- [Announcer] Live from your Public Media Studios, WVIA presents Keystone Edition Arts, a Public Affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is Keystone Edition Arts.

And now, Erika Funke.

- Welcome to Keystone Edition Arts, where we'll have a lot to say about the making of silent films in this region in the early 20th century.

You are invited to take part by sending an email to keystone@wvia.org and on social media at #Keystonearts.

Quiet on the set!

All except for Paul Lazar, who sets the stage for us.

- [Paul] History books tell us that in 1891, Thomas Edison publicly exhibited a camera and viewer that showed pictures in a way that gave the appearance of the images moving.

So, began the transition from Vaudeville with actors, dancers, and singers, performing live to movies.

First, silent movies without the sound of actors' voices, but with music provided by pianists or orchestras as the movie played.

Then talkies, as developing technology allowed actors voices to be recorded and synchronized with the film.

It didn't take long for other inventors in the late 1800s and early 1900s to create equipment and techniques that would advance this new form of entertainment.

Mechanical advancements allowed competition with Thomas Edison for customers.

Editing techniques created special effects and stories written expressly for moving pictures and experimentation with filming on location rather than with backdrops was also common.

For Keystone Edition Arts, I'm Paul Lazar.

- [Erika] Believe it or not, it was just over seven years ago that the Federal Aviation Administration granted permission to six TV and movie firms, allowing them to use drones to shoot scenes.

But wait, up in the sky, it's not a bird, it's a plane, it's Lyman Howe over Wilkes-Barre in 1911 shooting what were said to be the very first moving pictures ever taken from an airplane.

You may have caught, there it is.

You may catch a glimpse of Public Square just now at that very time back on terra firma Public Square became the sight of a scene in a silent comedy.

We couldn't quite make out the fountain perhaps from the air, but it's there in the sleuthing scene in Her Fractured Voice.

From documentaries to fiction features, Northeastern Pennsylvania was no back lot.

The upper Delaware River, Hillside Farms in the back mountain, and Taylor's Bluff all provided the backdrops for homegrown movies that would entertain the nation.

We'd like to welcome our movie-loving guests, Dr. Noreen O'Connor who is professor of English at Kings College in Wilkes-Barre.

She teaches literature, writing, and film and media studies.

In 2012, she began researching the Black Diamond Comedies, the first short comedy films released by Paramount Pictures in 1916, 17, and 18.

Her research has taken her to the Library of Congress and to Los Angeles to Paramount Pictures Archives, the UCLA Film and Television Archives, as well as the Douglas Fairbanks Center for Motion Pictures.

Carol Nelson Dembert, an award-winning filmmaker who returns to WVIA to talk with us about her historical documentary, Lyman H. Howe's High Class Moving Pictures and its companion book, High Class Moving Pictures and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition written with Charles Musser and published by Princeton University Press.

And John DiLeo, who is a resident of Milford in Pike County.

He is the author of seven books about classic movies.

His most recent, There are No Small Parts, 100 Outstanding Film Performances with Screen Time of 10 Minutes or Less.

John has been a contributing book reviewer for the Washington Post.

Welcome, John, we'll go to you first.

You specialize in films from the 1930s on, but can you tell us something about the prehistoric days before the great migration to Hollywood?

- Well, of course the business aspect of film would've been centered in New York.

And so if you wanted to find nature, you would go outside.

And so of course, Upstate New York and Jersey, and of course, Northeastern Pennsylvania, would've been the perfect place to find all the things you needed.

And of course, the pool of actors as well from the city.

But then once things start to move, it pretty much goes, I guess, around 1914 with The Squaw Man, Cecil B. DeMille when the movie business essentially moves to Hollywood, you know, it lingers on, in Astoria Queens until the early thirties with Paramount Pictures using Broadway stars by day, and then they go to the theater at night.

But you know, it's so fascinating when you look at the period, you're gonna talk about this evening.

They're making up an art form.

They don't even know it's an art form yet.

They're just creating this whole new world and flying by the seat of their pants, I'm sure in most instances and not really aware of the importance of this early, early work, creating the language.

- Well, so drawing on the scenery, a stage set, no they're out there on the terrain, out on the landscape.

And we welcome you back, Carol.

It's so wonderful to have you here.

And we know that Lyman Howe was someone who was in on the ground floor as John was just suggesting to us, making it up and discovering things and inventing things along the way.

He wound up bringing the world to Wilkes-Barre and to the rest of the United States.

You have with you in, with such a treasure.

We're so glad you do, Lyman Who?

That meaning, right?

That's the only one?

- This is the last one, the last one.

And this really was almost my mantra as I was doing my research because the biggest challenge was, and still is that most people don't know anything about Lyman Howe and their answer was Lyman Who?

