts)
Spooks and Spirits (Mabel Normand, Chester Conklin)
Mon 13 Aug 1945 The Fighting Blade (Richard Barthelmess)
short subjects
Tue 21 Aug 1945 Shadows
short subjects
Mon 27 Aug 1945 The Forbidden City
short subjects
Mon 03 Sep 1945 Tiger Rose (Lenore Ulrich)
short subjects
Mon 10 Sep 1945 His People (Rudolph Schildkraut)
Mon 17 Sep 1945 Alias the Deacon (Jean Hersholt)
Mon 24 Sep 1945 Lorna Doone (Madge Bellamy)
Mon 01 Oct 1945 The Girl in the Pullman
The Grinning Gringo (Douglas Fairbanks, abridgment of The Lamb, 2 reels)
Mon 08 Oct 1945 Big News (talkie, Carole Lombard)
Mon 15 Oct 1945 Shield of Honor (Thelma Todd)
Mon 22 Oct 1945 His Wonderful Chance (Rudolph Valentino)


Ah! At last we learn a little bit! This was probably the model of Victor projector that Harold used:

When YouTube disappears this video, download it.

A Daylight screen.

The splicer would have been one of these contraptions.
“Box of recordings” tells us that the music was supplied by Harold himself, who simply spun 78rpm shellacs. As for “mailing list,” from that we learn that he printed schedules that he mailed out to regular customers. No idea what he used the shadow boxes for. His entire film collection was included in this sale.
Who purchased Harold’s collection and business? I wish I knew.


TIME OUT!


Just discovered this:






OLD-TIME MOVIE THEATRE
5440 Hollywood Boulevard, near Western Avenue
Hollywood
Fri 29 Mar 1946
Fri–Sun only
Dancing Mothers (Clara Bow)
Nomads of the North (Lon Chaney)
Wed 03 Apr 1946 The Lost World
Ella Cinders
Wed 10 Apr 1946
thru Sun		 Kismet
Lucky Devil
Wed 17 Apr 1946
thru Sun		 The Spieler
A Pair of Silk Stockings
Wed 24 Apr 1946
thru Sun 28		 The Headless Horseman (Will Rogers)
Night Cry (Rin Tin Tin)
Wed 01 May 1946
thru Sun 05		 Beau Brummel (John Barrymore)
All Aboard (Harold Lloyd)
Tue 07 May 1946
thru Thu 16		 Romola
Chaplin comedy
Fri 17 May 1946
thru Thu 23		 The Covered Wagon
Will Rogers short
Fri 24 May 1946
thru Thu 30		 Tillie’s Punctured Romance
Twisted Trails (Tom Mix)
Fri 31 May 1946
thru Sun 02		 The Lost World
Ella Cinders
Tue 04 Jun 1946
thru Sun 09		 Dancing Mothers (Clara Bow)
Stand and Deliver (Lupe Velez)
Tue 11 Jun 1946
thru Mon 17		 The Eyes of Youth
Peck’s Bad Boy
Tue 18 Jun 1946
thru Mon 24		 Beyond the Rainbow (Billie Dove, Clara Bow)
Big News (Carole Lombard)
plus 16mm sound preview
Tue 25 Jun 1946
thru Sun 30		 Orchids and Ermine
Are Parents People?
The Great Train Robbery
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Tue 02 Jul 1946
thru Mon 08		 Lorna Doone
The Gold Rush
Nomads of the North
Wed 10 Jul 1946
thru Mon 15
Lucretia Lombard
Smoky Comes Through
Our Gang
serial, comedy
Wed 17 Jul 1946
thru Mon 22		 The Pony Express
The Light House by the Sea
Tue 23 Jul 1946
thru Thu 01
Miss Bluebeard
Soul of the Beast
Our Gang
serial
Fri 02 Aug 1946
thru Sun 04
Poker Faces
Wife’s Relations
Tim McCoy serial
Tue 06 Aug 1946
thru Thu 08
My Lady of Whims
The Cat and the Canary


































OLD-TIME MOVIES
Yucca Street & Wilcox Avenue (I don’t have the exact address. Sorry.)
Hollywood
Tue 26 Nov 1946
thru Wed 27
Just Suppose (Barthelmess)
Eagle at Sea (Florence Vidor)
Sat 30 Nov 1946
thru Sun 01
The Informer (a talkie)
Tue 03 Dec 1946
thru Wed 04
The Cat and the Canary
Why Sailors Go Wrong
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Sat 07 Dec 1946
thru Sun 08
The Last Days of Pompeii (mighty sound epic)
shorts
Tue 10 Dec 1946
thru Wed 11

Soul Fire (Barthelmess)
Romola
Fighting Coward (Beery)
Sat 14 Dec 1946
thru Sun 15
Mae West’s best picture (talkie)
Lena Horne short (talkie)
Tue 17 Dec 1946
thru Wed 18
Skyscraper (Wm. Boyd)
The Night Club (Beery)
Fri 20 Dec 1946
thru Sun 22
As You Like It (talkie)
Bob Hope comedy (talkie)


