11.

Have Some Onions, They’ll Make You Fat

Although he’d likely scoff at the description, British film historian, documentarian, preservationist, and collector Kevin Brownlow is something of a living legend among lovers of cinema history, and in particular, the history of the silent era. His documentaries on cinema have set a high standard few others have matched, including Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite (1968), the epic thirteen-part series Hollywood (1980), and Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987). His elegiac, masterful 1968 book The Parade’s Gone By is arguably the definitive portrait of the silent era, featuring dozens of interviews conducted by Kevin with Louise Brooks, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton, and others. It’s one of the few truly great books about film that should be read by everyone, whether you’re a movie buff or not. As a preservationist Kevin has been directly involved with rescuing and preserving dozens of endangered films, including most famously Abel Gance’s long-neglected 1927 masterpiece Napoleon. Kevin’s first feature film as a director, the disturbing and highly controversial It Happened Here (1966), codirected with Andrew Mollo, imagined what might have happened if the Germans had successfully invaded England during WWII. For me personally, Kevin’s crowning glory is his brilliant second feature Winstanley (1976), a haunting black-and-white portrait of the ill-fated seventeenth-century Digger movement, which was brutally repressed by the British ruling class. In 2010 Kevin received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was the first time that a film preservationist has received an honorary Oscar, and entirely fitting it should go to Kevin.

When he and his Photoplay Productions partner Patrick Stanbury arrive at my Burbank house to talk with Jeff and me, Kevin’s first words have nothing at all to do with film. His eyes light up when he sees a toy Paddington bear I have sitting in a frame by the door: “My aunt illustrated the first eleven Paddington bear books!” he says with delight and then asks politely if I’ll take a photo of him with it to send to her. He’s tall and slender, with thinning gray hair and glasses, and he’s dressed quite properly in a suit jacket and tie, which he later asks permission to remove due to the stifling Los Angeles heat. His producing partner Patrick is fifteen years his junior, with shaggy brown hair and a scruffy, graying beard. When they talk there’s a very funny give-and-take between the two men, constantly correcting each other in the way that only two incredibly knowledgeable film buffs would do, but it’s always taken in good spirit. I give Kevin a quick tour of my house, casually pointing out a rusted 1930s-era film light, or what I think is a film light, in the corner of the den. He whips out a tiny flashlight that he apparently carries with him for just such occasions and examines it with keen interest. “It may be a prop,” he says, pursing his lips in deep concentration. “It should have a plaque on it saying Mole-Richardson somewhere.” I start to move on, but Kevin the historian isn’t done with the mystery just yet: “Whatever it is, it wasn’t a carbon arc light, I’m sure of that. You know if they’d just kept the glass on them, they wouldn’t have caused klieg eyes.” I ask what “klieg eye” is, and he instantly bugs his eyes out in exaggerated fashion. “Oh, that’s what happened to actors in the silent film era. Cameramen removed the glass from the lamps to get more light, and the ultraviolet rays caused this terrible inflammation. It could take several days to recover. They’d have to put potatoes on their eyes to reduce the swelling. We now know that if they’d kept the glass in place, this wouldn’t have happened.

“I never thought I’d live to be the age of people I was interviewing [for The Parade’s Gone By …],” Kevin observes as I pour cups of mint tea for him and Patrick. “When they were talking about fifty years ago, it was The Birth of a Nation.” He pauses for a moment, then continues: “I remember showing my 9.5 Napoleon and saying, ‘It’s twenty-seven years old!’” I look at him confused, then ask if he’s referring to a 1995 restoration of the film. He and Patrick both roll their eyes and reply in unison, “9.5mm,” as if they’re talking to a remedial school student who’s just asked which end of the pencil he should use. I know a bit about film history, but I’m obviously way out of my depth with these two.

