- 1 Bruce F. Kawin, How Movies Work (Macmillan, 1987), 555.
1In the “Glossary of Key Terms” at the end of his 1987 book How Movies Work, Bruce F. Kawin defines a “text” as “a particular wording, arrangement, cut, or version of a work. A complete, original, historically verified version of a book, a play, a poem, or a movie would be called a ‘good text,’ as the Fractured Flickers version of Intolerance would be called a ‘bad,’ ‘unreliable,’ or ‘corrupt’ text”1.
2The “Fractured Flickers version of Intolerance” is an invention on the part of Kawin. There has never been such a thing. But his combination of two well-known titles and what they are popularly seen to represent nevertheless makes for an efficient and evocative shorthand definition. Where reference to Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916) alone – an original, legitimate, and canonical work from a major figure in film history – would clearly suggest a “good text,” what he proposes is a “Fractured Flickers version of” it, the mere addition of this second title transforming it into something altogether different. No longer “complete” or “original,” to use Kawin’s criteria, it now represents all that a “good text” is not: “bad,” “unreliable,” and “corrupt.”
3Taking this definition as its starting point, this article examines why it is that Fractured Flickers – the title of a short-lived, low-budget 1960s comedy show – has come to serve as such a convenient byword for cinematic corruption, or at least did at the time of Kawin’s writing three decades ago. And it explores, in turn, what this corruption entailed. What did it mean for silent classics like Intolerance to be reduced to “bad” texts, or, perhaps more properly, what did it mean to give rise to them?
- 2 Keith Scott, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Tal (...)
- 3 John Larson, “Jay Ward Is Crazy Party Giver,” The Maryville Daily Forum, 9 August 1963, 6.
4Running twenty-six episodes over a single season between 1963 and 1964, Fractured Flickers was a syndicated half-hour weekly US television series developed by Jay Ward Productions, best known for the popular Rocky and Bullwinkle series. Since premiering in 1959, the cartoon adventures of this duo – the flying squirrel Rocky and dimwitted moose Bullwinkle – had earned a following among children and adults alike for their dry and relatively sophisticated humor2. And according to Jay Ward himself, Fractured Flickers was to follow its example by being a show for “young adults” – by his definition, “people all the way up to 85 years”3. Certainly, it shared much of its talent, bringing over most of its core voice cast, including Paul Frees, June Foray, Bill Scott, and, most prominently, Hans Conried – best known as the voice of Captain Hook and George Darling in Disney’s Peter Pan (Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson, 1953) – who serves as the show’s genial and erudite, if, as he often hints, somewhat unwilling, host (Fig. 1). “Tonight’s program is proudly brought to you by the makers of mistakes,” he affirms in one of his many droll episode openers.
Figure 1
Hans Conried in the studio, next to a “fractured” portrait of Theda Bara
Fractured Flickers (Episode 1), Jay Ward Productions.
5Evidently, however, none of this is what, for Kawin at least, made Fractured Flickers such an exemplary case of textual corruption. The real substance of the show, and what made it such a danger to all “good” texts, is best summarized in the terms provided by its title: “fracturing” meant dismantling and reassembling older, primarily silent films – otherwise known as “flickers,” an early slang term for motion pictures – and overdubbing the results with incongruous new dialogue, sound effects, and music, all to comic ends far removed from the apparent intentions of their original creators.
- 4 Marion Purcelli, “‘Silents’ to Burst Into Laughter!” Chicago Tribune, 7 September 1963, 52.
6Where the distinction between “good” and “bad” texts is concerned, corruption can thus be said to have taken place in two key senses: these old films were to be deprived of their wholeness by being “fractured” and their integrity as works of art by being hijacked for new purposes. Reported the Chicago Tribune in advance of its fall 1963 premiere: “The dusty memory book of the motion picture industry will be taken off the shelf” to undergo a process of “twisting and corrupting”4. “Cinematic lobotomy” is one term used by host Conried for this; “adding insult to injury” is another.
7And yet, the dominant vocabulary, with its emphasis on misuse and mutilation, captures only one side of the “fracturing” process. The violence of the language can overshadow the fact that for all that making a “good” text “bad” involves “twisting and corrupting,” this need not be seen as a purely destructive act. Such irreverent repurposing and transformation also produced a new way of engaging with these fragmentary materials and the past at hand – one that was, as will be seen, in fact closely bound up with the preservation and continued popularity of silent cinema in decades to come. Ignominious as it might have been, becoming a “fractured flicker” marked anything but the end for the relics of film history.
8Introduced by Conried in Episode 5 as a contribution to the current “epidemic of medical dramas” on television, Hands Across the Fee began life as Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac, Robert Wiene, 1924), one of a small number of European films that peppered the predominantly Hollywood diet of Fractured Flickers. In its original incarnation, Conrad Veidt plays a world-famous pianist, Paul Orlac, who loses his hands in a railway accident. When they are replaced with those of an executed murderer, Vasseur, not only does he lose his ability to play piano but he soon comes to believe that his new hands have brought with them the violent proclivities of their original owner.
