50 Fun Facts About Silent Films

Which 1927 film, the first commercially successful sound feature, is said to have ended the silent era?

The Jazz Singer opened on 6 October 1927 with none of the Warner brothers in the audience: Sam Warner, who had pushed the studio into sound, had died the day before.

What do film historians call the text cards that carry dialogue and narration in silent films?

Intertitles had specialist writers, and the first Academy Awards gave an Oscar for title writing. It was never presented again, because talkies were already making the cards obsolete.

Studios scrapped many unwanted silent film prints partly to salvage which precious metal from the image layer?

Silver forms the image in black-and-white film, so prints with no commercial value left were destroyed for its scrap value. About three-quarters of American silent features are now thought lost.

What kind of film stock made early movies so prone to decay and fire?

Nitrate film carries enough oxygen in its own molecules to keep burning without air, so dousing a blaze with water may not put it out. Kodak stopped making it for cinemas in 1951.

In which country did live narrators called benshi stand beside the screen and voice the characters of silent films?

Japan's benshi were a draw in their own right, with their photos printed on film posters. Their popularity helped keep silent pictures in the country's cinemas until the mid-1930s.

Which theatre organ, with train-whistle and pistol effects, accompanied silent films?

The Mighty Wurlitzer was built as a 'unit orchestra', so that one organist could stand in for a whole pit band. Its maker turned out more than 2,000 of them for cinemas.

Which French composer, then in his seventies, wrote an early film score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908?

Camille Saint-Saens was 73 and probably France's most celebrated composer when he took the job. He went away for the winter before the premiere, so another musician conducted his score.

In silent-era tinting, what colour usually signalled a night scene?

Blue meant night because the film stock of the day was too slow to shoot in the dark. Night scenes were filmed in daylight and dyed afterwards.

What problem helped end film tinting once sound-on-film arrived?

The dyes interfered with the soundtrack, which was printed along the edge of the film itself. Kodak answered with Sonochrome, a pre-tinted stock whose colours did not disturb the track.

Why do silent films often look speeded-up today?

They're projected faster than filmed: silent cameras were cranked by hand, often at around 16 frames a second, while projectors since the coming of sound have run at a fixed 24.

Which child star of Chaplin's The Kid grew up to play Uncle Fester in TV's The Addams Family?

Jackie Coogan earned millions as a boy, then found as an adult that his mother and stepfather had spent nearly all of it. His lawsuit pushed California into a law protecting child actors' pay.

Which silent horror star, who devised his own make-up, was billed as 'The Man of a Thousand Faces'?

Lon Chaney was the son of deaf parents and grew up communicating through gesture and expression, a training that made him a natural for acting without words.

Germany's Skladanowsky brothers showed films to a paying Berlin audience in November 1895, weeks before which French brothers' famous debut?

The Lumieres had plainly the better machine: the Germans' Bioscop had to alternate frames from two separate reels, and their booking at the Folies Bergère was cancelled once its owners saw the French show.

What was the nickname of the Motion Picture Patents Company formed in 1908 to control the industry?

The Edison Trust enforced its patents so hard that many independents moved to distant California, where suits were harder to press. A federal court ruled against it as an illegal monopoly in 1915.

Which 1914 adventure serial made Pearl White the best-known 'serial queen' of the silent screen?

The Perils of Pauline had its star doing most of her own stunts, and she injured her spine during filming. Her studio later stopped her taking the risks, deciding she was too valuable to lose.

Which actress has been called film's 'first true actress' for pioneering screen acting under D. W. Griffith?

Lillian Gish lay on a real ice floe for the climax of Way Down East, her hair and hand trailing in the freezing river. It left her with lasting nerve damage in several fingers.

Which French filmmaker made the fantasy film A Trip to the Moon in 1902?

Georges Melies was a stage magician who turned his tricks into some of cinema's earliest special effects. Bankrupt by the 1920s, he ended up selling sweets and toys from a stand in a railway station.

Which 1903 Western has a famous close-up of an outlaw firing his pistol straight at the audience?

The Great Train Robbery's gunshot had nothing to do with the story, so director Edwin S. Porter left it loose: projectionists could run it at the start or the end of the film as they pleased.

D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation was adapted from which novel?

The Clansman, Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, cast the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. The film's huge success is credited with helping inspire the Klan's revival a few months after its release.

At which studio did Charlie Chaplin first find fame in 1914?

Keystone hired Chaplin straight from a touring stage troupe, and he found its comedies crude at first. Within months he was directing nearly every short he appeared in, at about one a week.

Which company did Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith help found in 1919?

United Artists let its star founders distribute their own films and keep control of their work. A rival studio boss is said to have remarked that the inmates were taking over the asylum.

Which film was Chaplin's first true talkie, with spoken dialogue throughout?

The Great Dictator ends with Chaplin dropping the comedy for a long, earnest plea for brotherhood and democracy. He had resisted talking pictures for more than a decade.

What nickname did Buster Keaton's deadpan expression earn him?

The Great Stone Face came later: in his first films, as Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle's sidekick from 1917, Keaton often smiled and even laughed on screen.

Which Buster Keaton film did Orson Welles call 'the greatest comedy ever made'?

The General cost so much and earned so little that Keaton lost his independence as a filmmaker and signed with MGM. The title is the name of a locomotive, not an officer.

In which 1923 film does Harold Lloyd dangle from the hands of a clock high above the street?

Safety Last! was made by a man with eight fingers: a bomb mistaken for a prop had cost Lloyd his right thumb and forefinger in 1919, and he hid the loss on screen with a special glove.

Which silent star was known as 'America's Sweetheart'?

Mary Pickford was in fact Canadian, born Gladys Smith in Toronto. Off screen she was a producer in her own right and one of the founders of the Academy that hands out the Oscars.