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N. Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
OLD MOVIES CLUB
Yucca Street & Wilcox Avenue
Hollywood
    Mon 23 Dec 1946
thru Fri 27
Beau Brummel
Back Door to Heaven (talkie)
Sat 28 Dec 1946
thru Sun 29
Golden Boy (talkie)
Manhandled
Mon 30 Dec 1946
thru Tue 31
King of Kings
Sennett comedy
Houdini serial		 Mon 30 Dec 1946
thru Wed 01
Only Angels Have Wings (talkie)
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Wed 01 Jan 1947
thru Tue 07
See America Thirst (talkie)
Houdini serial
Christie comedy
cartoon		 Thu 02 Jan 1947
thru Thu 30
REOPENING JANUARY 31
Wed 08 Jan 1947
thru Tue 14
closed Sun
Caught in a Cabaret
Stella Maris
Houdini serial
Wed 15 Jan 1947
thru Tue 21
closed Sun
Twisted Trails
Charley Chase - Oliver Hardy comedy
Houdini serial
cartoon
Wed 22 Jan 1947
thru Tue 28
closed Sun
Orchids and Ermine
Our Gang
Houdini serial
Wed 29 Jan 1947
thru Tue 04
closed Sun
The Son of the Sheik		 Fri 31 Jan 1947 DOES NOT REOPEN


Slowly but surely, I shall make my way through all the newspaper listings — even though there’s no longer much reason to. I had been tearing my hair out trying to figure out which distributor was renting these films, and then it finally dawned on me that NO DISTRIBUTOR was renting the films to the Hamptons or to Kuschner or to any of the other copycats. There was an underground that made 16mm copy negatives or dupe negatives from 35mm materials held by the studios. This underground consisted of probably just two guys. Maybe three, but probably two. One of them owned a lab and the other one owned an exchange and knew where the old prints were shelved and also knew when they were not scheduled to play for a few weeks (or months or years). The guys (I’m sure they were guys) sold 16mm prints under the table. Collectors such as the Sterne and Kohn and the Hamptons and Kuschner and so forth all purchased the same movies because those were the only movies that were on the black market. Some of the films that the Hamptons and Kuschner and the others showed were in the public domain, but others were most definitely still protected by copyright. The exhibitors simply took their chances — and they got away with it — except, of course, for poor old Eddie Kohn.


As for the Comoedia, it surely rented the foreign films from various catalogues, but supplemented the screenings with silents borrowed from a collector — or two collectors. Who were the collectors? Probably the guy who ran Old Time Movies, followed by the guy who ran the Old Movies Club. The Comoedia continued its 16mm series through 2 August 1947. Then, not long afterwards, it switched back to live performances, but by the end of the year it was defunct.


There were revival houses, but they seem not to have been successful. I discover that the Franklin, 5500–5502 N. Figueroa St., in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Ángeles, briefly advertised itself as the Franklin Encore Theatre of Proven Hits. That policy began on Tuesday, 18 November 1947, but it lasted only to the end of January. And I suppose the list goes on. And on. And on.


For what it’s worth (nothing), here is the remainder of the programming that I have so far been able to reconstruct. It will take me rather a while to make it all the way through to the end.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 North Fairfax Avenue
Los Ángeles
Fri 05 Feb 1947 Haunted Spooks (Harold Lloyd)
The Spieler
Fri 12 Feb 1947 Young April (Bessie Love)
Picking Peaches (Harry Langdon)
Houdini serial
cartoon
Wed 19 Feb 1947 The Americano
Wed 26 Feb 1947 Matchmaking Mama
Thu 27 Feb 1947 Carole Lombard, Sally Eilers, Baby Peggy
Thu 06 Mar 1947 Wonderland (Rod Laroque, Lupe Velez)
Thu 13 Mar 1947 The Ropin’ Fool (Will Rogers)
Wed 19 Mar 1947 Every Woman’s Husband (Gloria Swanson)
Wed 26 Mar 1947 Lighthouse by the Sea (Rin Tin Tin)
Laurel & Hardy
Wed 02 Apr 1947 Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Dressler, Chaplin)
Wed 09 Apr 1947 The Last Performance (Conrad Veidt, Mary Philbin)
Thu 17 Apr 1947 Eddie Quillan, Mary Pickford
Wed 23 Apr 1947 Draw Egan (Wm. S. Hart)
Wed 30 Apr 1947 Skyscraper (Boyd, Hale, Carol)
Our Gang
Wed 07 May 1947 The Spanish Dancer
Fri 16 May 1947 Nomads of the North
Wed 21 May 1947 Lucky Devil
Chaplin
Houdini
Thu 29 May 1947 Pearl White
Semon and Hardy
Wed 04 Jun 1947 Clara Bow
Pearl White
Thu 12 Jun 1947 Pearl White
Fred Thomson
Wed 18 Jun 1947 The Safety Curtain (Norma Talmadge)
Pearl White serial
Wed 25 Jun 1947 We’re in the Navy (Beery, Hatton)
Pearl White
Our Gang
Thu 03 Jul 1947 Romolo
Pearl White
Wed 09 Jul 1947 The Cat and the Canary
Pearl White serial
Wed 16 Jul 1947 Kentucky Hills
Chaplin
White
Wed 23 Jul 1947 The Leathernecks
Pearl White serial
Wed 30 Jul 1947 [The Night Club] (Ray Griffith, Vera Reynold, Wallace Beery)
Pearl White serial
Wed 06 Aug 1947 Beau Brummel
Wed 13 Aug 1947 Tarzan of the Apes
Wed 20 Aug 1947 Raggedy Rose
Pearl White serial
Wed 27 Aug 1947 The Fighting Coward
Laurel & Hardy
Pearl White
Thu 04 Sep 1947 The Marriage Cheat (Jay, Marmont, Menjou)
Our Gang
Wed 10 Sep 1947 The Devil Horse
Chaplin comedy
Wed 17 Sep 1947 Barbara Frietchie
Larry Semon
serial
Thu 25 Sep 1947 The Power of the Press
Wed 01 Oct 1947 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Wed 08 Oct 1947 Lucretia Lombard
Thu 16 Oct 1947 Miss Bluebeard
Turpin
Wed 22 Oct 1947 The Eagle
Wed 29 Oct 1947 West Bound Limited
Chaplin comedy
serial
Wed 05 Nov 1947 His Majesty, Bunker Bean
Laurel & Hardy
Wed 12 Nov 1947 Square Deal Sanderson
Charley Chase
Wed 19 Nov 1947 The Drop Kick
Our Gang
serial
Wed 26 Nov 1947 Lorna Doone
F. Arbuckle - M. Normand
Wed 03 Dec 1947 Pearl White
The Mad Lover
Cohen & McNamara
Wed 10 Dec 1947 The Charlatan (part-talkie)
Wed 17 Dec 1947 School Days
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Wed 24 Dec 1947 King of Kings
Wed 31 Dec 1947 Charley’s Aunt
Wed 07 Jan 1948 Night Cry (Rin Tin Tin)
Laurel & Hardy
Wed 14 Jan 1948 Lady Windermere’s Fan
Snooky comedy
Tiger’s Shadow serial
Wed 21 Jan 1948 The Pony Express
Charley Chase comedy
serial
Wed 28 Jan 1948 Rubber Tires
Charley Chase comedy
serial
Wed 04 Feb 1948 Scars of Jealousy
Mabel Normand
Oliver Hardy comedy
Wed 11 Feb 1948 Kismet
Mack Sennett comedy
serial
Wed 18 Feb 1948 My Lady of Whims
comedy, cartoon, serial
Wed 25 Feb 1948 The Yankee Clipper
comedy, cartoon, serial
Wed 03 Mar 1948 Skinner’s Dress Suit
Our Gang comedy
serial
Wed 10 Mar 1948 The Coming of Amos
Laurel & Hardy comedy
serial