Figure 2
“I can’t play bridge with my friends anymore!” (Hands Across the Fee, originally Orlacs Hände, 1924)
Fractured Flickers (Episode 5), Jay Ward Productions.
9Its “fractured” counterpart, narrated by a self-professed “simple country dermatologist,” finds Veidt cast as Otto Umlaut, a wealthy man afflicted by “one eccentricity”: “he always did his own dishes.” Though he employs a housekeeper, Gretchen, “canoodling” is her primary responsibility, as demonstrated in a key scene in which she rests her head upon her employer-turned-lover and he begins to massage it. Where in the original film, she complains via an intertitle that his hands are hurting her, comparing them to those of “a killer,” now the massage gives rise to a scraping sound: “Your hands are like sandpaper! I can feel them right through my beanie!” exclaims the dubbed voice. Shocked by the revelation – once macabre, now dermatological – Otto leaps up from his chaise longue, leaving Gretchen “with no visible means of support”; she collapses to the ground with a loud cymbal crash. Upon arriving in the doctor’s office, he throws his hands up before his dermatologist, the dramatic severity of his gestures at odds with the triviality of the accompanying complaint (Fig. 2): he keeps “scraping the spots off the cards” when playing bridge. Where Paul Orlac pulled at his new hands as if to tear them off, convinced that they were compelling him to commit terrible deeds, Otto Umlaut’s desperate efforts now produce a rubber-like sound that the doctor compares to bandleader “Xavier Cugat’s rhythm section.”
10An “assessment” follows; slapstick footage showing an uncooperative patient brawling with eight medical professionals is spliced in, again with percussive sound effects. Otto is prescribed an automatic dishwasher, new detergent, and a pair of rubber gloves. However, the gloves prove too tight, and in scenes that had once marked the first post-surgery reveal of his new hands, these have to be carefully cut off; newly “beautiful mitts” await beneath. “But then I made just one little mistake. I violated the first principle of being a good doctor. I presented my bill to Otto Umlaut on the day before he left the hospital,” the narrator explains. On reading that he is to be charged $1480.75 – $4.75 of which is for a frontal lobotomy – Otto rises from his bed and collapses dead. This new bill replaces the original cause of his violent, but non-fatal, collapse: a note revealing that his hands once belonged to an executed murderer. “I’ve learned one important thing from this case: you can’t win them all,” concludes the narrator.
11Hands Across the Fee is very much a typical example of a “fractured flicker.” Silent images framed as dated or “old-time” – both in how they are introduced and in their relatively degraded condition next to the newer studio elements – are juxtaposed with the contemporary re-editing, voices, and sound effects of Jay Ward’s company, understood to be the products of another mode of entertainment and another time, one of sound and television. The action at hand appears out of place and out of order, with the materiality of the “fracturing” process being inscribed in the grain, damage, and sometimes decomposition of the old prints utilized, contrasted with the other, newer visual elements of the show: the animated opening and end credits, makeshift-looking replacement title cards, and, most strikingly, Conried’s studio introductions and weekly interviews with guest stars.
12Now accompanied by a laugh track, the repurposed images are put to the telling of a lighter, even inconsequential, story that renders the sincerity of the actors’ performances ridiculous. As for the added sound, while broadly aligned with the visual cues provided by the film, it remains distinctly inappropriate; the use of effects that would sound more at home in Ward’s specialty, cartoons, undermines the apparent dramatic intentions of director and performer alike. Incongruity, not immersion, is the aim; we are expressly discouraged from buying into the synchrony between sound and image and interpreting them as one.
- 5 “New Comedy Fractures Flicks of Silent Days,” Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, 21 September 1963 (...)
- 6 Harold Heffernan, “‘Fractured Flickers’ Now Embarrassing Some Stars,” The Columbia Record, 13 Augus (...)
13The result is a pointedly inauthentic art founded on disjunction. These reworked films no longer take place within diegetically coherent worlds. Their footage appears instead as raw material common to the serving of conflicting purposes and the telling of competing stories: those of the sincere original and its irreverent, oppositional reimagining. The overt incompatibility between these is foregrounded throughout, reflexively inviting a kind of double consciousness in which viewer responses are informed by their awareness of both, and, with it, a sense of looking back in learned superiority on a simpler, more naïve time in film history. This owes, in no small way, to how the “flickers” are framed, both in Conried’s introductions and in press coverage. “Some of the most gilded celebrities of the ‘golden Era’ are toppled from their lofty thrones by the ax wielding writers taking sweeping strikes at their exaggerated mannerisms,” read one report from close to its fall 1963 premiere5, echoing an alternative title proposed by the host in one of his episode openers: “Down Memory Lane with Axe and Crowbar.” Nearly a year later, newspapers described how the show “continues to jazz up old celluloid and cause 1964 audiences to wonder how their parents ever swooned over such characters as now pop out at them”6.
