After Monday's orgy of obscurity perhaps you thought you'd get a stream of stupid jokes and family misadventures, right? Well, no. I don't have any stupid jokes today, and I'm readying myself for a trip out East, a process which is nothing but headaches, pain and misery (and money!!) So indulge me please, as we turn another page of history hardly anyone has read. However, the nice thing about this story is that the artifact is still with us.
This is culled from posts on the alt.movies.silent group. "RH" asked: "What I mean to ask is, which major figure from the silent feature era was born the farthest back in the 19th century? --Not including major figures from the stage who made a few films."
I answered:
Although you're excluding stage figures, stage actor Joseph Jefferson did appear in an early film of his signature role "Rip van Winkle" - he was born in 1822.
Eric Stott stated...
Are you sure Joseph Jefferson appeared in a film? I've seen stills of his SON, Thomas Jefferson, in 1914 and 1921 versions of Rip Van Winkle. He was born in 1858 and was appeared in films until his death in 1932.
Then Bruce Calvert came to my rescue:
In 1902, American Mutoscope & Biograph copyrighted eight short scenes of Joseph Jefferson appearing on stage as Rip Van Winkle. The paper prints that they deposited had actually been shot in August or September 1896, but AM&B didn't start submitting paper prints until 1902. The scenes are very short and comprise a total of 108 feet in 16mm. According to the LOC catalog, they were
shot in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts.
Your Pal Brian came up with a correction to my original post:
IMDB pegs his birth at 1829
My final answer (and the essy that followed):
Yes, that is correct. I didn't take time to look it up before I posted, probably counting on unreliable old memories of things read long ago in equally unreliable books...
But I knew of the Joseph Jefferson film from its being listed in the Niver Paper Print catalog and it's being marked with an "x" in Biograph Bulletins. One of the reasons that the scenes are so short is that the Jefferson films were made as Mutoscope subjects, and you were expected to drop a coin to see each successive portion of the story. Biograph also disseminated some sporting events in this fashion, such as individual rounds of boxing matches.
According to our friend and correspodant "early film", right around 1902 Biograph was converting many of the 68 mm titles they thought were worth keeping ("Rip Van Winkle" definitely would've been one of them) to the 35mm standard, and at that time likely also copyrighted it and deposited the paper print.
I've never seen the Joseph Jefferson film, but I've always wanted to. Imagine - you'd be witnessing the work of an actor who was born the year Andrew Jackson was elected president, and at a time when Edmund Kean was still "strutting and fretting" his last miserable years away at Covent Garden. Jefferson was also arguably the first American actor whose work was regarded as "respectable" by most Americans, even though he only played the one role, over and over, many thousands of times. So, even beyond being a mere actor, Jefferson was extremely "important."
When Edison and Muybridge met in 1889 to discuss a technological marriage between the phonograph and Zoopraxinoscope (in the the conference that ultimately led to the invention of the Kinetoscope) their mutally agreed upon goal was to make a visual and aural record of Edwin Booth's performance in "Julius Caesar" for posterity. Alas, no one got to film Booth, silent or otherwise. And it sure must've made Edison mad as hell to see his ex-employee, W.K.L. Dickson, wind up getting the scoop on Joseph Jefferson.
Composition of the day: "C3PO", a sonata for piccolo, 2 sets of pan pipes, 4 pots & 1 pan (with optional continuo parts for celtic harp or hammered dulcimer.) This was inspired by a conversation with my office co-worker who reminded me of a project I'd started in the mid-1970s to write a series of duets between instruments that were listed succesively alphabetically in the Oxford Dictionary of Music. It got as a far as a fully filled, two-page piece (on 12-stave pages) that was a duo for Alphorns and aeolian harp. The Alphorns were notated all in bass clef on one staff. For the Aeolian Harp part, I drew a little pictograph of an aeolian harp in the margins and indicated its music with a wavy line.
Poem for the day: Homeless man in a thick beard and shades sits hunched forward on the bus bench and hopes maybe if I do this people will think I'm the ghost of Jerry Garcia...
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com