They first met in February 1975 when Patrick, who was programming a local film society in England, invited Kevin to come down to show several rare silent movies. “Do you remember what I showed that night?” Kevin asks teasingly, as if he’s testing his old friend’s little gray cells. Patrick thinks for a second, then responds, “The films you showed were The Beast at Bay and the Silents Please Paul Killiam version of Variety.” Paul Killiam was a noted silent film collector who produced a pioneering TV series in 1960 called Silents Please, hosted for a time by comedian Ernie Kovacs, which featured reduced versions of silent classics. Although the notion of condensing films might seem like a sacrilege to most purists, apparently it didn’t bother the young Kevin: “In fact they turned D. W. Griffith’s boring America into a masterpiece at twenty-eight minutes by skillful abridgment,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

As with most collectors Jeff and I spoke with, Kevin’s love for film goes back to his earliest years. He was born in 1938 in the mid-sized town of Crowborough in East Sussex. “My mother had gone out with my father the first time in 1926, and they went to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on reissue for Valentino’s death. They were so broke that they couldn’t get married for ten years,” he says. Both his parents were commercial artists. “My father was Irish and was a really brilliant artist, but he couldn’t get any work,” he recalls. “So he became a commercial artist doing film posters. You think the lettering on all those posters was typeset, but they were all hand-drawn by some poor artist like my father. Oliver Twist by David Lean was one [poster he worked on].”44 His parents were determined that Kevin wouldn’t follow in their artistic footsteps, so they packed him off to boarding school at the age of three. It’s where Kevin was first introduced to cinema: “An orphanage called Dr. Barnardo’s would show a film as treats for us children. I’d never seen a film before, and yet I knew instinctively it was badly shot. It was filmed on our home movie gauge of 9.5mm. When I finally saw a proper film, it was a newsreel. This was 35mm, so you can imagine the impact of the brightness, sharpness, and clarity. I remember that first shot to this day: there were four naval officers walking towards the camera. To show you how prescient I was—the technical knowledge I had even then about cinema—I knew those four naval officers were going to fall into the theater. I was so disappointed when they melted off-screen.” He pauses, then adds: “Then we saw Snow White, and I ran out screaming from the theater.”

He recovered enough from the trauma of seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to develop a keen fascination with film, thanks to the silent films shown at his next boarding school. “The stuff we saw at the cinema in the holidays was what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘photographs of people talking,’” he notes, doing a quite-passable imitation of Hitchcock. “The silents seemed fresher and occasionally a lot more daring.” He begged his parents for a home movie projector, and the following Christmas they gave him a 9.5mm Pathéscope Ace that came with two shorts, a Mickey Mouse cartoon and a newsreel called The Naval Review at Spithead 1935. It was the beginning of Kevin’s career as a film collector. “I quickly wore those out and went out into the streets looking for more,” he remembers. “I came across a photographic shop which had a pile of 9.5mm films. They were one-and-six a reel, and I had ten shillings pocket money, which was an enormous amount in those days. And I bought the lot.”

He shared his tiny cinematic treasures with his mother, and it was this that led to his first encounter with a forgotten masterpiece he would eventually spend over forty-five years of his life restoring to its former glory. “My mother was a Francophile; she nearly married a Frenchman. She thought French culture was ‘it.’ Anything French was much better than English,” Kevin says. After locating a silent adaption of writer Pierre Loti’s novel Pêcheur d’Islande called Fishers of the Isle, which Kevin’s mother thought was “beautiful,” he was desperate to find anything else French. After ordering an inferior 1924 movie, Le Lion des Mogols, from a film library, he tried to exchange it for another title. “They said, ‘We’ve got Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution in two reels.’ I didn’t want that, because I was sure it was a boring educational film with static engravings of battles and such,” Kevin remembers with a shrug. “They said, ‘That’s all we’ve got left.’ So I settled for it. I was home from school with flu, from which I managed a miraculous recovery when the film arrived. It was the finest piece of cinema that I’d seen.”

It’s taken for granted now that director Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) is one of the greatest masterpieces of the silent era and a pioneering achievement in its use of rapid cutting and brilliantly innovative camerawork. Originally running over six hours, the film climaxed with a stunningly ambitious triptych effect using three cameras and meant to be projected on three screens. This innovative use of widescreen anticipated CinemaScope (and later, Cinerama) by nearly twenty-five years. Even in its day, the massive length and technical challenges of Napoleon proved too much for most distributors and audiences: in the United States it was released in 1929 by MGM, brutally shortened to a mere seventy-five minutes.