14The primary pleasure found in Fractured Flickers can thus be said to be located in what is framed as an act of vandalism or, at the very least, deflation: seeing the inflated earnestness of the original works punctured by more modern, more cynical, and more knowing minds. Re-edited so, the old materials presented are revived as more than moving illustrations for humorous new stories. Their new form demands an awareness of the disconnect between the authenticity of the images seen and the inappropriateness of their disordered and misleadingly dubbed presentation; therein lies the “fractured” effect. Taken within the larger context of the show, it invites audiences to revel in their being put to ends unbefitting them and, crucially, ones of which their creators would not approve.
Figure 3 and 4
“Our flicker was originally made as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring the late, great John Barrymore. But tonight, it has been fractured into a stirring saga of the soft drink industry…” (Hans Conried introducing Do Me A Flavor, originally Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1920)
Fractured Flickers (Episode 2), Jay Ward Productions.
15A striking iconoclasm runs through the show’s reappropriation of old material. What was once John Barrymore’s celebrated turn as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (John S. Robertson 1920) is now a “stirring saga of the soft drink industry” that finds Dr Seltzer feeling the effects of a new flavor he’s invented: “chonklate” (Figs. 3 and 4). In The Barber of Stanwick, a “fracturing” of the Douglas Fairbanks vehicle The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920), the titular barber takes such pride in his work that he autographs the flesh of his delighted customers with a letter Z. So in demand is he in the little Spanish town he calls home, Stanwick, that he has to don a masked disguise to leave the house without being mobbed by would-be customers. The bullfighting drama, Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922) – one of Rudolph Valentino’s most iconic roles – is recut and dubbed to instead tell the tale of an insurance salesman, while scenes from the dinosaur adventure The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925) and the famous cyclone in Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928) are used for mock real-estate advertisements.
16Early sound films, such as The Great Gabbo (James Cruze, 1929) and M (Fritz Lang, 1931), are also subjected to this treatment, as are newsreels and documentaries of various vintages, reflecting how, in spite of its ostensible emphasis on ridiculing the sincere and self-serious, the show cuts across times, genres, and modes. Indeed, while already humorous by design, silent comedies are “fractured” just as frequently as dramas. One recurring feature that exclusively uses comedies for material plays on the idea that in the pre-sound days, before they had microphones to worry about, directors were free to speak to and guide their cast and crew during filming. The idea, per Conried, is that the team behind Fractured Flickers have miraculously recovered audio that was recorded on some of these sets and reunited it with the relevant footage.
Figure 5
“You know how the front office feels about violence…” (The 39 Stoops, originally Dizzy Daisy, 1924)
Fractured Flickers (Episode 1), Jay Ward Productions.
17One such segment from the first episode of the show takes as its basis the Louise Fazenda comedy Dizzy Daisy (Fred Hibbard, 1924), introduced as action from the set of The 39 Stoops, an early version of the oft-remade spy drama The 39 Steps. The scene opens on a beach. Fazenda’s character, clad in an elaborate and distinctly old-fashioned outfit, approaches a group of women in fashionable 1920s bathing suits. “Show the lady spies your credentials,” an off-screen male voice commands. Misunderstanding, she offers them candy from a paper bag, leaving the director audibly exasperated; they invariably are in these segments, given that the unfolding comedy scenes are framed as the unintended products of their attempts at directing drama. When she opens her parasol and begins to remove her shoes, he rebukes her – “this is a family picture” – and insists that they cut away to a shot of waves coming in over the sand. When told to “take the gun out,” Fazenda’s character is too busy attempting to recover her shoes and socks, which have been carried away by the seawater. The director’s suggestions continue to be ignored, even when he proposes the compromise that they “play the scene barefoot”; it would be “very symbolic.” And on-set relations deteriorate yet further when the heroine finds a fish in her now-recovered sock and begins to strike it with her shoe (Fig. 5). The director reminds her that she knows “how the front office feels about violence.” Again, he cuts away from such objectionable content to a shot of the ocean waves, from which a sealion emerges, chases off the cast, and brings the abortive “take” to an end.
18While this was clearly a comedy even before being “fractured,” the fundamentals of the humor here are familiar, namely the film’s repurposing and the juxtaposition between supposed intent and outcome, conveyed here by sound and image respectively. Particularly striking in this instance, however, is how clearly it foregrounds another of the show’s foundations: the contrast between silent-era sensibilities and those of the modern day, conveyed here via various allusions to the director’s frustrated making of a more serious art and his insistence that matters are becoming too adult for its intended audiences – too risqué when the heroine removes her shoes and too violent when she battles with the fish in her sock.
- 7 Andrea Comiskey and Jonah Horwitz, “Fractured Flickers (1963–64), Camp, and Cinema’s Ab/usable Past (...)
