Well readers, today I had a "bird which had flown" come back to me, thanks to Per Ahlin, a record collector in Sweden who thankfully also collects posts from the 78-L newsgroup. The newsgroup has been around since 1992, and I have been a contributor since 1997. But we changed servers twice in the years 1999-2000, and in the process lost the entire archive. The current one only begins in the fall of 2000.
In March-April 1999 I did a series of posts on a subject about which I am apparently the only authority, the experimental sound films made by the Selig Polyscope Company. None survive, although I hope someday some element, either picture or sound, will turn up. What follows is a combination of the 1999 posts along with some follow-up material written in 2003. I hope you enjoy it, if you can get anything out of such an obscure topic at all. Please understand that I didn't make any of it up. Oddly, I have been accused of doing so in attempting to flesh out such forgotten histories, and have successfully defended myself in most instances.
SELIG POLYSCOPE, CARUSO, HARRY LAUDER AND SYNCHRONIZED MOTION PICTURES
I provide background in condensed form: "Colonel" William Selig formed his movie company in Chicago in 1896 in a loft at 43 Peck Court. He relocated it to Irving Park and Western in 1907 and "here, on April 8, 1910, Selig filmed the great operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. Never intended for release, this film was probably the first of Caruso, who later starred in a 1918 Famous Players-Lasky feature, "My Cousin." (Anthony Slide "Early American Cinema" Second Edition, 1994, pg. 28)
Slide does not go into whether this was merely a silent test of Caruso or some kind of experimental sound short. "My Cousin"
was cited as the source for the scene of the "Lucia Sextette" in the Teldec video compilation "The Art of Singing". Another post-synched bit of Caruso in a medium close-up singing "Vesti la Giubba" is included in a Polygram video entitled "Pavarotti and the
Italian Tenor". It is not stated if this is from "My Cousin", the 1910 Selig film or another Paramount feature starring Caruso from 1919, "The Splendid Romance". Other than these three subjects, I know of no other Caruso films. In the case of "My Cousin", the cast was filmed singing along to the commercial Victor record of the Lucia Sextette, and it was played back live in the theater as the film was shown. It was no big deal at all in the digital era to match the two again, although the synch is far from perfect.
Before we depart from Caruso's sound films, it is worth mentioning a disagreement between Slide and the imdB as to the unit within Paramount which handled the two Caruso features. Slide says it was "Famous Players-Lasky", and the imdB "Paramount-Artcraft". Is there a difference? Most certainly. While Jesse Lasky produced all of the Paramount product, there was an arrangment from 1915 which designated the producer credit on Famous Players films to Lasky and the other films to Adolph Zukor, Lasky's much-despised partner in the company. The slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays" meant that this unit (headed by director Cecil B. DeMille) was primarily for developing stage talent in the cinema, such as Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, Sarah Berndhart, Lou Tellegen, Gerry Farrar and others. So it seems that Caruso would fit right in with this crowd.
But wait. "Artcraft" was a seperate entity, "produced" by Zukor. It featured the Mary Pickford films and those of Griffith, i.e. "A" pictures. If you were a theater owner in 1918 and you bought the slate of Paramount product, you thought you'd be getting the Pickford subjects also. But that's not the way Zukor did business. You'd find out at the last second that the rental on Artcraft subjects were seperate from the regular Paramount slate, and thus would have to shell out accordingly. And a "special" such as a Caruso feature
might well have qualified for the latter unit, especially if the tenor stuck to his usual salary demands for his films as he did in his other business dealings. I see no reason why not - at that point Mary Pickford was making $10K a week.
So which unit was it? Perhaps only a dip into Photoplay or Moving Picture World will reveal the answer.
Back to Selig. Selig did make sound shorts of Harry Lauder in 1914 with the co-operation of inventor I.T. Kitsee. It might be that Kitsee
was in on the early Caruso subject also, but this has not been established. Anthony Slide writes:
"In 1914, the Selig Polyscope Company, in association with the Cort-Kitsee Company, filmed a series of short films of the immensely popular, Scottish-born vaudecille performer Harry Lauder. The process used was sound-on-disc and patented by Dr. I. Kitsee. It was not because the process was good, but because the subject was Harry Lauder that the films were first seen in New York City at the Palace Theater, home of American vaudeville. Lauder's manager, William Morris, presented the program, which consisted of four songs: "She's Ma Daisy", "Saftest o' the Family", "Parted on the Shore" and "Wee Doech and Doris". Variety's Sime Silverman complained (May 8, 1914) that the phonograph horn was placed in such a position that the sounds did not appear to come from Lauder's mouth- a constant complaint about these early experimental films- but continued, "For those who like Lauder and for those who haven't seen him, the Lauder Talker is a big act for vaudeville, and it gives the house the privelege of billing the Lauder name."
- Anthony Slide in "Early American Cinema" (New and Revised Edition,1994) pg. 126 Scarecrow Press Metuchen, N.J. & London
Here is an except from a message addressed to me from Allen Koenigsberg, author of the "Patent History of the Phonograph": "This sounds like Isidor Kitsee of PA. I covered his work up through the end of 1912 in PHP. He seems to have been involved with various light systems which were used for optical sound on film - but I don't have his post 1912 patents handy - although any Patent Depository (65 around the country) will have the annual indices, and all that has to be done is look him up, and see what
patents he received for that period. I will check my trademark database (1893-1930) for Seligs Polyscope. Ah, the company was located in Illinois and started operations in 1909 - he even used the phrase "Red Seal Plays"! Also Concertaphone, Distascope,
Projectaphone, etc." - Allen Koenigsberg
I pick up again on March 24, 1999: Was poking through the Motion Picture entries in the Library of Congess catalogues, looking for something else for something I did not find, and discovered a LOT more information about the 1914 "Lauder Talkers" under the heading "Selig Polyscope Co." In earlier posts, from information in Slide, I listed the titles of six synchronized sound shorts. Slide, in turn, cites a Variety review for these. However, the LoC catalogue list a full 13 subjects, one of which, it seems, was not musical.
