Questions for Ken Winokur

Past chats with our guests.
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Ken Winokur
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Post by Ken Winokur »

You know, I take that back about Universal. They've been very accommodating with Lonesome (they own the copyright, but the print is the George Eastman House's).

MGM and anything owned by Turner seem to the be most difficult.

Ken
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Gagman 66
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Post by Gagman 66 »

Ken

:) Yes, all the films that I mentioned in the previous post are Paramount Pictures Silents. Another long unseen Paramount Silent that I long to see is Allan Dwan's TIN GODS (1926) with Thomas Meighan, Renee Adoree, and Aileen Pringle. James Cruze OLD IRONSIDES (1926) with Charles Farrell, Esther Ralston, George Bancroft, and Wallace Beery is a ttile you might be able to coax out of Paramout on the road. It had a VHS release, many years ago, and is a highly underrated film.

:o One film that comes quickly to mind is De Mille's THE ROAD TO YESTERDAY (1925) with William Boyd, Jetta Goudal, and Vera Reynolds. David Shepard mentioned several months ago, that his group Film Preservation Associates has a 35 millimeter fine-grain master of this great picture. They also have a Fine-grain of THE VOLGA BOATMAN, which has been released on Laser-disc, but not on DVD. I am not sure WHITE GOLD (1927) still survives in 35 millimeter or not? This film is a Masterpiece, and merits a proper restoration.

:? When my friend Ed, was at Eastman House in 2006, He saw near pristine prints of ZAZA, STAGE STRUCK, and another Swanson film FINE MANNERS. All of these were 35 Millimeter. Also need to put a word in for the several Marion Davies Silent's that are not owned by Warner's. Titles like WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER, LITTLE OLD NEW YORK, BEAUTY'S WORTH, and ZANDER THE GREAT all still exist in 35 millimeter I believe? These films definitely deserve more consideration than they have received thus far. I continue to be ignored that Marion's, and Colleen Moore's public domain titles have been so ignored by people like Kino, Image, Milestone, and Flicker Alley.

:roll: A Universal title you might consider taking a look at is Clarence Brown's SMOULDERING FIRES (1925) with Pauline Frederick, Malcolm McGregor, and Laura La Plante. Great film that has gone sadly overlooked. Anything with Laura La Plante sounds good to me! I hope one day to see HER BIG NIGHT (1926). Kevin Brownlow mentioned Clarence Brown's BUTTERFLY (1924), with Laura, Norman Kerry and Margaret Livingston being newly restored by UCLA just a few months ago, during his visit here. I am very sorry to say that I have yet to see LONESOME. It sounds very interesting though.

:wink: Hope that these suggestions are helpful to you? I must say, It's been very interesting having you here all week on the forum!
Last edited by Gagman 66 on July 17th, 2008, 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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bdp
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Post by bdp »

I don't know if international silents are more or less difficult to clear for use, but I think E.A. Dupont's 'Variety' might be a good choice.

PS: I also think British silents are very under-represented in general - Maurice Elvey's 'At The Villa Rose' might be a good candidate, its storyline involves fake spiritualists (I know, are there any other kind) and murder. 'Underground' or Hitchcock's 'The Pleasure Garden' perhaps...
Last edited by bdp on July 17th, 2008, 6:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Gagman 66
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Post by Gagman 66 »

Kyle,

I haven't seen VARIETY' before either? By the way, where did yopu happen to see LONESOME? Was it at a live screening? Hey, E-mail me. I just got the MGM laser-disc set of the Thames version of GREED!
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Post by SSO Admins »

I have to apologize for being lost in the work ozone for so much of the week, but wanted to say thank you to Ken Winokur for being here. It's been a fascinating discussion.

If you have time before you leave, would it be pssible for you to talk a little bit about how you became interested in silent movies? It's kind of an obscure hobby, and even more obscure as a career.

Once again, thank you for participating on SSO, and you're welcome back here anytime. Looking forward to seeing you on August 9 in DC.
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Post by Ken Winokur »

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll get to work seeing what I can find about on these titles.

The only one of the list that I have seen is Variety. Loved it. I proposed it to Telluride a couple of years ago (the year after Piccadilly came out, but the Telluride directors didn't think that a followup Dupont, so soon after the Piccadilly hit, would be such a good idea. Perhaps it's a good time to suggest it again.

