[Dixielandjazz] Ron Hutchinson Vitaphone's Matchmaker

[Robert Ringwald]

Ron Hutchinson, Vitaphone's Matchmaker Extraordinaire, in Person Today
by Lou Lumenick
New York Post blog, May 9, 2011
When Ron Hutchinson and fellow early talkie enthusiasts started the Vitaphone Project
in 1991, little did they suspect this effort would eventually lead to 150 shorts
being made available for public viewing for the first time in eighty years or so.
Hutchinson will be introducing a program of 11 rare shorts with vaudeville headliners
today (at 1, 4:40 and 8:30) at Film Forum, on a double feature with the early sound
feature "Show Girl in Hollywood" (1929).
The shorts are also part of a collection of 70 rare, highly entertaining shorts released
recently by the Warner Archive Collection. Never shown even on TCM, they're the fruit
of a collaboration between Warner Bros., the UCLA Film and Television Archive and
the Vitaphone Project that yielded an earlier collection. An additional program of
shorts that accompanied the first Vitaphone feature "Don Juan" (1926) were included
in its recent DVD release via WAC.
"As I kid I collected 78s [old 78 rpm records] and I was also interested in the old
shorts I saw on [TV's] 'The Joe Franklin Show,'" Hutchinson says. "This was a way
to marry the two interests together. The sound for these early shorts was recorded
on big 16-inch shellac discs, and they later became separated from the picture elements.
The later sound-on-film shorts were released to TV, but nobody else was particularly
interested in playing matchmaker between the owners of the films, many of which no
longer exist, and the discs that are still around."
Vitaphone was a subsidiary that Warner Bros. formed in collaboration with Western
Electric (a manufacturing subsidiary of the pre-breakup AT&T) to make talking shorts
and features using a sound-on-disc system famous for its use in "The Jazz Singer,"
the first feature with talking (and singing) sequences. Warner Bros. adopted the
rival sound-on-film system by 1930, but shorts and features continued to be made
in sound-on-disc versions for theaters so equipped into the mid-1930s.
Hutchinson's favorite Vitaphone short is "Conlin and Sharp in Sharps and Flats,"
which features Jimmy Colin -- a pianist best known for his later work as a character
actor in several Preston Struges films -- and his vaudeville partner singer Myrtle
Glass that was shown last year at Film Forum (and elsewhere) and is included in the
latest four-disc Warner Archive Collection set, "Vitaphone Varieties."
"It never fails with an audience," he says. "It all seems really off the cuff. People
just love this stuff. It dispels the myth that vaudeville was unfunny jokes. These
are incredibly polished and still very fresh and fun -- like a time capsule that's
been opened after 80 years. These appeal not only to film buffs but to teenagers."
The 11 shorts Monday at Film Forum have not been shown in a New York theater in more
than 80 years, Hutchinson says. They feature both totally forgotten finds like the
pictured Eddie White ("a great monologist and singer") and performers who were still
working decades later -- such as Russ Brown, a singer who played the manager in the
stage and film versions of "Damn Yankees" (1958) and Jack Waldron, a dry and hilarious
comedian who appeared in the original '50s production of "The Pajama Game" on Broadway.
Though the Vitaphone Project has located over 4,500 discs since 1991, Hutchinson
estimates there are around 200 surviving Vitaphone shorts for which there are still
no sound discs -- and around 80 discs for which no picture elements have been located.
The project has also helped to restore 12 features.
The pace of discoveries has quickened thanks to the Internet, which leads owners
of the distinctively labeled Vitaphone discs straight to Hutchinson's group. A descendant
of a theater owner in New Haven recently turned over 70 discs, 12 of them for shorts
for which only picture elements were previously known to exist. One features legendary
Yiddish theater actress Molly Picon.
"She made it in 1929, singing three songs and doing her regular non-Yiddish vaudeville
act," he said. "The Library of Congress has the nitrate picture elements for years.
We already have funding for a restoration."
The Vitaphone Project has raised funds for restorations, with Warner Bros. paying
for the recent restorations of 53 of its very old short -- which have proven unexpectedly
popular on DVD -- with another dozen in the pipeline.
"A lot of the stuff is pre-code ethnic humor, double entendres," Hutchinson says.
"It's almost like a guilty pleasure."
Hutchinson is also involved in the hunt for a lost film that was never issued in
a sound-on-disc version.
"Convention City" (1933), a famously racy comedy with Joan Blondell and Dick Powell,
"is the newest major feature for which no sound or picture elements are known to
exist," Hutchinson says. He's debunked long-standing rumors that the film was destroyed
on the orders of Jack L. Warner after the production code began to be enforced the
following year, documenting a booking in Spain as late as 1942.
"Someone in France claimed to have a copy, but that seems to have been a hoax," Hutchinson
says. "But I have no doubt it will turn up eventually."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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