By the time Kevin saw his even-further-reduced version of Napoleon in the early 1950s as a teenager, Gance’s masterpiece had been butchered and discarded for decades, passed over by even die-hard film historians. Although he had no notion at the time of “preserving” or “restoring” the film, Kevin recognized that what he saw was incomplete and a pale shadow of a much greater work. “I became obsessed with finding the rest of the movie,” he says. “I advertised in the Exchange & Mart, that was a magazine just full of ads: ‘Wanted: 9.5mm Films Especially ‘Napoleon: Youth,’ ‘Napoleon: The Battle of Toulon,’ etc.” He was able to find enough 9.5mm reels to assemble a nearly ninety-minute version that he began screening privately for other silent-film buffs. At the same time he became, in his words, “an Abel Gance bore.” He wrote to the great filmmaker care of the Cinémathèque Française and amazingly received a brief, polite reply. The story of Kevin’s pursuit of Napoleon is filled with years of dogged research and persistence, and also moments of pure blind luck. One such twist of fate came after he’d shown a photo of Gance to Liam O’Leary at the British Film Institute. A few days later O’Leary happened to look through his glass door and saw a man passing by who looked exactly like the photograph. “He walked out his office and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Gance!’” Kevin says with obvious delight. “Gance was astounded to be recognized, because he hadn’t worked in twelve years.” The director happened to be in London and had literally wandered into the BFI offices. Remembering Kevin’s obsession with the French director, O’Leary called Kevin’s mother, who telephoned him at his school. This was such a rare event that they assumed there had been a death in the family and let Kevin go, so he could rush over to the National Film Theatre to meet his idol. “He was the most charismatic character, even though he didn’t speak English,” Kevin recalls of his first meeting with Gance. Then he adds simply, “That was the beginning.”

Although he never fully forgot about Gance or Napoleon, life pressed on; Kevin dropped out of school to begin working in the film industry. While still in his late teens, he and his friend Andrew Mollo started work on the project that became It Happened Here (1966), about Nazis successfully invading England. The heated controversy surrounding the finished film, which featured actual British fascists playing themselves and angered many Jewish organizations, launched his career. During the shooting of It Happened Here, he was invited to a private screening at the home of a well-known British film collector named Dr. Ken Elliott, who lived in Norfolk. “He had bought a 17.5mm projector accompanied by a print of Napoleon. It was tinted. It was seventeen reels long.” Like the 9.5mm films Kevin bought for his own collection, 17.5mm was meant primarily for home use, not commercial distribution. Kevin, as he now says dryly, was “gobsmacked” when he saw Elliott’s original 1920s print of Napoleon, which was far longer than any version he’d seen so far, including the one he’d assembled.

Despite his own amateur attempts to restore the film, and even after seeing Elliott’s longer (but still woefully incomplete) version, Kevin still hadn’t decided to work on a restoration of Napoleon. In the late 1960s the Canadian-born animator George Dunning, best known for directing the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, organized a festival of multiscreen films in London, for which he brought over some of the groundbreaking triptych sequences Gance had shot for the climax of Napoleon. It was the first time Gance’s astonishing use of widescreen had been seen in England in over forty years. “I went over to Dunning’s office hoping to get hold of it, and he said, ‘I’m very sorry, I’ve sent the triptychs back,’” Kevin remembers. “Then Dunning said, ‘But I’ve copied it before it went, and I think you should look after the print.’ This was really the beginning of the restoration. I was forced into it, you see, by accident.”

The following year, while working on his own acclaimed documentary on the director, Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite, Kevin was asked by the National Film Theatre to repair an original print of Napoleon brought over from the Cinémathèque Française. “It was in a terrible state. It was covered with oil, and some of the sprockets were ripped, and even some of the film,” Kevin says, nearly wincing. “It was an original safety print of the film.” When Jeff tries to correct him, saying it must have been nitrate if it was an original 1920s print, Kevin shakes his head firmly: “No, it was safety. They printed it that way originally. Because they had a rule in France after many members of the aristocracy had been killed by a fire at a charity bazaar in 1897. Whenever they had an important show and when children were involved, they paid the few extra cents per foot and showed safety film.” Before the print was returned, he and a friend “borrowed it” (as Kevin mildly puts it) and had a dupe negative made: an illegal action, perhaps, but one that shows his increasing passion for preserving the film.

A major turning point came from a seemingly offhand remark Abel Gance made while Kevin was interviewing him for the BBC documentary: “He told me that they’d shot footage of Napoleon being made. I thought he was an old man having me on. I’d never seen footage that showed a silent film while it was in production.” On the off chance that Gance was telling the truth, Kevin went to Paris to visit the archives of the Cinémathèque Française. In another strange twist of fate, the woman in charge of the archives happened to be Mary Epstein, the sister of Jean Epstein, director of Le Lion des Mogols, the silent film that Kevin had exchanged all those years earlier at the film library for Napoleon Bonaparte. She disappeared into the back of the archive shelves and returned with one big reel and several smaller reels. To Kevin’s astonishment, the smaller reels turned out to be, yes, surviving behind-the-scenes footage of Gance during production. But an even bigger surprise was in store. “We look at the big roll, and it has all sorts of flash cuts of a snowball fight, and I remember from a book I’d read that the original Napoleon had a snowball fight that was a masterpiece of rapid cutting. I was obsessed with rapid cutting at that time, so this excited me enormously,” Kevin recalls of that moment when he rediscovered the long-missing footage. “When she came back, Mary Epstein was very upset that I’d rootled through the can, but she ran it for us on the flatbed, and that was one of the most amazing moments of my life. It was the equivalent for me of that researcher who found a Leonardo da Vinci sketchbook in a Spanish museum.”

Returning to England, Kevin put the rediscovered snowball-fight footage into his BBC documentary and showed it to director Gance, who was equally thrilled to find it still existed. (Ironically, when Gance himself tried to access the lost footage for a never-completed project he had in mind combining the earlier Napoleon with newly shot material, Epstein refused to let him have it—until Kevin went to see her and explained that he’d let Gance use the l6mm print she had made for Kevin. “At one point Gance said, ‘You need two revolvers: one for Henri Langlois [founder of the Cinémathèque], one for Mary Epstein,’” Kevin recalls of the great director’s exasperation.)45 Hearing of Kevin’s growing interest in restoring Napoleon, in 1970 David Meeker of the BFI reached out to a colleague across the channel, Jacques Ledoux, then secretary general of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Ledoux issued an appeal to film archives around the world to scour their holdings and send anything related to Gance’s Napoleon to Kevin Brownlow c/o the British Film Institute. “So in it rolls, print after print,” Kevin says of the riches that arrived from all over the globe.

Utilizing the newly arrived footage along with material from a 35mm blow-up of the Elliott 17.5mm tinted print Kevin had seen nearly a decade earlier, he labored on and off to produce a restored version while also working on his own documentaries. In 1979 he screened his nearly five-hour version of Napoleon to an astonished audience of film lovers at the Telluride Film Festival. The response was overwhelming and began to turn the tide of opinion on a film that is now justly regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of its day. Ironically, when the topic of the Telluride screening comes up, Kevin’s response is less than stellar. When Jeff asks him to explain, Kevin sighs: “The Telluride experience is what made Mr. Coppola say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if my father wrote the score for that?’” Following the rapturous Telluride screening, Francis Ford Coppola joined forces with restoration expert Robert Harris, who had bought rights for North America through his company Images Film Archive to present the film at Radio City Music Hall. But Coppola and Harris soon learned that the unions at Radio City would charge thousands of dollars more if the show ran over four hours. Ironically, the same problem had been faced by Gance at the Paris Opera in 1927, and he had cut it to three and a half hours for that engagement. Gance then showed his full version a week later. Kevin listed the sequences that could be cut to match the Opera version. Coppola and Harris agreed to do the same: present Gance’s abridged Paris Opera version at Radio City, followed by the longer edition at other venues, but then decided to stick with their abridged cut. It was another thirty years before the full version with the Carl Davis score reached the United States.

The film was released by American Zoetrope to great acclaim, but because Coppola’s name was attached to it, he received the lion’s share of the credit, at least in the U.S. press. When I ask Kevin to talk about his experience with Coppola, Patrick steps in: “We won’t talk about that for legal reasons,” he says simply. End of discussion, but not of Kevin’s work on Napoleon. In 1983 he produced an improved version, replacing all of the blown-up 17.5mm footage from Elliott’s tinted print with material from original 35mm elements. Then again in 2000 Kevin premiered a further-restored version incorporating thirty-five minutes of additional footage discovered by the Cinémathèque Française, at close to five and a half hours running time. Napoleon developed into a collaborative project with the BFI, and the most-recent restoration is a collaboration between the BFI and Photoplay Productions, who jointly own it. This is by far the most definitive version of Gance’s masterwork to date, although just under an hour is still missing from the full version that premiered in 1927. When I ask Kevin earlier in the interview to talk about Napoleon, he quips, “Have you got a fortnight?” and then adds, “Do you really want all this? Because it’s not really about film collecting, it’s film restoration.” “Kevin, you start off doing this as a film collector—you’re not doing it because you work for an archive,” Patrick quickly corrects him, and he nods.

Like his partner-in-crime, Patrick developed his love for film and collecting at an early age. Their experience as British collectors mirrors that of many American collectors we spoke to, with some differences. Patrick was born in 1954: “Within days of the date Kevin saw Napoleon. I wish it was the same day as the first screening of Napoleon, because that would fit very nicely,” Patrick says with a smile. His parents both worked for the telephone system, which was then part of the post office. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1962, they took him to see William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston, which was still in its original release. “We came out and my mother said, ‘That was good, but the silent version was better.’ Silent version—what silent version? I’d only seen Chaplin films on TV,” Patrick recalls. Like Kevin, he badgered his parents into buying him a home movie projector and soon began renting 8mm abridged prints of titles like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, eventually moving up to collect 16mm and 35mm.

Jeff asks if collecting in 35mm was difficult in England, and Patrick nods: “There was an organization called the Kinematograph Renters Society, the KRS—in other words, the Gestapo—and they would go around threatening you if they found you were showing films you weren’t supposed to be.”46 Smaller film gauges like 8mm, Super 8mm, 9.5mm, and 16mm were considered fine for home exhibition. “But nobody was supposed to have 35mm outside of commercial movie theaters,” Kevin explains. “If you had 35mm sound films, the KRS would be after you.” The organization’s heavy-handed tactics sound suspiciously like those of the MPAA in the United States in the early 1970s. The best-known court case surrounding film collecting in the United Kingdom involved Bob Monkhouse, a popular TV game show host and film collector who’d produced a successful British TV series in the mid-1960s, Mad Movies, which featured clips from old silent films, many from his private archives. In 1979 he was charged with defrauding distributors of their rightful royalties. Monkhouse was eventually cleared of all charges, but much of his collection was seized and, sadly, destroyed. (When he walked out of the Old Bailey after his acquittal, the quick-witted Monkhouse still managed to quip, “It’s terrible being a film pirate: you can’t watch films with a patch over one eye and a parrot on the other shoulder.”⁴⁷) The KRS may have been vigilant, but they weren’t necessarily the brightest bulbs when it came to examining the prints that passed through their hands. “My favorite story about the KRS was when [film preservationist] David Shepard went to see them,” Kevin recalls. “The man who ran it was an ex-Army intelligence officer and David was told that there were lists of what all the collectors had. He said, ‘Do you have anything on Kevin Brownlow?’ ‘Yes, we do have something on Kevin Brownlow.’ And they showed him the list of films I supposedly had,” Kevin says with a smile, then pauses for effect. He leans in closer: “At the top was a very strange title called Have Some Onions, They’ll Make You Fat. Not a classic of the screen.” Jeff and I exchange puzzled looks. I’m about to ask him if this was some food-related educational film in his collection, when Kevin continues: “What had happened was, the person who was sending it to me had wit enough to send the print with the tails heads out. If they’d been heads up, it would have said, ‘Greta Garbo and Antonio Moreno in The Temptress.’ But at the end of reel one, there’s a scene where Garbo’s serving dinner and she says, ‘Have some onions, they’ll make you fat.’ So that’s how they listed the print.”

“I got the impression that film dealers in the U.S. would try to take advantage of us European collectors because we were overseas,” Patrick observes. “For example, in The Big Reel I found somebody offering a Scope edition of the first version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was really into CinemaScope, and I happen to love the film.” He paid his money for the print, but when it arrived he found, to his dismay, that the print was pan-and-scan flat, not Scope. “I phoned the dealer up and said, ‘What happened to it? This was supposed to be a Scope print!’ He said, ‘It was a Scope print when it left me. Something must have happened to it on the way.’” Like almost all collectors, they remember the ones that got away or, in one case, never were. Patrick brings up the name of a dealer in Austin, Texas, and Kevin groans painfully, as if someone had punched him in the stomach. The dealer had taken out an ad in The Big Reel listing impossibly rare and/or lost films, including a five-hour “rough cut” of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and F. W. Murnau’s long-vanished Der Janus-Kopf (a 1920 silent version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Conrad Veidt and Bela Lugosi in one of his first screen appearances). Even though they should have known better, Kevin and Patrick took the bait. “Not being sensible about this, and being collectors, we sent money,” Patrick says. When I ask how much they sent the dealer for these tempting but nonexistent rarities, he shudders: “More than we would care to remember. I can’t remember now. I don’t want to; it was a painful experience.”

For all the missed opportunities, there are also the small triumphs to go with the large ones like Napoleon. “I was contacted by a collector in St. John’s Wood who said, ‘I think I have a film that would interest you,’” Kevin says. “I shoot over. He goes to his air raid shelter, roots around, and brings out a can of film which turned out to be Le Droit à la vie, Gance’s The Right to Life (1917). It opens very unusually, with a portrait of Abel Gance at the beginning of the film. I said, ‘How much do you want for this?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to sell it. I just want to know that you want it.’” Kevin bursts out laughing and then adds the ironic punchline: “In order to remind him who wanted it, he put my name in the can. And when he died, his widow thought he’d left it to me!” So she sent Kevin the print, free of charge.

To this day Kevin and Patrick continue to screen prints from their collections at home for their private pleasure, although not as often as before. When I ask which films they showed most recently, Kevin responds a 9.5mm print of the 1924 version of Captain Blood, starring J. Warren Kerrigan (later remade much more famously with Errol Flynn); for Patrick it was a 35mm print of Rex Ingram’s 1926 WWI drama Mare Nostrum, starring Antonio Moreno, one of the first Latino film stars in Hollywood. And yes, there are still treasures in their archives waiting to see the light of a projector: Patrick mentions the 35mm negative of a rare British silent called The School for Scandal (1923), starring a young Basil Rathbone in one of his earliest roles, which he’s hoping to raise money to preserve. “We don’t know if it’s any good. Being British it may not be!” he says with a self-deprecating grin.

Toward the end of the conversation, the topic of the transition from film to digital inevitably comes up. It’s a pressing but somewhat troubling issue for these two men who have spent so much of their careers preserving film on film, including some of cinema’s earliest treasures. In fact, the two are currently in L.A. for screenings of their acclaimed Photoplay Productions restorations of The Phantom of the Opera (1925) at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on 35mm, and The Cat and the Canary (1927) at the Disney Concert Hall, on DigiBeta (or “Digi-Beeta” as Patrick says with his British accent), although the restoration was produced on 35mm. Kevin expresses guarded optimism about the future of digital preservation but fears “an enormous amount of stuff will be junked.” Patrick has similar optimism, with reservations: “Digital is a big bogeyman to some people. It’s certainly a big problem for silent film, because it’s difficult to show silent film at the right speed with digital. It’s a cost issue, because for the manufacturers of the projectors, the studios are the big customers and the cinema exhibitors—and there’s no money in it for them.”