- 8 Rob King, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (University of Cal (...)
19In this, the show was very much following a trend, albeit one that was certainly not without precedent. In the early 1920s, the name “Old Time Movie Show” was given to the practice of screening the “primitive” relics of the nickelodeon era for purposes of ridicule7, and “witty” re-edits and mock dubs of footage from Hollywood’s back catalogues are almost as old as the talkie itself – Warner Bros’ Movie Album (1932) series and MGM’s Goofy Movies (1934) being among the more successful early efforts. But Fractured Flickers arrived on the small screen during what was a 1950s and 1960s heyday for the revival of old film among popular, rather than necessarily cinephilic, audiences. On the big screen, a series of Robert Youngson-produced compilations of silent-era comedy were drawing comment for their success across the generations8, among them The Golden Age of Comedy (Robert Youngson, 1957), When Comedy Was King (Robert Youngson, 1960), Days of Thrills and Laughter (Robert Youngson, 1961), Laurel and Hardy’s Laughing ’20s (Robert Youngson, 1965), and Four Clowns (Robert Youngson, 1970).
20In such tributes to a past “golden age” or decade, silent films appeared to find new value on the very basis of their being outdated and past their commercial prime. Repackaged and re-edited as nostalgic looks at “what made the 20s roar,” to borrow a representative tagline from promotional material for Four Clowns, these images of just over thirty years prior promised an insight into the comedic mores of what were characterized as distant and curious times, as if the enthusiasm of their historical audiences had somehow been imprinted upon them as a context for making sense of them in retrospect. Rob King describes this phenomenon in relation to the sound-era popularity of “old-time”-style slapstick: “Nostalgia … stood for the affective logic whereby the ‘old’ could be reinvested as ‘old-time,’ the outdated reclaimed as a throwback; it was the very process through which slapstick as a residual form nonetheless sustained a lingering place and economic function within the mass cultural market”9.
21By the start of the 1960s, television too had been firmly established as a leading platform for the comedic revival of “old-time” cinema, with shows like The Funny Manns (1961) preceding Fractured Flickers in featuring re-edited and narrated versions of silent films. Like their big screen counterparts, these went beyond trading on the actual memories of spectators, offering a second-hand nostalgia, not necessarily based on direct experience of the era, that tantalized a new generation of silent film viewers. Exposing what were often younger audiences to early film, albeit as the object of ridicule, such corruption transformed the former heights of cinematic modernity into ironic portraits of a remote time – one seen to be separated from the present not only by years but by a fundamental and irreversible change: the coming of sound.
- 10 David Kalat, Too Funny for Words A Contrarian History of American Screen Comedy from Silent Slapsti (...)
22Discontinuity begets nostalgia, and in the story of Hollywood film, there is no more definitive rupture than the arrival of the talkie. The self-mythologizing of the “dream factory” had long insisted upon this, from early sound extravaganzas designed to re-introduce silent idols as talkie stars, such as The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner, 1929) and The Show of Shows (John G. Adolfi, 1929), to that most canonical tribute to this period in film history Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). In his work on American screen comedy, David Kalat credits this sense of a landmark change having taken place with inspiring an enduring popular fascination with silent cinema: “By treating the advent of sound as a dividing line between Then and Now, any celebration of ‘Then’ turned into a pining for something lost. Over time, that nostalgia became a self-feeding phenomenon”10.
23In the case of Fractured Flickers, venturing back into the silent days means an encounter with this “something lost” – something absent and never to return, a time before sound, television, and the other trappings of the 1960s media landscape. The result is a nostalgia ambiguous in its relationship to the past that upends the “fractured” films’ relationship to modernity. Rather than the technological or filmmaking marvels many once were, their new status as historical artifacts from the pre-talkie days becomes an essential part of their current-day appeal. Reconstituted in nostalgic and comic modes on the newer medium of television, the output of Hollywood’s old pioneers now appears pointedly archaic, inviting reminiscence over a pre-talkie era, a “then” that could be separated from the current-day “now” by technological change and also by the dated costumes, sensibilities, and scenarios that were now seen as vestiges of a quainter time – that of the “flickers.”
24In service of this, Fractured Flickers sees films of all stripes – newsreel, documentary, slapstick, drama – serving alike as historical material, the basis for a playful, creative engagement with the early-twentieth-century past, the place of moving images in it, and also the place that moving images have in our understanding of it. Devoted to “probing analysis” of historical subject matter, the recurring segment “Scrutiny” offers a prime example of this, such as in an installment on the “US in the twenties” – or “us in the twenties,” as the announcer first mistakenly introduces it: “Some called it the ‘decadent decade’; we called it ‘the twenties.’” Cutting from mixed newsreel footage to what appear to be comedy scenes of backyard skirmishes, its combatants armed with crockery and laundry baskets, the “big story” of the decade is introduced: World War One. The narrator goes on to explain that, in spite of its surrender in 1926, Woodrow Wilson’s United States marked the end of the war with mass celebrations, again illustrated via newsreel shots, “unaware that in a Bavarian bowling alley a dastard called Adolf Hitler was bent on destruction”; “Hitler” is represented by Charlie Chaplin in an outtake from The Idle Class (Charlie Chaplin, 1921).