TIME OUT!


Just discovered this:




MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 North Fairfax Avenue
Los Ángeles
Wed 17 Mar 1948 The Girl in the Pullman
Harry Langdon / Mack Sennett comedy
Wed 24 Mar 1948 Shore Leave
Charlie Chaplin comedy
serial
Wed 31 Mar 1948 Big News
Bobby Vernon comedy
serial
Wed 07 Apr 1948 The Headless Horseman
Wed 14 Apr 1948 Walking Back
Oliver Hardy
Thu 22 Apr 1948 Nju - Eine unverstandene Frau
Wed 28 Apr 1948 Single Shot Parker
Our Gang comedy
Wed 05 May 1948 Horseshoe
Thu 13 May 1948 Eagle of the Sea
Wed 19 May 1948 Manhandled
Wed 26 May 1948 Mabel at the Wheel
Annapolis
Wed 02 Jun 1948 Flesh & Blood (Lon Chaney)
Fri 11 Jun 1948 The Volga Boatman
Wed 16 Jun 1948 Ella Cinders
Stan Laurel comedy
Wed 23 Jun 1948 The Birth of a Nation
Wed 30 Jun 1948 Pitch Hitter
Charley Chase
Wed 07 Jul 1948 Silks and Saddles
Sennett comedy
Wed 14 Jul 1948 The Grand Duchess and the Waiter
Wed 21 Jul 1948 Clash of the Wolves
Wed 28 Jul 1948 The Bells
Thu 05 Aug 1948 Tillie Wakes Up
Thu 12 Aug 1948 Made for Love
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Wed 18 Aug 1948 Square Shoulders
Laurel & Hardy
Wed 25 Aug 1948 Man from Beyond
Wed 01 Sep 1948 Mickey
Wed 08 Sep 1948 Tartuffe
Semon-Hardy
Wed 15 Sep 1948 A Pair of Silk Stockings
Wed 22 Sep 1948 Soul Fire
Wilson campaign
Wed 29 Sep 1948 Going to Congress
Wed 06 Oct 1948 The Son of the Sheik
Wed 13 Oct 1948 The Lost World
Wed 20 Oct 1948 Eve’s Leaves
W. Wilson campaign film
Wed 27 Oct 1948 Brave Heart
C. Chaplin - M. Normand
Wed 03 Nov 1948 Battle of the Sexes (D.W. Griffith)
Wed 10 Nov 1948 The Covered Wagon
Wed 17 Nov 1948 The Merry-Go-Round
C. Chase - O. Hardy
Wed 24 Nov 1948 The Fighting Blade
Harold Lloyd
Tarzan
Wed 01 Dec 1948 The Grinning Gringo (Douglas Fairbanks, abridgment of The Lamb, 2 reels)
See My Lawyer
Wed 08 Dec 1948 The Tempest
Wed 15 Dec 1948 CLOSED FOR VACATION
Wed 29 Dec 1948 King of Kings
Wed 05 Jan 1949 Hands Up!
Tarzan serial
comedy
Wed 12 Jan 1949 The Goose Woman
Sennett comedy
Tarzan
Wed 19 Jan 1949 The Knockout
Tarzan
Thu 27 Jan 1949 The Forbidden City
Wed 02 Nov 1949 The Last Warning
Tarzan serial
comedy
Wed 09 Feb 1949 The King on Main Street
Laurel & Hardy
Tarzan
Wed 16 Feb 1949 Dough and Dynamite
Spangles
Wed 23 Feb 1949 Day-Dreams (Lanchester - Laughton)
Soldier Man (H. Langdon)
Thu 03 May 1949 Brass Cook
Laurel & Hardy
Wed 09 Mar 1949 Friends (Pickford - Barrymore)
Wed 16 Mar 1949 Outside the Law
Wed 23 Mar 1949 Dress Parade
Fatty Arbuckle comedy
Wed 30 Mar 1949 Othello
Sennett comedy, serial


All right. All right. All right. I get the idea. It took me this long, but I get the idea. I shall not make a list of every show, because what we see above is the entire inventory. John Hampton would add more films to his collection, and he would schedule them as he acquired them. I shall run through the rest of the ads but I shan’t compile a calendar. I shall note only John’s new acquisitions.