Anybody know who has the best print of Variety?

Alloy almost did Piccadilly. I went to the Cinefest festival in Syracuse a few years back and saw the great new 35mm print of this film. Later, I was chatting with Dennis Doros of Milestone, and commented about how much I enjoyed the film and how I would love to do an Alloy score of it. He told me that he was already in the process of getting the rights to distribute it and do a DVD.

I want to Telluride with this idea., but they passed. They wanted The General that year (which we had already scored for David Shepard's DVD). It turns out that Telluride was giving an award to Ted Turner at the festival, and Ted has said that The General was his favorite movie of all time.

David Shepard told me about the fabulous negative that Douris/Rohauer had. Douris owns the original camera neg, and has made a copy neg from that. I contacted Tim Lanza and made arrangements for him to make a new print (which is the best looking safety film print I've ever seen).

So we performed The General as a gift to old Ted (who has elsewhere commented that the worst mistake of his life was adding color to black and white films). You got to love a rich man who is haunted by artistic matters instead of money.

This is often our problem. There are too many great films to work with, but not that much time. We try to do only one score a year. Too often, for various reasons, we end up doing two or even three.

The next problem (ah there are so many) is keeping as many different films as possible rehearsed and in our touring repertoire. We've scored about 25 or so features and about the same number of shorts. We still perform about 10 of them, in rotation. When we write a new one, we have to drop one from our list.

We've been thinking of trying to resurrect our old scores for Man With a Movie Camera, and Strike, and get them ready again for performance. But what do we drop out? Black Pirate, Speedy, The Masters of Slapstick shorts program?

Usually what happens is the print becomes unavailable, and we stop doing that film. It's hard decide to dump any of the titles, they're like children (willful and misbehaved).

Ken

BTW - Only a short time left to pose questions. I think this might be ending today (is that right Jon?).

You've all been great. I'm used to a lot more abusive kinds of conversations on web groups. Alloy has often been savaged by th self proclaimed experts of the web.
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Post by movieman1957 »

Well, I don't have another question but I wanted to thank you for coming here. You have been most fascinating and I appreciate the information and the degree that you shared things. I am a music lover (and piano player) but little educated other than what I can pick up for myself so the chance to talk about music with a pro has been a delight.

As we do for all of our guests I want you to know on behalf of everyone here that you are most welcome anytime to share news or to just jump in the conversation. Some of our past guests have done just that and I hope you will too.

Thanks so much.
Chris

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana."
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Ken Winokur
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Post by Ken Winokur »

If you have time before you leave, would it be pssible for you to talk a little bit about how you became interested in silent movies? It's kind of an obscure hobby, and even more obscure as a career.

When I lived in Paris (1995 - 7)my best friend there Glen Myrent was working at the Cinematheque Francaise. He showed me Un Chien Andalou by Dali and Bunuel. I was pretty flabbergasted. Glen had done his college thesis on THE MUSIC FOR SILENT FILMS, so that's the first time I really gave any thought to the idea.

Glen had me come to photograph Henri Langois (the founder and director of the Cinematheque Francaise)for a book he ultimately published on Langois.

While there Glen also had me photograph the collections of the Cinematheque Museum (which no longer exists). I got to photograph the actual set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and the robat Maria from METROPOLIS!! I even touched them (don't tell anybody, but I had to dust them off a little. I wonder if those pictures still exist (color slides - probably very faded now).

About 18 years ago, the group Alloy Orchestra come together. We did performances for the First Night Celebration in Boston (out doors in Nor'Easters). We built a junk sculpture to perform on. It weighed several tons and had steel columns, giant oil tanks, steel pipe chimes and gongs Tens of thousands of New Year revelers heard us that night. We did that 3 or 4 years in a row. I also made a cool slide show to play during intermissions.

Next, In 1991, the film programer from The Coolidge Corner Theater, David Kleiler, asked Alloy to whip together a score for Metropolis. I had seen the film (in college) and knew that the film kind of looked like our giant junk drumset. We all agreed it would be fun and signed on.

We had about 2 weeks to prepare. We wrote a very rough score, that relied a lot on improvisation.

We had a selection of our best junk and lots of gorgeous drums (Hatian and handmade in Cambridge MA)

We played for about 5 shows over a weekend. At first audience wasn't that large but we had a great show. The subsequent shows increased in attendance every night until we sold out the theater at the end of the run. The theater holds about 650 seats.