25This is obviously not a reliable account of American history. However, in failing to be one, it offers an exemplar for how Fractured Flickers approaches the period with which it is concerned and the films it appropriates from it. The knowing, self-conscious act of splicing together such diverse fragments – from newsreel to comedy – in the name of a nonsensical narrative exemplifies why they were so ripe to serve as new, or renewed, creative material in the first place: they are indexical, testifying to a reality that once existed before the camera, but the visual load of any given shot will always exceed the essentials of the story told. In other words, these images are clearly historical artifacts from a period of note, but their signification is not fixed by their being so. As is seen when they are reworked and recontextualized, any “intended” meaning they might have been ascribed is but one provisional option among innumerable alternative interpretations and narratives.
- 11 Katherine Groo, “Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter: Remixing Film History,” Frames Cinema Journal 1, (...)
26It is by exploiting this basic fact about the nature of moving images so overtly that Fractured Flickers establishes itself as a show that is simultaneously about the silent era and about how we choose to remember, or perhaps misremember, it. It recalls what Katherine Groo in her work on more recent remixes of silent films calls, at once, a “bad film object” – derivative and deprived of its original integrity – and “a metahistorical work, a mode of historical expression that is fundamentally about film artefacts and historical telling”11. Rather than authoritative, it is a playful encounter with media history that invites reflection on the stories we tell about the early decades of cinema and the images we use to tell them. Repurposed, these same images provide a gateway to a creative foray into the silent era, one founded both on a nostalgia for the past and on absurd present-day narratives and ironic counter-readings.
- 12 Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (Routledg (...)
27It has been seen that the process of “fracturing” or corrupting “flickers” draws attention to two things in particular: that they are old and that they are being misused. They are out of time and at odds with their intended purpose. In other words, they are marked by “temporal” and “intentional disparity,” the two qualities Jaimie Baron identifies as the basis of what she calls “the archive effect” – an effect at the root of the pleasures offered by found-footage, compilation, and other such films that appropriate, recycle, and remix existing material: “a sense that certain sounds and/or images … come from another time and served another function”12.
- 13 Baron, The Archive Effect, 11.
- 14 Baron, The Archive Effect, 36.
28To generate this effect, the distance between “then” and “now” needs to be made apparent within the text itself13. Its defining disparities must be between elements in the same space or textual context. Fractured Flickers clearly falls into this category by inviting a distinct kind of engagement that takes form in the encounter between silent film text, the historical context from which it is understood to have come, and its new television context. The result is a productive sense of pastness and, more specifically, a humorous discourse about history. Emerging here from the contradiction between what might be considered the films’ intended use and how they are seen to be misused, irony is central to this, as it is to the archive effect generally, being a product of “the viewer’s awareness of multiple meanings and contexts surfacing within” a given text14.
- 15 Baron, The Archive Effect, 37.
29Watching one of the included “flickers” shown today would not, in itself, produce an archive effect, aware as we might be that we are seeing products of the 1910s and 1920s. A more specific relationship is required between the text and its interpreter. Baron explains: “Like irony, the archive effect is defined by the recognition of an ‘other’ meaning – stemming from an ‘other’ context, temporal and intentional, in which a given document meant (or was intended to mean) something else”15. As such, for all that Fractured Flickers will be seen to have been decried as a lowbrow affront to the great films of a bygone age, its corruption is not reducible to mere destruction, a mutilation of art that should be treated with proper reverence. Nor, however, is its appeal simply the seeing of rare old films. It is rooted in something more generative: combining new and repurposed old within a single space to produce a reflexive, irony-heavy archive effect and find renewed meaning in these disordered old images.
- 16 Harold Heffernan, “Jay Ward’s ‘Flickers’ in Trouble,” Omaha World-Herald, 12 January 1964, 144.
- 17 Heffernan, “‘Fractured Flickers’ Now Embarrassing Some Stars,” 18.
30Both in text and beyond, Fractured Flickers foregrounds to a rare extent the archive effect’s defining combination of temporal and intentional disparity. And today, the show is perhaps best remembered for the numerous lawsuits that apparently resulted from this. When the late Lon Chaney’s portrayal of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley, 1923) became the story of Dinky Dunstan, top cheerleader for the University of Southern California, so offended was his son, Lon Chaney Jr., that he famously attempted to sue. His complaints made for colorful newspaper stories: “‘They are making my father out to be an idiot,’ declared Lon, his voice quivering with indignation. ‘They have put silly dialog in his mouth, speeded up his actions until they are grotesque and in other ways have made a fool out of a great and revered screen personality’”16. Joan Crawford apparently deemed the show “a horrible idea,” and Buster Keaton was said to be considering launching a suit against it. More generally, journalists described “open demands that the Screen Actors Guild ‘do something’ about it”17.
