The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has lost one of its greatest friends and biggest boosters. Frank Buxton was not only a generous sponsor of this event, along with his wife, Cynthia Sears; he was an enthusiastic attendee who encouraged friends and family to join him at the Castro Theatre every … [Read more...] about Remembering Frank Buxton
The Red Kimona
She swore that she hadn’t meant to kill him that New Year’s Eve of 1915. Gabrielle Darley had brought the pistol along for self-defense and it had been tucked in her fur muff when it fired the fatal shot into her lover, Leonard Topp. Her defense attorney, Earl Rogers, offered up a hole in the muff … [Read more...] about The Red Kimona
The Real Stan & Ollie
My father, who worked as an usher in a Detroit movie theater in the 1930s, loved Laurel and Hardy. And, perhaps, so did your father or grandfather, or even your brother, who may have had their poster hanging in his college dorm. Famous or not, mostly male but some female, Laurel and Hardy fans are … [Read more...] about The Real Stan & Ollie
The Rat
Devastatingly handsome and abundantly talented, Welsh-born Ivor Novello was one of Britain’s most dazzling matinee idols of the 1920s. Like his friend and contemporary Noël Coward, Novello was a writer, producer, actor, composer, a star of stage and screen—a multi-hyphenate before that term existed. … [Read more...] about The Rat
Rapsodia Satanica
In his witty introduction to film historian Angela Dalle Vacche’s seminal 2008 study Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin writes, “When on a shopping spree for anguish, rapture, martyrdom, comas, counts, rapes, bastards, orphans, dogaressas, philtres, … [Read more...] about Rapsodia Satanica
Ramona
Helen Hunt Jackson wrote her 1884 novel Ramona as a beacon against racism and injustice, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Native American. Jackson, a writer and U.S. Interior Department agent, became radicalized after attending a lecture given by Ponca Chief Standing Bear, who told harrowing tales of … [Read more...] about Ramona
Prix de Beauté
Arguably no movie star has ever been so thoroughly rehabilitated in popular esteem—going from footnote to icon—as Louise Brooks. In her brief career heyday, she was a Hollywood up-and-comer whose career self-sabotage came too early to afford her the protection an established star might have had from … [Read more...] about Prix de Beauté
Preserving Beyond the Rocks
This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of Beyond the Rocks at Silent Winter 2005 Gloria Swanson rued the fate of her lost films in her 1980 autobiography, Swanson on Swanson. “The same sad questions are always asked: Does anyone know of a print anywhere of Beyond the Rocks, … [Read more...] about Preserving Beyond the Rocks