Because there was a misconception that movies started with Edison and then went on to Birth of a Nation and talkies.

Well, there was a whole era of traveling exhibition and Lyman Howe was the premier traveling exhibitor.

He called himself the Barnum of the Mall.

He was an innovator in terms of putting programs together and also an innovator in creating sound.

Sound from behind the screen, coordinated sound with the phonograph because his silent movies were not silent at all.

And when we made the documentary about Lyman Howe, we actually brought one of the people who did the sound effects from behind the screen, and we dropped plates and did coconuts for horses and sandpaper for rushing water to coordinate with the film.

But Lyman Howe eventually had six traveling companies that introduced much of America and even into Canada to moving pictures.

- New York City, a big place for him to play?

- Oh, the Hippodrome in 1909, The Lyman Howe Show came to New York City with a 26 piece orchestra.

And the carriage trade was there, gowns and furs and top hats and tuxedos.

And this was all at a time that the sheriffs were closing five cent NickelodeonS that were considered dark places where evil things took place.

- Is that why it's High-Class Moving Pictures?

- Absolutely, he coordinated his shows.

He would come to a town, Wilkes-Barre, Syracuse, Chicago, and he would coordinate initially with a church or civic organization.

So he had a different clientele.

Instead of a nickel, he was charging 25 cents, 50 cents, 75 cents.

At the Hippodrome, it was a dollar.

So they were the High-Class Moving Pictures.

And he was truly, he loved to call himself the Barnum of the Mall.

And he was not a snake oil salesman.

He was a smart entrepreneur who took moving pictures and phonographs and created a whole new era of traveling exhibition.

- [Erika] Well, he was also civically engaged in the community of Wilkes-Barre.

And Noreen, he must have known the Mayor Daniel Hart.

How is it that Mayor Hart was a politician and a movie maker?

Who were these people at the United States Motion Picture Corporation?

And what were they up to?

- Oh, well, Daniel Hart was the Treasurer of the United States Motion Picture Corporation, which was founded about 1915, set up business at the Savoy Theater in the Square in Wilkes-Barre and built their studios in Forty Fort.

And in 1915 and started putting up films by 1917.

They had a big contract with Paramount Pictures to do the first Paramount comedies.

Now, Daniel Hart is a fantastically interesting man, because he was a playwright, very successful playwright who had won the equivalent of the Tony Award now for his plays that were being staged in New York City.

The Parish Priest is one of his great award winners.

And then he came to Wilkes-Barre to do political work, but also to get involved in motion pictures.

So, I think he was also involved in some of the screenplay writing, but he's always listed as the Treasurer.

By 1918, the United States Motion Picture Corporation really has finished their work.

And he becomes mayor of Wilkes-Barre by 1920, is mayor until 1933 when he dies.

So he has this really wide-ranging and interesting career.

- And lots of places named for him.

- Yes.

- Hart Hotel and so forth, I suspect.

We saw Public Square in the aerial footage that Lyman Howe took, and we know that actor Carl Daley, Carl O'Daley is on the hunt on the Square for woman he loves in the movie, Her Fractured Voice.

And that was from 1917.

Is that right?

And we can see a scene now, thanks to you, Noreen.

Susie's at the hills at the lands at Hillside Farms is what it's known.

Set it up for us.

Tell us what's the premise, look at her.

- [Noreen] Well, Susie is dying to get off the farm and has this great belief in her skill as a singer.

Every time that she sings, even the cows and the chickens run away, however But finally the boarder who's boarding with the family convinces her that she could run away with him and he will set her up in a career.

It's pretty clear that he probably has bad things in mind.

And so, oh, Carl Daley is a farm hand on their farm and he goes and rescues her and brings her back to the farm.

But, her career as a singer probably wouldn't have gone that well because right, even the chickens know she's not that greatest a singer.

(All laugh) - Well, so there are those things like the lands, at Hillside Farms that we recognize, Public Square and Wilkes-Barre, we see in Lyman Howe's films.

Carol, the parades around Public Square.

So the Hotel Sterling, we see the Square, and there's even a shot of, that's the Hotel Sterling, I think we're seeing now.

And also we get to see there's a car on the steps of the Luzern County Courthouse.

- [Carol] Wow.

- [Noreen] This is a film called Bridget's Blunder, which we do not have the film anymore, but we do have the advertisements for it.

So we have film stills of Bridget driving her car up the steps to Luzern County Courthouse.

- That's wonderful.

Well, Susie is played by Leatrice Joy who actually wound up as we're told, working in Hollywood, and she was working with Mary Pickford and that was Joy's first role under contract with Samuel Goldwyn, if the facts are right online.

John, tell us what Mary Pickford was doing standing on the cliffs there in Pike County, looking out across the Delaware River.