- 18 “Fractured Flickers Boss Thrives on Lawsuits,” The Fresno Bee, 19 April 1964, 169.
- 19 “Fractured Flickers Boss Thrives on Lawsuits,” 169.
31Yet, with headlines like “Fractured Flickers Boss Thrives on Lawsuits”18 suggesting that producer Jay Ward cared little about, and even relished, these challenges, what is striking is just how directly the show’s newspaper coverage replicated the show’s rebellious attitude to the idols of old. The “fractured” version of Blood and Sand, for instance, led to such embellishments as, “Valentino’s kin were on the phone faster than you can say ‘Call my lawyer’ – and Ward smacked his lips in anticipation”19.
Figure 6
Interview with Bob Newhart
Fractured Flickers (Episode 24), Jay Ward Productions.
- 20 Scott, The Moose That Roared, 228.
- 21 “Fractured Flickers Boss Thrives on Lawsuits,” 169.
32Legal drama was, in fact, written into the show from the outset. Even in the ten episodes that had already been filmed before its premiere in September 196320, host Conried regularly refers to incoming lawsuits. Furthermore, press stories published about comedian Bob Newhart being “so shocked by Ward’s treatment of his idol,” Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame, “that each week he pickets his TV set” when the show screens are noteworthy for how similar they are to an interview-cum-skit included in one of its final episodes21. In it, the same Bob Newhart appears equipped with a versatile sign reading “Fractured Flickers Unfair to _____” (Fig. 6): “Don’t you realize you’re making money from the talents of people who aren’t even alive anymore?” Demanding, for laughs, that the show ceases exploiting former stars – such as Laurel – without payment, he explains that he has founded his own group, VOOCL (Victims Of Outdated Copyright Law), to fight for their cause. Reiterating the newspaper stories, he also claims to picket the show before his television set every week.
- 22 William K. Everson, “Raymond Rohauer: King of the Film Freebooters,” Grand Street 49 (1994): 194.
33Ultimately, this sense of complicity – between ridiculer and object of ridicule, corrupter and corrupted – is one that extends beyond the show’s press coverage and guest appearances, into the very fundamentals of its production. The film material for Fractured Flickers was provided by Raymond Rohauer, former Gallery of Modern Art curator, business associate of Ward, and comfortably the most notorious film collector of the second half of the twentieth century. “King of the Film Freebooters” was the title that noted silent film historian William K. Everson bestowed upon him: “audiences – around the world – hissed in unison when the logo RAYMOND ROHAUER PRESENTS appeared on the screen, followed by his name on the copyright notices, usually printed in larger letters than the star or director of the film”22.
- 23 Edward Watz, “Raymond Rohauer: The Man Who Would be Keaton,” Comique 1, no. 2, (2022): 18.
- 24 Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (McFarland, (...)
- 25 Everson, “Raymond Rohauer,” 194.
34Equipped with an expert knowledge of loopholes in American copyright law and a vast, perhaps unsurpassed, collection of silent films, obtained through a variety of legitimate and more dubious means, Rohauer was, as Edward Watz recently described him, “the ultimate bête noire in the world of film collecting,” infamous for his compulsive determination to claim legal ownership of, and profit off, old films23. One well-known aspect of this was his penchant for tracking down veteran filmmakers, their heirs, and their widows and offering to represent their film interests, regardless of whether these had any actual legal basis24. More controversially, at least among cinephiles, his endeavors also led him to make changes to films’ intertitles and sometimes their editing to establish them as his own copyrightable properties and exploit them anew. Everson expressed particular disdain for his attempt “to improve on Dreyer’s suggestively evocative terror” in the early sound horror Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) with lengthy additional titles: “one read his version of Vampyr almost as much as one saw it”25.
- 26 Watz, “Raymond Rohauer,” 18.
- 27 Watz, “Raymond Rohauer,” 20.
- 28 Everson, “Raymond Rohauer,” 194.
35In his earlier years running the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, Rohauer’s habit of duplicating and selling copies of titles he had rented for screening purposes had earned him a reputation as a film pirate26. And over the years, his name would be attached to a string of legal battles, the most famous of these coming when he tried to rival Charlie Chaplin’s sound reissue of The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925) with his own unauthorized bootleg of the film27. But as his career progressed, his jealously protective attitude towards his assets pitted him against the pirates; he is said to have intentionally circulated his films in second-rate prints – watchable but unsuitable for further duplication – to discourage others from doing exactly what he had made his start by doing and copying them for sale28.
- 29 Everson, “Raymond Rohauer,” 196.