Which silent star died suddenly in 1926, aged only 31?

Rudolph Valentino, the star of The Sheik, died of peritonitis days after emergency surgery. Tens of thousands of mourners mobbed the New York funeral home where he lay in state, and police struggled to control the riot.

Nosferatu (1922) was an unauthorised adaptation of which novel?

Dracula's author was dead, but his widow Florence Stoker sued, and a court ordered every copy of the film destroyed. Several prints survived anyway, and it became a horror classic.

Who played the vampire Count Orlok in Nosferatu?

Max Schreck was so eerie in the role that the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, with Willem Dafoe playing him, imagined the actor really was one of the undead.

In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), what is Cesare, the character played by Conrad Veidt?

A somnambulist, or sleepwalker: Cesare is sent out to kill by the showman Caligari. Conrad Veidt later left Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, then played the Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca.

Which Soviet director's Battleship Potemkin (1925) contains the endlessly imitated Odessa Steps sequence?

Sergei Eisenstein's film alarmed censors well beyond Russia: Britain's film board refused it a certificate in 1926, fearing its revolutionary message, and did not pass it until 1954.

Who directed Metropolis (1927)?

Fritz Lang's original cut was trimmed soon after the premiere and long believed lost. In 2008 a damaged print of it turned up in a museum in Argentina, restoring the film to within minutes of its full length.

Which UNESCO register inscribed Metropolis in 2001, before any other film?

Memory of the World lists documents, not places, and what it inscribed in 2001 was a restoration with whole scenes still missing. Some 25 minutes of the lost footage surfaced in Buenos Aires seven years later.

Which producer gave Metropolis a rock score with songs by Freddie Mercury and Pat Benatar in 1984?

Giorgio Moroder, the producer behind the Midnight Express and Scarface soundtracks, re-edited and shortened the film as well as scoring it. Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant also sang on his version.

Which 1927 war film won the first Academy Award for Best Picture?

Wings went to William Wellman because he was the only director in Hollywood who had flown in combat in the First World War. He had been a fighter pilot in France with the Lafayette Flying Corps.

Which F. W. Murnau film won the Academy Award for 'Unique and Artistic Picture' at the first Oscars?

Sunrise holds a prize no other film ever can: the Academy gave 'Unique and Artistic Picture' only at that first ceremony, then dropped the category for good.

Which director presented the restored silent epic Napoleon in New York in 1981, with a live score by his father Carmine?

Francis Ford Coppola put the film into Radio City Music Hall, where his father conducted for nearly four hours. The restoration itself was the work of historian Kevin Brownlow, a collector of silents since he was 11.

In Mel Brooks's Silent Movie, the film's only spoken word comes from which performer?

Marcel Marceau, the French mime, gets the one audible word, a resounding 'Non!', when he is phoned and asked to appear in the picture. Everyone else stays wordless, Paul Newman and Liza Minnelli included.

Which black-and-white 2011 French film, silent almost to its end, won Best Picture?

The Artist saves its star's voice for the final scene: asked for one more take, he answers 'With pleasure', and the two words reveal a strong French accent.

In Sunset Boulevard, which real silent star played the faded silent star Norma Desmond?

Gloria Swanson's butler in the film is played by Erich von Stroheim, who had really directed her in the silent Queen Kelly. A clip from it is the old picture Norma screens at home.

Which sound-on-disc system did Warner Bros. use for its 1927 Al Jolson breakthrough?

Vitaphone kept its sound on separate discs that had to be cued by hand for every reel, and a badly cued record threw voices and picture apart. Sound printed on the film itself soon took over.

Which Japanese director made silent films like I Was Born, But... well into the sound era?

Mizoguchi's The Downfall of Osen (1935) was also silent; the benshi tradition kept the form alive in Japan.

Whose 1878 photographs of a galloping horse, taken with a row of cameras, were a key step toward motion pictures?

Eadweard Muybridge was hired by railroad magnate Leland Stanford, a keen racehorse owner. His pictures showed what no eye could catch: a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once.

A 1908 American film catalogue, doubting local colourists, sent its prints to which city to be painted by hand?

Paris had the specialist workshops. The seller explained that all 16,000 pictures in a 1,000-foot reel had to be painted by hand, and that few American colourists would take the work at any price.

Which German shepherd, rescued from a First World War battlefield, became one of the biggest film stars of the 1920s?

Rin Tin Tin was found as a puppy in France by American soldier Lee Duncan. His films drew such crowds that he is often credited with saving Warner Bros. from bankruptcy.

Which 1940 Disney feature has only one short scene of character dialogue?

Fantasia needed a sound system of its own, Fantasound, so costly to install that only about a dozen theatres ever played the film with it. That first run failed to turn a profit.

Which 1952 MGM musical gets its laughs from a silent-film studio's chaotic first attempt at a talkie?

Singin' in the Rain's disastrous preview, with voices drifting away from lips, spoofs a real fault of early sound-on-disc systems: one badly cued record put a whole reel out of step.

In 1978 over 500 reels of silent film, preserved by permafrost, were dug up in which Klondike gold-rush town?

Dawson City was the end of the distribution line, so old films piled up there with nowhere to go. In 1929 the unwanted reels were buried beneath the town's hockey rink, where the frozen ground kept them.

Which silent star's first talkie, Anna Christie, was advertised in 1930 with her surname and the word 'talks!'?

Greta Garbo was held back from talkies for as long as MGM could manage, for fear her Swedish accent would sink her. Her first line: 'Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby!'

Which silent star became known as the 'It Girl' after playing a shopgirl in the 1927 film It?

Clara Bow drew more than 45,000 fan letters in a single month at her peak in 1929. Four years later, still in her twenties, she walked away from films to become a rancher.