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<DIV>The Scopitone Films That Time Forgot</DIV>
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<DIV>Two local collectors are putting on their second annual event dedicated to
the passe precursors to contemporary music videos.</DIV>
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<DIV>by John Owens</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Chicago Reader, June 16, 2016</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>About 15 years ago, vernacular photo collector Nicholas Osborn was
rummaging through a flea market in Wisconsin when he came across a bunch of
16-millimeter reels. They featured kitschy performances by B-list 1960s music
acts, formatted in a way that resembled the modern music video: one was of
singer-songwriter duo Dick and Dee Dee poorly lip-synching their tune "Where Did
All the Good Times Go" while a bevy of scantily clad dancers moved clumsily
behind them on the Santa Monica Pier; another captured platinum-blonde model Joi
Lansing singing the torch song "Web of Love" while ensnared in a giant
spiderweb.</DIV>
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<DIV>Osborn was fascinated by what was on the reels, but he was equally
delighted with their quality. "They were obviously directly from a distributor,
so they were pristine and in perfect condition," he says from west-suburban
Brookfield, where the items are stored. "And they were shot in Technicolor, so
the films were stunning to look at. The colors were so vibrant, they just
popped."</DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>What Osborn found was a collection of three-minute films that were
originally played in Scopitone jukeboxes, which for a brief time in the
mid-1960s were a staple of American taverns and pool halls. He now owns about 60
reels, and with the help of his friend and fellow vernacular photo collector Ron
Slattery will showcase the best of them at the second annual Scopitone Party at
Comfort Station in Logan Square. It's part of the Vernacular Photography
Festival, a 23-day show curated by Slattery that kicked off on June 10. The
Scopitone show will last somewhere between one and two hours, and based on the
response to last year's screenings, there should be a good turnout.</DIV>
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<DIV>"We had to turn people away [last year]," Slattery says. "Young crowds go
crazy over them."</DIV>
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<DIV>The Scopitone films are descendants of the better-known "soundies," musical
shorts distributed in coin-operated jukeboxes called Panorams, which were around
in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The production of Panorams was halted during
World War II, and the technology didn't resurface until the late 1950s in
France, when the CAMCA company (an acronym for Compagnie d'Applications
Mecaniques a L'Electronique au Cinema et a l'Atomistique) reproduced the jukebox
in a vertical cabinet. CAMCA gave the device its new name, Scopitone, and soon
top French pop stars like Juliette Greco and Johnny Hallyday were being featured
in segments for the European market. Miami lawyer Alvin Malnik, reportedly
backed by the east-coast Mafia syndicate, brought the jukebox to America in 1963
and soon after partnered with Chicago-based Tel-a-Sign to manufacture it;
Tel-a-Sign then contracted with Harman-ee Productions, a company owned by
actress Debbie Reynolds, to produce the content.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>From the beginning of its time in America, Scopitone had problems. The Wall
Street Journal reported on its mob ties in 1966, and the company was sued by the
folk group Back Porch Majority for inserting "lewd" shots of dancers in its
Scopitone film The Mighty Mississippi. And the machines were constantly breaking
down in bars. "They were difficult to keep running," Osborn says, "because they
aren't conventional jukeboxes, due to the film factor."</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The Scopitone company formally went out of business in 1969, and the
jukeboxes disappeared from bars shortly afterward. Today they're collector's
items, fetching prices as high as $8,000 on sites like gameroomantiques.com and
showcased as museum pieces in places like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
and Third Man Records, the hip Nashville record emporium owned by Jack White. A
vintage Scopitone jukebox, which Slattery currently houses in his cluttered
storage space in Brookfield, will make an appearance at the Comfort Station
screenings.</DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Slattery often has problems firing up the 60s-era techno wonder -- it makes
sputtering, wheezing noises when it's plugged in -- but it's still a
marvelous-looking device. It stands about seven feet tall, and the lower half of
the machine looks like a traditional jukebox, dominated by a huge speaker and an
area where a customer can insert a coin and make song selections near the
center. On the top of the Scopitone is a 26-inch screen where the shorts are
projected. Turn the machine around, open it up, and see how it operates: 36 tiny
reels are queued up, side by side; when a customer makes a selection, the chosen
film drops into an area where it's threaded and illuminated.</DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>"When it's working, [the jukebox] is a beautiful thing to watch in action,"
Slattery says. "To hear the mechanism turning, it's just a killer."</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But the main attraction, of course, is the films. The closest thing to
"celebrities" featured in the Scopitone shorts are R&B singers like Lou
Rawls, pop crooners like Billy Eckstine, Brook Benton, and Vic Damone, trumpeter
Herb Alpert, and somewhat surprisingly, English progressive-rock band Procol
Harum. Yet the performers are overshadowed by the gaudy, eye-popping Technicolor
and the well-recorded audio. The Scopitone reels had magnetic soundtracks (most
films in the predigital age had optical soundtracks) that give the audio more
resonance.</DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The most noticeable aspect of the Scopitone productions is the
straight-male- oriented, 60s-era sex. Invariably, female dancers wearing either
bikinis or bra and panties perform period dances like the frug or suggestively
thrust and kick toward the camera. Many times, the choreography has no
relationship to the song -- in Brook Benton's "Mother Nature, Father Time," a
medium-tempo R&B ballad, the dancers are shaking and undulating three times
faster than the music. "The titillation factor is huge, and part of what makes
the Scopitones special" Slattery says. "It's like a blast from the past that you
didn't know existed."</DIV>
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<DIV> <A
href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/scopitone-party-films-comfort-station-vernacular-photography/Content?oid=22542638 ">http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/scopitone-party-films-comfort-station-vernacular-photography/Content?oid=22542638
</A></DIV>
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