What was that all about?

- Well, she, we do know she was one of the people who did work in this area who, of course you, you know, by World War I, she's the most famous woman in the world.

I mean, you could go anywhere.

And they knew who Mary Pickford was.

It was a level of stardom that is kind of mind-blowing, especially for that long ago.

She, you know, the most interesting thing about Mary Pickford, of course, the career was so long in the Silent Era, but she was always playing girls and then teenagers well into her thirties and she managed to do it.

And the audience loved her all the way through, even if they were probably figuring out she must be getting a little older, but they loved her so much, but she was a casualty of the talkies in the sense that she kind of knew it was gonna be over.

Yeah, as you can see, there's the creation of United Artists in 1919, when even then, you know, artists wanted, you know, some control over their art and their lives and careers.

So she was very influential, not only on the screen, but be behind the scenes in terms of actors taking control and trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their careers.

She would retire sensibly in the, you know, early thirties and just think her time was over.

But there were very few people who had a level of stardom like Mary Pickford.

- And that the oh, yes.

- I was just gonna say that I interviewed Leatrice Joy in Greenwich, Connecticut at her home because I was interested in her time here and in her career.

And of course John Gilbert and everything, she was a lovely woman and I actually had old photographs of her that my son took in her home in Greenwich.

- Oh my goodness, and was she still?

- [Carol] Charming.

- Charming.

- Lovely and beautiful and charming, yes.

- That's, oh, that's wonderful, Carol, thank you.

- I don't think I've told anybody that I just came across those pictures.

- Pictures, oh, that's wonderful.

And anybody who would know, I don't know whether it's life following art or art following, imitating life, but the story of Her Fractured Voice, where it's somebody who loves and has a passion for singing and won't stop singing, even though she doesn't realize that she's not a good singer.

Anybody who knows the story of Florence Foster Jenkins, right?

That's down the line, but that's the real life story.

Meryl Streep, right?

Right, John?

Playing the role of Florence Foster Jenkins.

We know, Carol that Lyman Howe, we were just talking with John about the cliffs overlooking the Delaware River, that Lyman Howe was fascinated with scenery and landscape and that he felt travelogues would trump the story films, the stories of love.

- He did, he did.

- [Erika] Did he?

- Well, he felt that travelogues were important and historic events.

He started filming floods in Wilkes-Barre in 1900.

Teddy Roosevelt's visit here and 1905, the building of the Panama Canal.

A Binghamton newspaper said the only reason we don't know who built the pyramids is that Lyman Howe was born too late.

- [Erika] Oh, Carol, we have a little clip here of the silent Panama Canal with the dynamite explosion.

Let's just see that a little bit.

- [Announcer] They had a barrel backstage with a shotgun and they shot into this barrel.

(Explosion) And it put half the audience out of their seats.

(dramatic music) - Was that a sense of trying to, not up the anti, but try to just do what he could do and show ta-da, this what movies can do!

- He was a showman and from the very first days when he was traveling with a with a coal mine, that weighed 5,000 pounds and the phonograph with a six foot horn and he was entertaining 3000 people.

So, it was a natural evolution for him to move forward with everything he could do to make his film exhibitions first class, high class, entertaining, fun.

He was a real showman.

He was a real showman.

- And he was honored at the expositions in California where Lyman Howe Day, right?

- Lyman H. Howe Day, July 7th, 1915 for the exposition that honored the completion of the Panama Canal.

And a film was supposed to be buried there for 50 years.

And I went back to San Diego and I actually found it unidentified in the Library of Congress.

And we had a whole celebration at the Historical Society in San Diego.

But then 1915 was also Lyman H. Howe Day at the San Francisco Exposition, because that honored the arrival of the Liberty Bell.

He had cameramen in Hawaii.

You see people surfing, you see railroad trestle.

I mean, it really is amazing.

He brought the world to Wilkes-Barre, and as you say, Wilkes-Barre to the world, because he was always Lyman H. Howe of Wilkes-Barre.

- Wow, he didn't forget his roots.

- No, the building is still here.

There are some final, as you can see, these old clips are from every show.

- [Erika] Wow.

- I have, I have all of these.

What I really would like is someone with the skill to digitize and archive all of these, because they are unique.

They are very special.

These were in the hands of Lyman H. Howe III who lived in Signal Mountain, Tennessee.

And he was generous enough to let me borrow these.

- [Erika] Wow.

- And they are worth saving.

They are definitely worth saving.

- And Noreen, if Lyman Howe wasn't quite on the mark in terms of the fact that travelogues would outdraw those heart rendering films that you were paying attention to, what about the characters?

We saw Susie singing, and there were other women in films for the Black Diamond Comedies.

