What do I like about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival? Apart from the fabulous Castro cinema with its huge screen, gorgeous décor, perfect sightlines, and refreshingly sturdy balcony (for a cinema of its age)—hmmm ... everything. The people, the films, the mattresses. My revelatory … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Adventures from the Archives
25 Years: William Wyler’s Tokyo Holiday
The fun of a film festival is not only seeing the wonderful films, little-known ones in particular, but also meeting wonderful people. In the case of silent film festivals, we no longer get to see the film’s original casts or crew members because most of them died decades ago—still, unexpected and … [Read more...] about 25 Years: William Wyler’s Tokyo Holiday
25 Years: Forward into the Past*
When Melissa Chittick and I got up on the Castro Theatre stage to introduce Lucky Star at the first Silent Film Festival on July 14, 1996, Frank Borzage’s lost-until-1990 Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell love story was sixty-seven years old, and I was thirty-eight. Today Lucky Star is ninety-three years … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Forward into the Past*