Gary Johnson wrote:How did you get involved with this project, Richard?
Kit Parker asked me to do it. I had a print of the film and knew it, but had not really looked at it in years. Whats interesting is that it has a number of rare European comedy titles including a couple of Max Linders, a Polidor, and a Little Moritz that I've never seen anywhere else, and some other very interesting early European and American films, but they were all misidentified for the most part, sometimes even to their nationality. So what first looked like a lark became an eight week project with me dragging a number of my fellow historians and archivists into doing a bit of detective work to figure out what the titles were. Some stumped even the best of us for quite a while, but in the end we got all but one as I recall.
The biggest mystery we never solved was how George Jessel had such a long career.......
RICHARD M ROBERTS