Were there any of them who were they just stereotypes or any of them have any strong female inclinations?

- Well, it seems to me that Leatrice Joy as Susie is almost always the center of those films.

She's the main comedienne.

And you're right.

There are other women who usually are a mother, you know, kind of somebody who is a kind of just on the side mostly, but the women who stand out the most for me are the ones that are in His Neglected Wife, because when she leaves her husband, she goes away to the city.

It's the Sterling Hotel that she's supposed to be in.

And she meets all kinds of different people there, including some adult Girl Scouts who beat up a man who's kind of bothering them.

There's several flappers and people like that who kind of skip through who seem to be very strong and interesting women types at the hotel.

And she herself is kind of looking around thinking, maybe I can do something different than my life than be bored and neglected by my husband.

The men that are around there all seem to be, they're trying to get one over on the women, and the women are too smart.

So, that's an interesting one for having multiple different kinds of alternative women in it.

It's a fascinating film, actually.

- And John, when you hear this or see the little clips and how, I don't know how much you can tell, but do you see anything in terms of characters or stories that survived the transition into Hollywood, or was this an era unto itself and things were kind of a dead end in this sort of regard?

- No, I think the conventions of every time always find a way to transition into a more modern version because those things we love in theater or film, the drama, the conflict, all those things are usually so primal, so human, they don't go outta style, everything around them in terms of the fashion, the trends.

But those basic things and in terms of acting, I mean, you can look at a performance by Lillian Gish in 1920 in Way Down East and cry your eyes out.

So I think, yeah, maybe people don't like to look at old things 'cause they think they're gonna be funny, but for the really high quality stuff, I think it stands the test of time.

And if nothing's classic, like anything that stands the test of time.

- And you're nodding, Noreen.

- You know, okay, I think he's really right.

I see that even with the characters that Leatrice Joy plays.

You see Bridget's Blunder, obviously that's one, we've got summaries of a lot of these films even if we don't have the films.

She's driving a car, she's a woman driver out of control a little bit.

There's these questions of women's roles.

And that push that they're pushing against those envelopes in the teens and into the twenties.

And she does similar kinds of film themes when she gets to Hollywood.

She has a film called Manslaughter where it's a crazy partying flapper who drives a car and runs into somebody and then needs to be rescued.

And so, so those kinds of themes of the lady driver even, but the women who run away, right?

The women who kind of break out and then maybe needs to be reordered back in somehow, it seems to be a theme that runs a lot I think in the first maybe still, I think so.

- Something else that's universal is trains.

- [Erika] Yeah.

- And in the very earliest days, there were films of trains coming into the screen and people jumped up and screamed.

They thought the trains were really coming right directly at them.

But Lyman H. Howe's famous ride on a runaway train, played at the Capitol Theatre, according to Samuel Rothfeld, by the way, who lived in Forest City for a while, said it was the only short to ever play the Capitol for two weeks.

And then it played a command performance at Buckingham Palace.

- [Erika] Ah, here we go.

- [Noreen] There, it is.

- [Carol] At the London Film Festival.

A man stood up in the back of the showing and said, I know where you can find that film.

And he took me to the British Film Institute and I actually saw it and then he disappeared and we never saw the film again.

- What about you two were talking before we began and John, I'm sure you would weigh in similarly about all the troves that you believe or you wish were out there, things that were destroyed in the floods or fires, things that nobody just knows about or they're up in attics.

What are your hopes?

What would you like to see most?

- Well, one of the reasons for the way I did my project, we have a website that my students and I put together called Black Diamond Comedies.

And we did it piece-by-piece to curate digitally the pieces that we were finding.

And because you find them a little bit at a time, for each film, we just said, okay, here's an advertisement.

Here's something from an archive.

And what we felt was if we could gather enough of those things, then if somebody does find it, they'll know what it is.

They'll be able to say, oh, that's the plot of that.

That's the film we found.

But then there's of course the wonderful stories about films being recovered.

One of the Black Diamond Comedies was recovered from a film archive in New Zealand and restored at Eastman House.

So we have, we have one of those that we didn't know we would have.

- Well, we have to bring it to a close, but we wanna just let everyone know that we're so grateful that you would give us this little tease and we hope that we can go online.

There's a resource page.

We want to thank our guests, John, to you in Milford, Carol for coming back to WVIA.

Noreen, for being here, and you for watching.

For more information on the topic, including links to our guests and what they've been talking about.

WVIA.org/keystone click on Keystone Edition Arts.

And remember you can watch this episode or any previous episode on demand anytime online or the WVIA app.

For WVIA's Keystone Edition, I'm Erika Funke.

We'll close with a swansong of sorts as a tribute to these filmmaking enterprises of yours.

Susie, you have the last word!

(ragtime music)