So, why do I want to continue to sift through all the listings, even though it’s the same handful of movies over and over and over and over and over and over and over again? Because I’m searching for any screenings of Buster’s movies. Up through the end of 1956 there simply weren’t any such screenings, with the sole exception of The General at the Movie Parade in March 1941. That was almost certainly legit, the official UA abridgment of about 40 minutes. Had pirated copies of the full-length edition of The General been available on the black market, then there would have been other commercial screenings during the 1940’s. In the 1940’s, though, Buster’s movies were pretty much no longer available, not even to Buster himself. The MoMA print popped up a couple of times, though, as we shall discover.


Was there another copycat? Of course there was! Did it do well? Of course it didn’t! That was the The Flicker: Old Time Movies at 10909 Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood in April and May 1949. This 16mm revival was crammed into an extremely small building, eight miles distant in a different city. I have no clue who was in charge of it. Whoever it was, though, probably just purchased Harold Kuschner’s old collection from the owner of the Old Movies Club. As we have seen, that collection had already gone through several other hands.




By the way, it seems that the building still stands:




For those of you who are not familiar with the local lay of the land, North Hollywood is not Hollywood. Never the twain shall meet. They are separately incorporated. They are as culturally distinct from one another as the Anaguta are from the Manhattanites. They are two entirely different planets.


We can infer that The Flicker did not do well at all, in any way whatsoever. It was in the wrong location. There are a great many movie-mad movie-addicts in Hollywood and Los Ángeles, immature, awkward people, nearly all of them male, between the ages of 30 and 60, nearly all of them extremist right-wing devotees of Alex Jones and Gateway Pundit, jobless, earning only SSI, living in mommy’s basement, spending non-movie hours playing with their scale-model toy monsters, forever suffering withdrawals and insanely dashing about town for their next cinematic fix. If you want to have success with your movie house, that’s the audience you need. There are no movie-mad movie-addicts in North Hollywood. It’s a different planet.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
THE FLICKER: OLD TIME MOVIES
10909 Burbank Ave
North Hollywood
Wed 06 Apr 1949 Man on the Box (Syd Chaplin)
Ben Turpin, serial		 Fri 08 Apr 1949 Primrose Path (Clara Bow)
Commemoration biography of F.D.R.
Wed 13 Apr 1949 Civilization
Backstop (Harold Lloyd)		 Fri 15 Apr 1949 Orchids and Ermine (Colleen Moore)
The New York Hat (Mary Pickford)
Will Rogers short
Chapter 1 serial
Wed 20 Apr 1949 Tillie’s Punctured Romance
cartoon, comedy, serial


TIME OUT!


(again)


Just discovered these follow-up items:



(It looks like The Kid was canceled and replaced two weeks later
by The Circus, Caught in a Cabaret, and Easy Street.)








I am totally stunned.
Nonetheless, we can figure out that this was, without any doubt,
MoMA’s 16mm print.


This next piece indicates that either Intolerance or The Passion of Joan of Arc was knocked off of the schedule to be replaced by Variety:




MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
THE FLICKER: OLD TIME MOVIES
10909 Burbank Ave
North Hollywood
Wed 27 Apr 1949 The Primrose Path
comedy, cartoons, serial		 Wed 27 Apr 1949 The Eagle
Old Schemer (Wallace Beery)
Sat 30 Apr 1949 The Heart of New York (Al Jolson sings)
Personality Parade
Wed 04 May 1949 Way down East Fri 06 May 1949 The Birth of a Nation
Sat 07 May 1949 Lady Windermere’s Fan
Sun 08 May 1949 Manhandled
Mon 09 May 1949 The Son of the Sheik
Tue 10 May 1949 The Covered Wagon
The Eagle
Wed 11 May 1949 [GUARANTEED SURPRISE NIGHT]
Thu 12 May 1949 Orchids and Ermine
Fri 13 May 1949 Burlesque on Carmen
The Nickel Hopper
Wed 18 May 1949 The Savage Princess (Mary Pickford)
Sporting Youth (Reginald Denny, Laura LaPlante)		 Sat 21 May 1949 CLOSED


When The Flicker flickered out, Movie continued on.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
Wed 25 May 1949 Fighting Eagle
The Busher
Wed 08 Jun 1949 The Godless Girl
Wed 15 Jun 1949 One Week of Love
Chaplin comedy
Wed 22 Jun 1949 Sunnyside Up
Cake Eater
Wed 29 Jun 1949 Conductor 1492
Liberty (Laurel & Hardy)
Wed 06 Jul 1949 Just Suppose (Barthelmess)
The Great Train Robbery
Wed 13 Jul 1949 Wife Tamer
Wed 20 Jul 1949 White Sheep
Saturday Afternoon
Babe Ruth
Wed 27 Jul 1949 Veiled Adventure
Tim McCoy serial
Wed 03 Aug 1949 Captain Swagger
Tim McCoy serial
Wed 10 Aug 1949 The Wanderer
wed 17 Aug 1949 Clinging Vine
Those Love Pangs
Wed 24 Aug 1949 Behind the Front
Wed 31 Aug 1949 Beyond the Rainbow
Charley Chase



The Hollywood Drake Hotel, 6726 Hollywood Boulevard, the site of the new Flicker.
I assume the new Flicker was in a ground-level storefront.
The building still stands but I shall never enter.
Interesting design. I wonder who the architect was.

