Hallroom Boys at the TCM Film Festival

[Brent Walker]

A segment for the Hallroom Boys comedy A CHILI ROMANCE (1921) with Sid Smith and Harry McCoy got shown during the Fragments program at the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood this weekend. It's about 200-250 ft., in which Sid and Harry survive a train wreck, and then encounter a Villa-type Mexican revolutionary and his sidekick. This clip got preserved "accidentally" by the Academy Film Archive because it was spliced on the surviving middle reel of THE CHANCE MARKET (1916) with King Baggott, which got preserved. So anyway, here's a bit from another surviving Hallroom Boys comedy that I don't know of existing on 9.5mm.

[Gary Johnson]

That sounds like a new method at getting previously neglected film preserved. The next time a company wants to re-restore "Gone With The Wind" for the umpteenth time have someone at the archive splice in reels and reels of silent films to the back end. Clark Gable walks out on Scarlett and suddenly there is Musty Suffer in all of his restored glory to keep the southern belle company.

Gary J.

[Richard M Roberts]

That sounds like a new method at getting previously neglected film preserved. The next time a company wants to re-restore "Gone With The Wind" for the umpteenth time have someone at the archive splice in reels and reels of silent films to the back end. Clark Gable walks out on Scarlett and suddenly there is Musty Suffer in all of his restored glory to keep the southern belle company.

Gary J.

I will name no names, archives, or specific film titles, but lets just say that throughout the history of film preservation, there have been feature films preserved that were oddly sent to the lab several reels longer than their original listed running times and then somehow nice safety prints of short films turning up in the archives stacks that , gee, where did that come from?

Or so I've heard....


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Brent Walker]

That sounds like a new method at getting previously neglected film preserved. The next time a company wants to re-restore "Gone With The Wind" for the umpteenth time have someone at the archive splice in reels and reels of silent films to the back end. Clark Gable walks out on Scarlett and suddenly there is Musty Suffer in all of his restored glory to keep the southern belle company.

Gary J.

I will name no names, archives, or specific film titles, but lets just say that throughout the history of film preservation, there have been feature films preserved that were oddly sent to the lab several reels longer than their original listed running times and then somehow nice safety prints of short films turning up in the archives stacks that , gee, where did that come from?

Or so I've heard....


RICHARD M ROBERTS

As much as I hate pork barrel riders in Congress, I love them in archive lab shipments.