Alloy strated doing fairly regular shows of Metropolis around the area. Ultimately we did it for about 10 or more years, and only stopped when the rights got to be an issue with the version we were using. I estimate that we've done about 500 shows of Metropolis.

We were hooked. Immediately after playing our first shows of Metropolis, we started trying to find a second silent movie to score. A historian/critic friend, Gerald Peary, suggested THE WIND. The Wind was available on VHS from MGM at that time (with the excellent Carl Davis Score). We watched it , totally loved it, and decided to do a score.

We rented the print from MGM a couple of times, but they made it too expensive to afford. We quickly gave up on performing the score and learned a lesson - don't do all the work to write a full length film score unless you have figured out the rights situation and the print rental agreement.

Next we did The Lost World. We bought a new 16mm Blackhawk print - so that there wouldn't be any problems with rental. But it was a pretty poor print of a badly cut version of the film We learned another lesson - make sure to work with the best print available.

I got a call from Bill Pence of the Telluride Film Festival (in 1993). He was looking for a "Percussion based Orchestra" to do a score for SYLVESTER - NEW YEAR'S EVE, by German director Lupo Pick.

The Pordenone Film Festival (Il Giornate Del Cinema Muto or something like that is the real name) had comissioned an all percussion score with Italian musicians which was apparently a huge hit. Telluride and Pordenone call themselves sister festivals, and Telluride always shows one or two of the hits from the previous years at Pordenone (curated by Paolo Cherchi Usai).

When I got off the phone the first time with the Telluride festival, I went over to the guys and said, "I think we just made our careers." A Telluride showcase seemed to best way to contact programmers around the country.

Our score for Sylvester was good and seemed well appreciated - it's a real downer film about a guy who commits suicide on New Year's eve - so the audience reaction was pretty subdued.

It was the next year, the year we wrote a new score for LONESOME, that the audiences just exploded.

The third year at Telluride, we premiered Man with a Movie Camera.

Anyway, that's when we started operating Alloy like a business instead of just one more of a bunch of great bands we had all been in. We started touring extensively. Other than the US, Alloy has played in Slovenia, New Zeland, Finland, Sweeden, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Canada, England, Portugal, and Mexico.

I was quickly pretty much consumed with watching and learning about silents. As the Alloy shows started coming in, I started meeting some of the experts in the field and learning a lot from them.

I started studying silent film history, buying every book I could find about it, and watching every video tape. I went to as many silent film festivals and showings as I could (and being on tour a lot - I get to see quite a few amazing live shows).

Over the last few years my wife and I started up Box 5. This is a film restoration and releasing effort. So far we've put out a fabulous restored, elaborately colored print of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (in conjunction with Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films and David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates). We also put out a gorgeous new print of Valentino's THE EAGLE. We're hoping to do more soon (but it's so damn expensive!). Alloy has toured extensively with Phantom of the Opera and The Eagle.
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Ken Winokur
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Post by Ken Winokur »

When I lived in Paris (1995 - 7)my best friend there Glen Myrent was working at the Cinematheque Francaise. He showed me Un Chien Andalou by Dali and Bunuel. I was pretty flabbergasted. Glen had done his college thesis on THE MUSIC FOR SILENT FILMS, so that's the first time I really gave any thought to the idea.

CORRECTION:
1975 - 77 is when I lived in Paris and was exposed to Silent Films (not 1995-7).

So, with that I'm signing off. It's been really fun to put the typing fingers in high gear and spin some yarns.

Best,
Ken
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bdp
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Post by bdp »

I suggested 'Variety' because I thought it would offer a lot of scope musically for you guys - I am pleased that you know of the film, it's strange to me that it's not as well known or circulated as so many other 1920's German films.

Thanks for your time, Ken - I deeply envy you in that you get to do what you love for a living.
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Post by Hollis »

Dear Ken,

Not being a silent era afficionado but a huge fan of the Big Bands and the Swing Era, I noticed you listed "A String of Pearls" by Benny Goodman. I'm confused. I was laboring under the assumption that "String of Pearls": was a Glenn Miller composition and release. I'd be trhe last one to take a professional musician to task being the novice that I am, but could you clarify that? Thanks for joining us and please come back soon and often if you're able to.

Appreciatively,

Hollis
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