36And yet, for all that the ruthlessly profit-driven Rohauer is often decried for having butchered and ruined screen classics for personal gain – having turned authentic, original “good” texts into “corrupt” ones, to return to Kawin’s distinction – even vocal critics, like Everson, acknowledged that, in the course of his commercial endeavors, he did more than anyone else to save the films of a number of important silent-era figures, including the Talmadge sisters, the aforementioned Stan Laurel, and Buster Keaton29.
- 30 Scott, The Moose That Roared, 227.
- 31 “Buster Keaton Wins Round in Fight for Film,” Los Angeles Mirror, 16 August 1960, 2 and “Berkeley T (...)
- 32 Scott, The Moose That Roared, 227.
37In fact, he was, in the early 1960s heyday of Fractured Flickers, most likely to appear in the news in his capacity as the business partner of Keaton. Claiming to have rescued the aging comedian’s personal film collection from his former home30, Rohauer was, by this point, working with Keaton to reclaim the rights to his films from rival parties and, in turn, launch legal suits against those who screened them without permission31. In the years that followed, the success of the company they founded to do this would play a major part in the revival of Keaton’s reputation as one of silent cinema’s great filmmakers32. Contrary to newspaper stories about Keaton’s fury at seeing his work so mutilated on the small screen, the Rohauer-approved Fractured Flickers was as close to officially licensed as they came.
- 33 Ted Okuda and James L. Neibaur, Stan Without Ollie: The Stan Laurel Solo Films, 1917–1927 (McFarlan (...)
38Rohauer even allowed Ward to screen fragments of films he otherwise kept locked away from public eyes, including Stan Laurel’s own humorous take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (Scott Pembroke and Joe Rock, 1925). This became the basis for the show’s most regular feature, spliced together with brief moments from other films to make a recurring series of minute mysteries with the master detective “Sherman Oaks.” These images first tantalized audiences at a time when, according to film historians Ted Okuda and James L. Neibaur, many believed it to be a lost film. In reality, Rohauer’s protectiveness when it came to his property had seen him keep the film in its entirety out of circulation, as it would remain for some time to come33.
- 34 Peter Bart, “Films by Sennett and Griffith Sold,” New York Times, 28 August 1964, 18.
39In many ways, Rohauer and Fractured Flickers made for a good match. Mutilating old films – for copyright reasons in Rohauer’s case, and for laughs in Ward’s – might be against norms of authenticity and integrity, but in these cases at least, it was closely tied to the preservation of, and maybe even creation of new afterlives for, the very texts they appeared to ruin. Appearing in a transformed, even corrupted, state brought these ostensible relics into view in a new context and before new eyes. In fact, not only would Ward collaborate again with Rohauer for more respectful and more complete rereleases of silent films after ending Fractured Flickers in 196434, but for some members of a certain generation of film afficionados and writers, this short-lived show would come to be looked back on as a formative introduction to silent cinema – an ironic gateway to a more earnest appreciation.
40Representing a common sentiment that can today be found across a variety of online forums and blog posts35, journalist David Theis wrote in 1994:
- 36 David Theis, “The Sound of Silents,” Houston Press, 9 June 1994.
Middle-aged Americans such as myself likely got their first taste of silent films by watching the ’60s television program Fractured Flickers. For you Generation Xers, this is one way we amused ourselves in those days: the television would show scenes from The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney was a favorite) while a voiceover would impose supposedly funny dialogue on the images. … If I’d been 60 instead of 16 I would have been pretty steamed at Fractured Flickers for making ignorant fun of the great popular art of my youth. But perhaps I would have consoled myself by agreeing with Henry Ford that history is bunk.36
41“Bunk” might be a fitting term for Fractured Flickers and the kind of history it offers, but this “ignorant” lack of respect for a past that might otherwise seem inaccessibly distant and alien is not necessarily to the detriment of it. At once ridiculing of and reliant upon the supposed characteristic features of the films it sends up, the process of “fracturing” a “flicker” contributes to the preservation of what it purports to destroy, not only by introducing it in some corrupt form to new audiences, but in more practical and material senses, as the business involvement of figures like Rohauer demonstrates.
42While some of the silent screen’s leading lights may well have taken issue with seeing their work exploited for new profits by those with little apparent respect for it, others were willing participants in this playful engagement with film and its industry’s past. Former silent star Edward Everett Horton even makes an appearance in the studio for one of the series’ most memorable interviews, ahead of a reworking of his “favorite” silent, the Ruritanian romance Young April (Donald Crisp, 1926), retitled The Prince and the Poppa.
- 37 Andrea Comiskey and Jonah Horwitz, “Fractured Flickers (1963–64), Camp, and Cinema’s Ab/usable Past (...)
43Perhaps more than any other element of the show, the weekly interviews, usually with an actor or musician, point to the core paradox of the “fracturing” effort: it extends the appeal of what it purports to undermine by encouraging its audience to seek to “get” its references to silent-era films and figures, such as when Conried mistakenly queries Roddy McDowall about his appearance in Cleopatra (J. Gordon Edwards, 1917), with Theda Bara, rather than Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963). Roles are then reversed when McDowall lauds the performances of Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Fred Niblo, 1925); Conried insists that Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) starred Charlton Heston. The discrepancy in silent film interest and knowledge between interviewer and interviewee is a recurring source of humor in the series. While not strictly necessary, familiarity with a more authoritative version of film history aids in appreciating the show’s distortions. The result is ultimately a “travesty born of affection,” according to Andrea Comiskey and Jonah Horwitz, who credit the series with a camp sensibility37.
44Where the name Fractured Flickers is most commonly invoked today, however, is as a precursor to more celebrated comic redubbings of what were once serious films, such as What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (Woody Allen, 1966), and also the remix culture of today’s digital age. Yet, it should be noted that the ostensibly destructive process carried out by Ward’s company – characterized within the show as the mutilation of authentic film prints – fundamentally differs from the many archive-led twenty-first-century projects centered around digitally cutting up and remixing what we can assume to be safely preserved silent films, such as the Eye Filmmuseum’s Celluloid Remix workshop: “Watch, cut and remix: in this workshop pupils will make a video clip based on old film clips from Eye’s collection. The images are over 100 years old, but they still look fresh thanks to smart editing tricks. Is it possible to make someone from 1910 dance to modern music?”38.
- 39 Groo, “Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter”.
45Compared to such projects and the thousands of amateur remixes posted online in recent decades – invariably made using digital facsimiles of preserved nitrate images – Fractured Flickers is a show with an ostentatiously different relationship to the archive. While we can now attest to Rohauer’s contribution to film preservation, his collection is never mentioned during the show; the re-edited footage is not presented with the caveat that it has also been retained in its original form. It does not function as a “promotional tool for its ‘real’ archival content,” as many digital remixes do39. Rather, it supposes that the thing itself – physical and analog – has lost its integrity and completeness. Host Conried even complains in one episode about film pirates taking prints of Fractured Flickers and undermining its makers’ efforts by returning its butchered comic reimaginings to their original forms.
46This is not to say that the era’s increasing awareness of the value of film preservation goes unacknowledged. It is a playful undercurrent to the show, one to which the team’s efforts are, inevitably, shown to run contrary, such as when actor Sebastian Cabot brings with him an unlikely discovery: an apparently unknown, and hitherto undeveloped, negative of a one-reeler starring Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino together. With the proceeds from it, he intends to establish a foundation for the development of film art. Unfortunately, after asking to handle it, Conried proceeds to drop the film can, spilling its contents and exposing them to the light.
47Because of such inclusions and frequent references to the hours of film that have been spooled through in search of suitable footage, the materiality and precarious physical existence of the “flickers” is never lost on viewers. That these are “old” moving images, mistreated and misappropriated, is reiterated throughout, both explicitly and in the form and condition of the repurposed footage. Yet their oldness does anything but diminish their value. If they inspired younger viewers to delve further into silent cinema, then it follows that their capacity to fascinate still owes something to what they are fragments of.
- 40 Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, 5.
- 41 Russell, Archiveology, 5.
48Catherine Russell writes in Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices of how works built on recycling and remixing are by necessity embedded within an image world, “whose resources it destroys and constructs again”40. While insisting that silent cinema belongs to a remote and ossified past, Fractured Flickers shows it to be embedded in a current, still vital, world of moving images – ripe to be torn apart and rebuilt for future profits, to “borrow the spectacular qualities of classical cinema not only to détourne mainstream cinema but to attract audiences. That is how powerful classical cinema, even in fragmentary forms, can be”41. As the early 1960s example at hand demonstrates, resources regarded as ripe for neglect or even destruction by a share of the film community that included the Hollywood studios themselves – as so many silent films were in the three decades since the coming of sound – could be harnessed again, not simply to ridicule or discredit the devotion inspired by the leading lights of cinema’s first decades, but to exploit their power over audiences anew.
49The comic corruption at the heart of Fractured Flickers – removing a “good” film text from its original time, integrity, and purpose – is no simple critique or disavowal of silent films, more a play of destruction and construction. Like all send-ups or parodies, it plays a part in sustaining that which it professes to destroy, giving it new lives and afterlives in the popular consciousness and opening up renewed commercial horizons. Asserted in every episode, this central reliance on the old for the creation of the new speaks to a fascination with these texts and their continuing, or at least returned, value. We are pointedly not their audience – naïve, quaint, “old-time” – but at the same time we are. We stand apart, at a critical distance from a historical context in which we also engage, taking pleasure from these same old images for both their oldness and the modern purposes to which they are put. These corrupted “bad texts” wound the old and open it up to new possibilities, blurring the lines between artistic corruption, production, and preservation.