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The title didn’t exactly sell itself. “Flowing Gold?—that must be one of them moonshine pictures,” guessed an Arkansas moviegoer. Equally puzzling was the tantalizing ad banner: “Flowing Gold on Market Street on Monday.” But at least one blurb caught the film’s gist: “A thrilling story of flaming … [Read more...] about Flowing Gold

Karl Brown was only twenty-nine when he wrote and directed Stark Love, but by then he was thoroughly grounded in the motion picture business, having started with Kinemacolor’s American operation in 1912 at the age of fifteen. Developing camera negative for the company he learned the basics of film … [Read more...] about Stark Love

You could almost feel bad for Mary Philbin. A Chicago-born beauty, she’d been discovered by virtue of proximity, a childhood friend of Rebekah Laemmle, niece to Universal’s Carl Laemmle who loved nothing more than to give family and the family-adjacent a break. It didn’t hurt that she bore a passing … [Read more...] about Stella Maris

Too few people remember just how funny Marie Prevost really was. Watching Up in Mabel’s Room should put us all on to the truth about her short but brilliant career. Ontario-born Prevost was discovered in her late teens by Mack Sennett when she was working as a secretary in a law firm in 1915. She … [Read more...] about Up in Mabel’s Room

Blessed with directors like John Ford, Frank Borzage, and Raoul Walsh, not to mention F.W. Murnau, it is surprising that William Fox should assign such an ambitious and sure-fire subject to Irving Cummings. When Alex Gordon was rescuing nitrate prints from the Fox vaults in 1970, I was able to see a … [Read more...] about The Johnstown Flood

Hail the humble programmer. Although sometimes denigrated as “the Bs” for their minimal production values, B- and C-list casts, and often far-fetched plots, programmers were a vital and ubiquitous feature of the American motion picture business from its early days through the 1950s. Programmers, … [Read more...] about Man and Wife

Presenters: Mindy Johnson, Kyle Westphal, and Nicholas White A GREAT NOISE The live Foley artists of their time, percussionists deployed whistles, blocks, bells, ratchets, anvils, and all manner of delightfully specific noisemakers known as “traps” to perform sound effects for silent movies. … [Read more...] about Amazing Tales from the Archives 2023

The motion picture industry was changing rapidly in 1928, and one of its biggest stars, forty-five-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, was seriously contemplating his place within it. It would be hard to overstate his importance to Hollywood as a movie star, a creative producer, and an industry leader. … [Read more...] about The Iron Mask