MU 133 Harry Lauder-Himself
(MU 134-146 titles all begin with "Harry Lauder Singing")
MU 134 I Love A Lassie
MU 135 Killie-crankie
MU 136 Roamin' in the Gloamin'
MU 137 Rob Roy McIntosh
MU 138 Safetest of the Family
MU 139 Same as His Father Was Before Him
MU 140 She's Ma Daisy
MU 141 She's the Lass For Me
MU 142 We Parted On the Shore
MU 143 Weddin' of Sandy McNab
MU 144 Wedding of Lauchie McGraw
MU 145 When I Get Back to Bonnie Scotland
MU 146 Wie Dock and Doris
The supplentary information on the deposits is all identical:
>copyright Selig Polyscope 6Apr1914 (Harry Lauder, author)
>Sd. synchronized phonograph title, descr., & 2 prints
The "2 prints" part concerns me, as this suggests only two prints were made of each subject, which makes their chances for survival slim indeed. The phonograph cylinders may survive in some form; perhaps they were included with the deposit! After 1912, the LoC no longer required paper prints for copyright from domestic film producers, though some prints in the Library date as late as 1914 (mostly European subjects, and for some strange reason, lucky for us, the D.W. Griffith Biograph of "Judith of Bethulia"- the only form in which this film has survived.) Selig didn't begin to copyright its subjects until it became part of the Motion Picture Patents Trust headed by Edison, and the paper prints it deposited consisted only of short strips representing 8-10 frames of each individual scene. This is highly unfortunate, as Selig was an important pioneer production company in many ways- the first motion picture producer West of New York (1896 or 7), the first studio in Chicago, the first in Los Angeles (1907), crucial in the development of such genres as Westerns and Serials, an early contributor to the field of animation, and it appears, to the development of sound film. But little to nothing exists of the work.
There is one very poor "book length", if you can really call it that, study of Selig history- "Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope
Company" by Kalton C. Lahue (A.S Barnes, 1973). Anyone familiar with Kalton's other books will know what they're like- long on
pictures, short on scholarship. This book has hardly any original writing at all, consisting mostly of reprints of trade paper articles from the period. So far it's slow going, and there is no mention of the synchronized sound films. On the basis of the seperate copyrights for each film, I would conclude that that these were individual reels/cylinders.
Steven C. Barr, author of the book "Almost Complete Dating Guide to 78 rpm Recordings" asked: "I'm possibly wrong...but might not "2 prints" be what was submitted as a deposit? I don't suppose there were any "rules" about the sound portion of synchronized-sound films, as the whole thing was too new at that point."
I answered: I wish you WERE right, but I've seen up to 154 prints listed in this field for other entries. Obviously, even the LoC would not
have enough room to house that many copies of a single title! I do believe that the field in question refers to the number of prints available at the time of the deposit. In this instance, just "two prints" would make sense. The Lauder Talkers were shown in only one New York theater (the Palace) and you would only need two prints of the 13 shorts- one to run, and one as "backup". If the sound recording was in some way deposited under seperate cover, their discovery would be a real boon to Lauder fans, especially as one seems to be a straight monologue ("Harry Lauder- Himself.")
The fate of the Selig Polyscope films is real mystery. A complete print of Selig's most famous western feature, "The Spoilers" (1914) is held at LoC. Single reels of the famous fight scene between Tom Santschi and William Farnum used to circulate back in the days of 16 and 8mm home use collecting. Selig made so much money on this film alone that he discovered he could retire, and in 1917, he did so. LoC holds one other Selig feature; AFAIK none of the Selig shorts survive. The William Selig papers are housed at the Margaret Herrick Library of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but the films just seem to have vanished. I know of no vault fire or other disaster to have claimed the films of Selig, such as I am aware was the fate of Fox and Eclair's product. Perhaps they were simply chopped up and melted down for their metal content during WWI.
In 2003 I added the following: Actually, Colonel Selig sold his entire film library to a small film distributor which did business on a states' rights basis. They would cut down features and serials alike to a running time of about 45 minutes apiece, change the
titles and book several pictures as a package onto a single bill, usually shown in low-rent nickelodeons where the movies ran all day long. This may bode well for the survival of some Selig subjects, as they may exist but as unidentified films under the wrong title, release date, whatever. However that does not improve the chances of the Lauder talkers. As short films belonging to a failed early sound process which was installed in no theater, they were probably discarded along with anything else the states' rights distributor felt that they couldn't use.
Also, there seems to be no information in the Kalton Lahue book about Kitsee, his process, or any experimental sound films produced by William N. Selig.
Finally, as an appendix, I would like to complete the list of films in which Harry Lauder appeared as per imdB. These were all made in England, and the starred items are musical shorts:
Huntingtower (1927)
Auld Lang Syne (1929)
Happy Days (1930)
Nanny (1931)
Tobermory (1931)
Wee Hoose Among the Heather (1931)
I Love a Lassie (1931)*
I Love to Be a Sailor (1931)*
Roaming in the Gloaming (1931)*
The Saftest of the Family (1931)*
She Is Ma Daisy (1931)*
Somebody's Waiting for Me (1931)*
The End of the Road (1936)
So Sir Harry ultimately appeared in 26 films - not bad for a stage entertainer born in 1870. Incidentally, this whole line of inquiry was brought about by someone who asked if Lauder appeared in any Lee DeForest Phonofilms. The answer to that is, apparently not.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com