CineSavant Column

Tuesday January 21, 2025

 

Hello!

Well, ignoring the world for the moment, we go forward with movie fun as best we can.

First up is a gem posted by Matt Bucy on Vimeo, relayed to us by the unsinkable David J. Schow. What Mr. Bucy has done is to re-edit  The Wizard of Oz, but in a way nobody expected … actually, a few years back we saw this same insanity applied to Star Wars ….

Bucy’s method is to break the film down by words — every word in the entire movie, and then rearrange the entire movie alphabetically. That explains the altered title, for starters, and then the very perplexing credits. The movie is the same length, only rearranged. At ten minutes in, I’m listening to a number of ‘arounds;’ Dorothy must say the word ‘auntie’ 20 times. The movie goes back to normal when nobody’s talking, which puts some transitional scenes in the clear. Early on we get a full minute of the film’s screams, listed as ‘aieee.’ It’s maddening, but also brilliant in its way. Flurries of words like ‘but’ may only be 2 or 3 frames in duration.

Frankly, the words heard in Of Oz The Wizard are more interesting than those in Star Wars …. George Lucas doesn’t know winners like ‘Cellophant.’

 

“of OZ The WIZARD
 


 

CineSavant doesn’t review many Silent Movies, and we’re happy not to be criticized for it, but a close collaborator on silents lately has been Jonathan Gluckman, who clued me into good discs of some silent Sci-fi I should have reviewed long ago.

I asked him for a good link or two, and Jonathan steered me directly to the page of the  Mary Pickford Foundation, which has dozens of authoritative articles, accompanied by rare photos, of Pickford’s career, her associates, publicity sidebars, and topics relevant to her partnership in the United Artists corporation.

Newly uploaded is an article by I think Cari Beauchamp on the production of the silent Ernst Lubitsch production Rosita, a Spanish Romance, from 1923. It’s great history … Pickford brought Lubitsch to America, a move that was resisted by some that still had it in for anything German.

Jonathan notes that the only Rosita disc he can find online is from a company called Grapevine; at the  Nitrateville page is an in-depth collectors’ bulletin board that discusses the film, Grapevine’s disc and a new restoration. Sourced from elements with Gosmofilm, The Pickford Foundation and two other entities, it’s supposed to premiere in Venice in August.

 

Lubitsch, Pickford and the making of Rosita
 

I haven’t heard so much about silent film personalities since taking classes with David Bradley at UCLA. The director would bring his personal 16mm prints to screen, and rhapsodize over the lost art of this and that. He invited his movie celebrity friends to a New Years’ party every year.

Another J. Gluckman link is to a 2011 piece about Mary Pickford’s fairly controversial brother Jack, at Steve Vaught’s historic Hollywood page  Paradise Leased. Jonathan writes that Jack Pickford is often portrayed as an example of Hollywood at its worst. But Steve Vaught doesn’t agree and comes to the defense.

 

You Don’t Know Jack: A Second Take on Jack Pickford
 


 

And Michael McQuarrie found this short article from 2013, on a page called Movies and Mania, that gives us the bad news about a film company we remember from the 1970s, Tyburn. Written by David Flint, we start off learning that Tyburn did not only not inherit the crown of Hammer Films, it wasn’t even as successful as Amicus and Tigon.

There’s a lot of information here that’s new to me, not being a full-time follower of the impressive Klemensen Dynasty of fine reporting, mainly on Hammer Films.

The article asserts that none of Tyburn’s films were successful!

 

Tyburn Films: A short-lived British horror production company
 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson