travsd

Tonight on TCM: A Late Silent Rarity

Tonight at midnight Eastern time, TCM will be premiering something truly rare: an independently made silent film from 1938! Seattle native Richard H. Lyford would eventually amass many legit Hollywood credits, working for Walt Disney and others, but at the time he directed and starred in his 45 minute long science fiction film As the Earth Turns, he was still a 20 year old kid, making theatre and short movies in his home town. This interesting artifact has been restored, and given a new original score by Seattle composer Ed Hartman. Much more about the film can be found here. This sui generis is being show by TCM as part of a line-up of vintage time travel movies playing tonight and into early tomorrow. I don’t know about the Way-Back machine, but my DVR is definitely set — mostly so I could say that “yesterday I programmed my machine to tape a futuristic movie from the past so I could watch it tomorrow!”

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.