EXCEPT — of course! — I’m wrong!!!
The Flicker was not in a storefront on the ground level of the Drake Hotel.
Nope.
Bill Counter discovered a vintage photograph in Marc Wanamaker’s Bison Archive.

It was in the building next door, which is long gone.
So there.
Marc Chevalier then told Bill that this was not merely a storefront,
but that it had stairs down to a basement that gave entrance to the hotel’s basement,
where was set up an entertainment venue!
Was the minicinema on the ground level or in the basement?
Might anybody know?


The Flicker flickered back, at a much better location, but I am not sure when, since it did not submit its schedule to the newspapers at first.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
THE FLICKER: OLD TIME MOVIES
6726 Hollywood Blvd
Hollywood
Wed 07 Sep 1949 The Birth of a Nation Sat 03 Sep 1949 The Eagle
Wed 14 Sep 1949 Garden of Eden
Murray-Durfee-Arbuckle
Fri 23 Sep 1949 The Nickel Hopper
Jewels of Desire
Wed 28 Sep 1949 Fighting Love
Stan Laurel comedy

The Pico was another revival house that seems to have been 16mm.
It showed mostly talkies with the occasional silent tossed in.
Wed 05 Oct 1949 Almost Human
His New Job (Chaplin, Turpin)		 Fri 07 Oct 1949 The Son of the Sheik
short subjects
Wed 12 Oct 1949 First Law (Irene Castle, Tony Moreno)
Harry Langdon - Mack Sennett comedy, serial		 Fri 14 Oct 1949 Ella Cinders
W.C. Fields comedy
The Great Train Robbery
Wed 19 Oct 1949 Gypsy Blood (Pola Negri)
serial, comedy		 Fri 21 Oct 1949 The Covered Wagon
Mack Sennett comedy
Charlie Chaplin
Wed 26 Oct 1949 The Cat and the Canary
serial, comedy		 Fri 28 Oct 1949 Tillie’s Punctured Romance
Laurel & Hardy
Wed 02 Nov 1949 His Wonderful Chance (Valentino)
Mack Sennett comedy, serial		 Fri 04 Nov 1949 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
comedy, old-time news
Wed 09 Nov 1949 Beau Brummel Fri 11 Nov 1949 Gypsy Blood
Mabel Normand comedy
Wed 16 Nov 1949 Arcadian Maid (Mary Pickford)
Madame Behave (Julian Eltinge)		 Fri 18 Nov 1949 Topsy & Eva
2 comedies, Wm. S. Hart short
Wed 23 Nov 1949 The Hunchback of Notre Dame Fri 25 Nov 1949 Burlesque on Carmen
2 comedies
(P.S. This must have been when and where Robert Payne saw the movie in preparation for his book, The Great God Pan, NY: Hermitage House, 1952.)
Wed 30 Nov 1949 Eyes of Youth Fri 02 Dec 1949 Last Warning
Harry Houdini serial
comedy
Wed 07 Dec 1949 Soul of Beasts (Bellamy - Beery - Landis)
A Night at the Show (Chaplin)		 Fri 09 Dec 1949 Lucretia Lombard
Wed 14 Dec 1949 CLOSED FOR VACATION Fri 16 Dec 1949 Lady of Whims (Clara Bow)
Houdini serial
two comedies
Fri 23 Dec 1949 Raggedy Rose (Mabel Normand)
Houdini serial
Wed 28 Dec 1949 King of Kings
Pearl of the Army (Pearl White serial)		 Fri 30 Dec 1949 Eyes of Youth
Houdini serial


The Flicker flickered out once and for all in October 1950. In the meantime, the Hamptons continued living their merry life at the Movie.


Their merry life allowed John to neglect paying for necessities in order to spend his money collecting more 16mm movies. We can, with some certainty, keep a tab of each of his new acquisitions. Ready?


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
A TALLY OF JOHN HAMPTON’S NEW ACQUISITIONS
Oct 1950 Fifth Avenue Models
Nov 1950 Gigolo
Nov 1950 Nju — Eine unverstandene Frau (Emil Jannings)
Nov 1950 The Road to Yesterday
Nov 1950 Whose Baby (Swanson)
Nov 1950 Spirit of the U.S.A. (Johnnie Walker)
Jan 1951 Out of Control (Turpin)
Jan 1951 The Prairie Pirate (Harry Carey)
Feb 1951 The Sea Lion
Mar 1951 Les miserables (Gabriel Gabrio, Henri Fescourt)
Apr 1951 Luck (Johnny Hines)
May 1951 Tartuffe the Hypocrite (Emil Jannings)
May 1951 Michael Strogoff
May 1951 When the Cat’s Away (Mary Pickford)


YIKES!


