NEWPORT – On Sunday, the Newport Opera House will be at capacity, showing a silent film made locally more than 100 years ago by one of the town’s most famous residents, Billy B. Van, and recently discovered, by happenstance, on the other side of the world.
“There will be about 190 of us there Sunday afternoon, and we will all be there because somebody saved something,” said film archivist John Tariot, who will show two Van films, some newsreels and lead a question-and-answer session afterward.
Tariot, of Lebanon, has been looking for films made by Van in the early 20th century for the last 10 years. In 2017, he discovered one in the Library of Congress titled “Where Are Your Husbands,” but nothing since then until earlier this year when he received a Van film from Japan that was mailed courtesy of a graduate student.
Tariot said Kohei Okita was researching films related to anarchy in Japanese culture and had purchased a collection of old reels from an online marketplace. Among them was “Van-ar-chy,” which Van produced in 1919. How it ended up in Japan is a mystery, but the title was enough to be included in the collection even though Van’s comedy was unrelated to Okita’s research.
Okita did an online search and found the Billy B. Van website, which put him in touch with Tariot.
“I was delighted,” Tariot said, about receiving in the mail what he described as a “reel with honest to goodness motion picture film on it.”
“It was sort of a lesson that things don’t always show up where you look,” he said. “I was not looking in Japan for copies of Billy B. Van movies.”
Without giving away the full story, Tariot said the 20-minute film deals with a subject that at the time was a serious and sometimes deadly one for the country: anarchy. Threats of violence were common in many cities. Anarchists were believed to be behind the bombing on Wall Street in 1920 that killed 30 and injured scores.
“It was an era of social unrest. There was growing class disparity happening,” Tariot said.
In “Van-ar-chy,” Van is unwittingly ensnared in a plot to blow up a local country club that also involves a young man who hopes to foil the plan and win the hand of his girlfriend in marriage.
“Where Are Your Husbands,” which will also be shown Sunday, is a satirical look at society around the time women were given the right to vote.
“It is a reversal of roles where the men are house husbands taking care of domestic duties while their wives went off to fight wars and hilarity ensues,” Tariot said. “Both movies are comedies with social commentary. Satire was one of Billy’s approaches to modern culture of the day.”
Tariot also plans to show some newsreels of that era to give people a better understanding of the topics of the movies.
“I have created some newsreels to prepare them for what they are going to see and acquaint them with some of the topics that are addressed in the movies so they get the most enjoyment out of them,” Tariot said. “Give them a sort of base level of understanding of what was going on in the culture at the time.”
Van, who died in 1950 at the age of 80, was a vaudeville actor and appeared on Broadway.
“He was quite famous as a stage performer,” Tariot said.
Van was born in Pennsylvania and came to Georges Mills to recover from a bout of tuberculosis that he contracted while performing in Boston. He bought property and eventually started his film company.
Van’s films were made on location in Newport and Georges Mills.
“He was defining what movies were to become,” Tariot said. “He used some pioneering techniques. This is a wonderful opportunity to shed light on the history of the area, to see it as it was. But it is also an invaluable piece of a larger story about our early cinematic history which we know little about.”
Van was at different times in his life a dairy farmer, a soap maker, filmmaker, radio personality and much more. Regarded as an eternal optimist, even when things could look grim, Van often said he came from Newport, New Hampshire, “where the sun shines on both sides of the highway at the same time.”
For all his fame during his lifetime, Van appears to have largely been forgotten in the decades after his death. In 2016, Newport writer Jayna Huot Hooper wrote “Billy B. Van, Newport’s Sunshine Peddler,” with a comprehensive look at his life.
Van often brought in local residents as extras and had familiar landscapes and buildings in his films. Tariot said there are recognizable locations in the films that can still be visited today.
“We would love it at the screening if someone could identify a long-lost family member in the background of one of the films,” Tariot said.
Just how many films Van produced in his Georges Mill studio is unknown, but Tariot plans to keep searching. He said during the era of Van’s films, Kodak had a national network that would buy films, edit or shorten them, make copies, and have them available for rent to families for viewing at home with rented projectors and screens. Unfortunately, many films made during that time period were lost or destroyed.
“I am optimistic there are more out there,” said Tariot, who focuses on the repair, preservation and restoration of films and their transfer to modern formats. He also consults with archivists on converting analog holdings to digital. “There are a good chunk of titles of Billy’s films where we know multiple copies were made and distributed so we feel certain some are out there.”
Tickets to Sunday’s showing, if any are still available, are $15, with all proceeds going to the Newport and Sunapee historical societies.
“They were instrumental in helping us get this project off the ground,” Tariot said of the historical societies.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
