moirafinnie wrote:Welcome, Mr. Birchard!
To get us started, may I please ask how you became a movie fan, and what led you into your profession as an editor and author? Thanks in advance for your insights.
moira
I guess I can trace my serious interest in film to seeing the David Wolper TV special "Hollywood the Golden Years" in 1961 when I was 11 years old. I was aware of silent films from seeing silent comedies on early TV, and my parents were both old enough to have seen them in theaters. My mother thought there was enough cultural benefit to take me to see "When Comedy Was King" at the Vogue theater in Hollywood ca. 1960, but it was seeing clips from films like "The Birth of A Nation" and "Intolerance" and "The Big Parade" that got me hooked--the clips looked just like "real" movies to me, not just the highly stylized world of the short comedies.
I started clipping out stories on silent films, mostly obits, and putting them in scrapbooks. I managed to get the books "The Movies" by Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer (still one of the best) and "Classics of the Silent Screen" by Joe Franklin (only years later did I come to realize it was ghost written by William K. Everson).
Film books were not as unbiquitous as they are today, and each new release was a special event (at least to me). "The Movies in the Age of Innocence" came out about 1963 (another great book) and I wrote a fan letter to author Edward Wagenknecht and he replied and mentioned that Blackhawk Films sold 8mm prints of many silents. So I started collecting films and it grew from there.
Because I was in Los Angeles I was fortunate to meet a number of people who worked in early pictures, cowboys Sid Jordan, Ted French, Art Manning, Tom Smith and others; directors like Irvin Willat and Al Rogell, Henry King and Allan Dwan; stars like George O'Brien and Harold Lloyd; cinematographers like Karl Struss, L. Guy Wilky, and Virgil Miller and many others. A number of them gave me still pictures from their early days in pictures and that's how it started.
The writing started almost by accident. I think my first short piece was for the "8mm Collector" (now "Classic Images") in 1966. It was about Sid Jordan, who had worked with Tom Mix. My first published piece for pay, however. I was introduced to former child actor and prolific film book author Raymond Lee. Ray was chrning out books and looking to partner with others in order to expand his areas of expertise. He was interested in collaborating with me on a book about Tom Mix.
Ray was a dear man, but to my taste not much of a writer, and pretty sloppy in his manuscript preparation. He showed me the proposal he'd sent out on Tom Mix and it was riddled with typos. I didn't like the way the package looked, but I was in no position to quibble. I was a freshman in college with no published work to speak of, and Raymond Lee had been publishing articles and books for years.
I wrote an essay about an old cowboy, whose widow I had interviewed, for a college English class; and with a couple of pictures I sent it off on a whim to "Frontier Times." They bought it for a princely $20, and now I had some "cred" to wave in Raymond's face in the preparation of the Tom Mix sales pitch. Unfortunately, at that Time Ray had about a dozen books under contract at A.S. Barnes, and they passed on buying any more from Ray until they'd published the backlog.
Ultimately, I think, it broke Raymond Lee's heart that he had sold a dozen books, at $300 advances, and really could not make a living from his writing. He passed away a rather dissillusioned man, and it would be years before I could resurrect the idea of doing a book on Tom Mix.
The editing I can also trace back to "Hollywood the Golden Years." Host Gene Kelly came out at the beginning of the show and said: "Hi, I'm Gene Kelly, and I work in the movies." That sounded neat. I later went to UCLA film school, managed to get a job with rbc films, which had nn-theatrical distribution rights to the Chaplin films, and through that connection met Russ Tinsley, who operated a post production service. The rest, as they say . . . [/code]