Just discovered this:


You’ve never heard of Spade Cooley.
Count your blessings.
You don’t want to know anything about Spade Cooley.
He was unspeakably evil.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
A TALLY OF JOHN HAMPTON’S NEW ACQUISITIONS
May 1951 Noisy Neighbors (Theodore Roberts)
Jun 1951 Court Martial (Jack Holt)
Jul 1951 Prince of Pilsen
Jul 1951 Run Girl Run
Aug 1951 Corporal Kate
Sep 1951 Tol’able David
Sep 1951 Knight of the Trail (William S. Hart)
Oct 1951 Michigan Kid
Dec 1951 Fortune’s Fool
Jan 1952 Shifting Sands
Feb 1952 The Cowboy Sheik (Will Rogers)
Feb 1952 The Home Makers (King Baggot)
Feb 1952 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edison)
Apr 1952 Piccadilly
Apr 1952 Light in the Dark
May 1952 Manhattan Madness
Jul 1952 Ned McCobb’s Daughter
Aug 1952 Mississippi (talkie, Joan Bennett)
Sep 1952 Butterfly (Clarence Brown, Laura LaPlante)
Sep 1952 Uncensored Movies (Will Rogers)
Oct 1952 The Isle of Love (Valentino)
Oct 1952 Back to God’s Country (Renée Adoree)
Oct 1952 Captain January (Baby Peggy)
Nov 1952 A Society Sensation (Valentino)
Nov 1952 Bachelor Brides (Rod LaRocque)
Nov 1952 The All Star Family in Distress: A Film Cutter’s Nightmare
(Pickford, Fairbanks, Gish, Chaplin, Swanson, Arbuckle)
Dec 1952 The Merry Widow (Clara Bow)
Dec 1952 Horse Shoes (Jean Arthur)
Jan 1953 The Half-Breed (Fairbanks)
Jan 1953 Walking Back (Sue Carol)
Jan 1953 Getting Gertie’s Garter (Marie Prevost)
Feb 1953 Madamoiselle Midnight (Mae Murray)
Mar 1953 Sailor’s Holiday (Sally Eilers)
Mar 1953 Lightnin’ Wins (Gary Cooper)
Mar 1953 The Blue Light (Riefenstahl)
May 1953 Wedding Song (De Mille)
May 1953 Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (John Barrymore)
Oct 1953 The Heart of a Siren
Oct 1953 Flirting with Fate (Fairbanks)
Oct 1953 Under Two Flags (Priscille Dean)
Nov 1953 Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life
Dec 1953 Mud and Sand (Stan Laurel)


Oops. Quick time-out.



Zo, there were similar revivals in San Francisco, too, huh? Makes sense. There is nothing unique about Los Ángeles except for the Egocentric Self-Absorption Manufacturing Company, Ltd., that belches smoke all day long. I guess any and possibly every major city in the US had similar revival cinemas, probably all 16mm with many of the films from a single underground supplier.


Now we can return to the narrative.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
A TALLY OF JOHN HAMPTON’S NEW ACQUISITIONS
Feb 1954 His Marriage Wow (Harry Langdon)
Mar 1954 Mardi Gras Mystery (Betty Compson)
Apr 1954 The Plastic Age (Clara Bow)
Apr 1954 Tumbleweeds
May 1954 The Narrow Road (Mary Pickford)
Jun 1954 45 Minutes from Hollywood


One moment please while we change reels.


Mon 12 Jul 1954 Topsy & Eva
Chaplin short
The New York Hat (Pickford)
Little Orphan Annie (Colleen Moore)
Wed 21 Jul 1954 Condemned (Clara Bow)
Tillie’s Dreams (aka Tillie Wakes Up)
Harold Lloyd & Bebe Daniels
Wed 28 Jul 1954 Judith of Bethulia
Our Congressman (Will Rogers)
Houdini serial
Tue 03 Aug 1954 The Lost World
Tumbleweeds
Chaplin comedy
Houdini serial
Tue 10 Aug 1954 The Birth of a Nation
Pearl White comedy
Houdini serial
Tue 17 Aug 1954 Shifting Sands (Gloria Swanson)
Ella Cinders (Colleen Moore)
Houdini serial
Chaplin comedy
Tue 24 Aug 1954 The Son of the Sheik
The Americano
Houdini serial
Tue 31 Aug 1954 Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Marie Dressler)
Twisted Trails (Tom Mix) [CANCELED]
Tarzan of the Apes
Mon 06 Sep 1954 The Lost World
Judith of Bethulia
Tue 07 Sep 1954 In Greenwich Village (Clara Bow)
Jazz Man
Tue 14 Sep 1954 The Great Lover (Valentino)
Mademoiselle Midnight (Mae Murray)
Houdini serial
Douglas Fairbanks
Tue 21 Sep 1954 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Mad Lover (Pearl White)
Tue 05 Oct 1954 The Busher (John Gilbert, Colleen Moore)
Headin’ Home (Babe Ruth)
Chaplin comedy
Houdini serial
Tue 12 Oct 1954 East Lynne
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
The Great Train Robbery
The Face on the Barroom Floor
Tue 19 Oct 1954 The Female Impersonator (Charlie Chaplin)
Stand and Deliver (Lupe Velez, Rod La Rocque)
Tue 26 Oct 1954 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Cat and the Canary
Sat midnight: This Is Spookarama
Thu 04 Nov 1954 Dancing Mothers
Chaplin comedy
newsreel
Tue 16 Nov 1954 Gypsy Blood (Pola Negri)
Scandal (Gloria Swanson)
Our Gang
Houdini serial
Tue 23 Nov 1954 The Champion (Charlie Chaplin)
Fighting Blood (Geo. O’Hara)
Mon 29 Nov 1954 The Son of the Sheik
Tue 30 Nov 1954 The Lost World
His First Command (Wm. Boyd)
cartoon
Tue 07 Dec 1954 Intolerance
Tue 14 Dec 1954 Flesh and Blood (Lon Chaney)
Chaplin comedy
The Power of the Press (Capra)
Peter, the Hollywood Hermit
Mon 20 Dec 1954 CLOSED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Sat 25 Dec 1954 Topsy and Eva
Mary Pickford
Charlie Chaplin
Peter, the Hollywood Hermit
Wed 05 Jan 1955 The Son of the Sheik
Charlie Chaplin
Gay 90’s News
Wed 05 Jan 1955 The Son of the Sheik
Charlie Chaplin
Ben Turpin
Tue 18 Jan 1955 Orchids and Ermine
Elaine Barrie Barrymore
Wed 26 Jan 1955 Chaplin festival (10 of his early hits)
Peter the Hermit (cartoon)
Thu 03 Feb 1955 Dancing Mothers
Tarzan of the Apes
Charlie Chaplin (quaint motley of scenes)
Thu 10 Feb 1955 Judith of Bethulia
Tarzan of the Apes
Charlie Chaplin comedy
Wed 16 Feb 1955 Tom Mix and Tony the Wonder Horse
William S. Hart
Jean Arthur, Lupe Velez, Rod LaRocque, Wally Wales, Warner Oland, Leo Maloney, Mickey Rooney, Fearless the Famed Dog Performer
The Great Train Robbery
Wed 23 Feb 1955 The Son of the Shiek
The Lost World
Thu 03 Mar 1955 20,000 Leagues under the Sea


