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April 13, 2006
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Rescuing the man on the clock He was the biggest movie star of the 1920s, the Tom Hanks of his time. And today he’s totally forgotten. If known at all, he’s that guy in the straw hat hanging from the hands of a clock high above the Los Angeles streets, in a scene from Safety Last, his 1923 megahit. But audiences today are rediscovering Harold Lloyd, one of the three kings of silent comedy (along with Chaplin and Keaton), as an unjustly neglected master filmmaker. This is in part due to the long-awaited release of his best work on DVD, and also because of revival screenings that allow his pictures to be seen as they were intended, in pristine 35mm prints projected on the big screen with live music. The latest step in this reawakening will take place Friday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m. at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, where Barry Steelman of Red River Theatres, Inc., has organized a screening of a pristine 35mm print of Safety Last on the theater’s big screen. The show includes a newly commissioned score by Concord-based composer Michael Annichiarico, who will perform the music live with fellow local musician David Kontak. Annichiarico, an associate professor of composition at UNH, is a regular customer of Cinema 93, Steelman’s video rental business. Steelman often asked Annichiarico if he’d ever scored a film; the composer hadn’t, but he was open to the idea. Late last year, Steelman said, “I think I’ve got the film,” Annichiarico recalled. It was Safety Last, a silent film that Annichiarico had never heard of. “I borrowed it, took it home, and fell in love with it,” Annichiarico said. “And I didn’t know who Harold Lloyd was. I only knew the iconic picture of him hanging from the clock.” “Initially, I thought it was going to be on a much smaller scale. I thought I’d watch the film and improvise. But as we got into it, we thought ‘we may want to do a score for this.’” Annichiarico began writing the 75-minute score this past January; at Friday’s screening, it will be performed by himself on digital keyboard and with Kontak playing bass and handling sound effects. “We’ve got a fairly rich palette of sound we use throughout the score,” Annichiarico said. “It’s quite a bit of sound for two people.” Annichiarico was surprised at the strength of the picture’s story, a boy-goes-to-the-city-to-make-good tale that winds up with Harold forced to climb a 14-story building in place of a professional human fly. The picture contains all the elements that fueled Lloyd’s popularity: a solid (if simple) story, great gag sequences (including some brilliant stuff in the department store), the trademark horn-rimmed glasses (which spurred a craze in the 1920s), and a warmth and humanity and innocence that’s totally vanished from contemporary films. Safety Last, with its climactic building climb, is astonishing today in part because it was made before trick or “process” photography. Yes, Lloyd did go up a building, doing his own stunt work. Even more amazing: Lloyd did all this after losing the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in a 1919 accident. Also, to add interest, one of the big celebrity weddings of the decade happened after the filming, when Lloyd married leading lady Mildred Davis. Annichiarico, rather than try to imitate 1920s period music, created a score that’s “a combination of a lot of the different things I do as a musician,” he said. “One tune near the beginning is my Frank Zappa tune. I’ve also been a jazz pianist for a number of years, so there’s some improvisation here and there.” The score is made up of many short cues – “too many to count,” the composer said. Annichiarico also compared his approach to that of Carl Stalling, the legendary composer of music for Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s to the 1950s. If the Concord screening goes well, Annichiarico would like to take the score on the road to screenings in other venues in Keene and Portsmouth, and possibly rescore it for the UNH wind ensemble. Safety Last will be screened on Friday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m. at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord. The event will be hosted by Jeff Rapsis (me!) of HippoPress; a Q & A about Lloyd and how the film was made will follow. Tickets are $10 each, available at Cinema 93 on Pleasant Street or at the Capitol Center box office. For more info, visit www.ccanh.com. Comments? Thoughts? Discuss this article and more at hippoflea.com |
More than silence • Pristine print quality: Most of us think of silent films as crude black-and-white pictures made with little technique. Actually, the image quality of even the cheapest film was as pristine as an Ansel Adams photograph. Most producers, however, regarded the prints as perishable as popcorn, so few prints were saved and those that did often decomposed badly. Lloyd, however, created archival-quality master negatives, so his films survive in stunning condition; for this Friday’s screening, a newly minted 35mm print will be used. • Live music: Forget the rinky-tink piano. In the heyday of silent film, even the smallest small-town theater employed a house band. Larger city theaters had full orchestras or mighty theater organs. • The big picture: Sure, a lot of silent films are now on DVD, but watching them on television is like trying to drink wine with an eye-dropper. Silent films were designed to be shown on the big screen, with stories and characters and images larger than life. • Organically grown: Amazingly, films such as Safety Last were made without scripts. Like other master comedians, Lloyd employed a team of “gag men” who created situations and worked out the story as they went along. If they got stuck, they’d back up and try something else, which was possible in an age before unions and studio assembly lines. They’d also preview pictures in theaters, note what didn’t work, then go back and fix it before release. The result was a kind of handcrafted cinema; it’s not a cliché to say they just don’t make ’em like that anymore.
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