We now continue with the next reel.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
A TALLY OF JOHN HAMPTON’S NEW ACQUISITIONS
Jul 1954 Bad Boy (Charley Chase)
Jul 1954 Hogan’s Wild Oats
Sep 1954 The Ruse (William S. Hart)
Sep 1954 Picfair Honeymoon
Oct 1954 Fantomas
Nov 1954 The Shock (Lon Chaney)
Dec 1954 Free to Love (Clara Bow)
Dec 1954 The Fast Worker (Laura LaPlante)
Mar 1955 Madame Mystery (Theda Bara)
May 1955 Capital Punishment (Clara Bow)
Jun 1955 Salome (Nazimova)
Jun 1955 His Wooden Wedding (Charley Chase)
Jul 1955 Charge of the Light Brigade (Wallace Reid)
Jul 1955 Shanghai Lady (Mary Nolan)
Jul 1955 The Fall Guy (Larry Semon)
Aug 1955 Egyptian Mummy (Ruth Roland)
Aug 1955 Taxi Spooks (Mack Sennett)
Aug 1955 Seven Days (Mary Roberts Rinehart)
Nov 1955 1918 Armistice
Nov 1955 Love and Bullets (Arbuckle)
Dec 1955 Painting the Town (Larry Semon)
Dec 1955 Are Parents People?
Mar 1956 All Night Long (Harry Langdon)
Mar 1956 Studios and Stars
May 1956 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (John Barrymore)
Jun 1956 The Flirt (Arbuckle, Normand)
Jun 1956 A Woman’s Man (Romaine Fielding)
Jun 1956 Man on the Box (Sydney Chaplin)
Aug 1956 Stolen Moments (Valentino, 1st LA showing since 1922)
Sep 1956 Alias the Lone Wolf (Bert Lytell)
Nov 1956 Othello (Emil Jannings)
Jan 1957 COPS (BUSTER KEATON)



Note how coy John was about revealing the source of his films!
After what happened to Eddie Kohn, why wouldn’t he be coy?
Mar 1957 The Phantom of the Opera (The World’s Only Complete Original 1925 Edition)
Mar 1957 Turn Back the Hours (Loy, Pidgeon)
May 1957 Up in Mabel’s Room (Marie Prevost)
May 1957 The Iron Mask (Fairbanks)
Jun 1957 Lena and the Geese (Mary Pickford)
Jun 1957 BUSTER KEATON COMEDY
Jul 1957 California Straight Ahead (Reginald Denny)
Jul 1957 L’argent
Jul 1957 The Perils of Paris (Pearl Frederick)
Aug 1957 Never Again (Mary Pickford)
Aug 1957 Hell’s Highroad (De Mille)
Aug 1957 New Perils of Pauline (Pearl White)




Sep 1957 Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Hampton’s 6-reel reconstruction)




Oct 1957 Rescue from an Eagle’s Nest (D.W. Griffith)
Oct 1957 Fires of Youth (Jeanne Eagels)
Nov 1957 The Gaucho (Fairbanks)
Nov 1957 Old Heidelberg (D.W. Griffith)
Nov 1957 Plunder (Pearl White)
Dec 1957 The Lonely Villa (Mary Pickford)
Jan 1958 Love Me and the World Is Mine (Dupont)
Mar 1958 Streets of Sorrow (Garbo)
Mar 1958 Hustling Hank (Will Rogers)




Apr 1958 Flames of ’49 (D.W. Griffith, Fairbanks)




Jun 1958 The Unknown Soldier (Marguerite de la Motte)
Jun 1958 Down to the Sea in Ships (Hampton’s restoration)




Oct 1958 The Black Pirate (Hampton’s restoration)
Oct 1958 Drivin’ Fool (Patsy Ruth Miller)


Then came 1959.


MOVIE: OLD TIME MOVIES
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Ángeles
A TALLY OF JOHN HAMPTON’S NEW ACQUISITIONS
Jan 1959 Carmen (Pola Negri)
Feb 1959 The Primitive Lover (Constance Talmadge)





Note the passing mention of the Coronet.
Store that in the back of your mind.
Feb 1959 OUR HOSPITALITY








May 1959 The Sheik’s Physique (Valentino)
Oct 1959 Stars of Yesterday (clips)


Yes, the magical year of 1959. The General was not in release in 1959. Yet it ran for a full week at the Movie: Old Time Movies, from Wednesday, 11 March 1959, through Tuesday, 17 March 1959. If the Movie: Old Time Movies had been a nonprofit, then this would likely have been MoMA’s 16mm edition. But I am CERTAIN that the Movie: Old Time Movies was commercial. John Hampton had just a few days or weeks earlier acquired this print for his personal collection. How? My best guess is that he purchased it from John Griggs, who regularly bootlegged MoMA prints. When Griggs noticed that a film in his collection had fallen into the public domain, he would run off copies for sale in 16mm and 8mm. This was almost certainly how Hampton obtained this print.


As for Cops and Our Hospitality and possibly yet another Buster movie, where did they come from? The most likely probability is that somebody (who? who? who? who? who?) duped them from materials at MoMA.


And on and on and on the Hamptons’ little business went through December 1980. Why the Hamptons closed their little business is a mystery to me. John later sold his film collection to David Packard. If that collection still includes The General, I must see if I can get access to examine that print!




Please take note of something that John said. It is one of the most important statements ever uttered. “The movie exchanges in town were willing to sell their old worn-out films for $1 a reel. Or we’d go through their garbage and retrieve the films they’d already thrown away.” Ponder that thought, every night upon going to sleep and every morning upon awaking. That explains so many mysteries, mysteries that we shall encounter by and by.


John and Dorothy did not reopen. Graffiti began to cover the walls. Then out of nowhere came a change.




Larry Austin purchased and reopened the little cinema in January 1991 and renamed it the Silent Movie Theatre. As far as I know, Austin continued the old habit of running 16mm films from personal collections — most likely his own personal collection, exclusively. Just a guess. Then a few years later the projectionist hired a hitman to murder Larry. Well, hey, ya know, it’s showbiz. What is it I say about showbiz?


More info.


I vaguely remember watching a tiny little docu/promo for the Silent Movie Theatre on cable TV. It was probably on American Movie Classics, inserted between shows as a filler. What I do remember is something that surprised me circa 1990 or 1995 or whenever it was. It would not surprise me now. There was a brief scene in the booth, just a few seconds long. That momentary scene revealed that the machines were antiquated Bell & Howell 16mm portables, and I don’t think they had even been converted to xenon. They were just incandescent. Something like this, I think. We did not get a full shot of the booth, just a few close-ups, but I was left with the distinct impression that there was not a hint of 35mm anywhere in the place.


With Larry in a grave and with his projectionist in a jail cell, the cinema went dark for a while, but new owners came along and ran mostly oddball flicks with about one silent night each week. I think Wednesday night was the silent night. When I first attended in, oh, when was it?, maybe 2008?, it ran 35mm as well, but it cropped full-aperture silent prints through the Academy sound aperture. Eventually, they purchased longer lenses and larger apertures, but I never saw them in action. There were no speed controls. The projectionist told me that he had tried running the drive motors through a variac and I groaned before he got to the punch line that his attempt resulted only in burning out the motors. I am not an electrician, and so why is it that I understand some electrical theory better than electricians do? I would have thought that any electrician would know not to run a single-phase AC motor through a variac. Oh well. What do I know? The cinema purchased replacement motors after that little stunt. That is why all silents pounded through the machines at 24fps, no matter what the original intentions were. Drove me nuts. Horrible sightlines. I chose to watch the movies from the back of the auditorium and either I would stand or I would sit on top of a seat without folding it down. That was the only way I could see over people’s heads. Various pianists accompanied, among them Cliff Retallick. I wish I could remember who else I heard there, but oh well. As for the allegations that closed the place down, I don’t know. I read the online accusations as well as Hadrian’s online denial, and they seem equally believable, or equally not believable. I have no idea what really happened or didn’t happen. Absent solid evidence, I refuse to pass judgment. More recently, a new outfit has newly outfitted the building but I think silent movies are now history. I have not returned or even passed by.


So there you have it. The tedious, boring, overly detailed story above took me six days to reconstruct, and I’m sure I’m missing a great deal of the context, and I can think of only two other people on this planet who might care a fig for any of this info. With the above story, though, I can say that now, at long last, Marion Mack’s claim makes perfect sense. I bet she bought tickets for several showings at the Movie Parade in March 1941, and that she saw it again at the Horace Mann School auditorium in Beverly Hills on 21 February 1946, and she almost certainly caught several showings at the Movie: Old Time Movies in March 1959, and I bet those were the only times she ever saw revivals. She surely did not attend the show on 26 April 1949 at the Westwood Community Clubhouse. She probably brought different friends and fam with her each time she attended. There were at least two further local revivals, both in 1950, but she remained forever unaware of them, as we shall discover later.


There was more. A few thousand miles away, in Baltimore, MD, and in Washington, DC, in 1958, came the most jaw-dropping news of all. We shall get to that later, though. Have patience.


Back to MoMA

By the time that film societies were beginning to sprout in the early 1930’s, accompanists as a species were extinct. As far as I can determine, most film societies presented silent films dead silent, with no music at all. MoMA, of course, had staff pianists who accompanied, among them Arthur Kleiner, but MoMA was not a film society; it was a museum supported by the Rockefellers and the CIA. Among film societies, though, I know of a few admirable outliers. Here is one such:




Zo, what was that? That was certainly the 16mm MoMA print, double-sprocket silent. The short films on the program were all, I’m pretty sure, in the MoMA rental catalogue. What was this about “a sound track added”? It must have been a homemade soundtrack on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, with musical selections likely pulled from a music lover’s library of them thar newfangled LP vinyl discs. Alternatively, and rather more likely, it could have been someone spinning discs. It was definitely not an optical track on the actual film print; I’m absolutely certain of that.








And here is a screening at the Santa Rosa Junior College:





(Click here to continue)