Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Mark Kearney on Film Pioneer Al Christie
103 Plays1 year ago
Joe and Mark are joined by London, Ontario author and journalist, Mark Kearney, to talk about an early pioneer of Hollywood, Al Christie.
Christie went to Hollywood in 1911, when it was just a village, some fruit trees and farms. “There had been a few directors shooting in and around Los Angeles, but Christie was the first to film in Hollywood,” Mark says.
Christie became famous for his short comedies. The boys discuss one of these comedies, which is typical of Christie’s work, Know Thy Wife, in some detail, and the three have a fascinating conversation about the early days of Hollywood, how the film industry worked and developed, and the nature of comedy.
For more info, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. and MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
Recommended
Transcript
Bilingual Podcast Humor
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Hello, Smoke and Joe. How are you? Same way. Same way. I don't know why I'm going into French here. We should do a bilingual version of this podcast. Oh, God. That'll be really embarrassing for me. I have a question for you. That's weird. I will try to phrase it in the French.
Western Travels and Exploration
00:00:27
Speaker
No, I will not. I can get one word. West. How far west have you ever gone? How far west have I ever gone? Well, I've been to Vancouver. That's pretty far west.
00:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's probably the farthest west that I've been, I think. Yeah. So and I guess if I were to go any further west, if you could go further west, where would you go? Well, I would actually like to go south of that western point because, you know, I've never been to San Francisco or California or Los Angeles or any of those cool places. So I'd love to check out those places. Yeah. So many other places in the world.
00:01:06
Speaker
I would like to, to visit. What about you? There are a lot of places. Uh, oh, I've been all the way west. What is all the way west? Well, that means I've circumnavigated the world. I've gone west and come back to where I started from. But have you ever been to Prague? Shut up. You shut up. That was, yeah, I didn't go west to get to Prague though. I went east. I took the short route. Cheater. Yeah.
00:01:34
Speaker
So how about our guest Mark, Mark Carney?
Introduction to Mark Carney
00:01:37
Speaker
Yes. How far west have you been? Well, I'm like you, I've gone as, I've gone so far west, it becomes east. Um, you know, I initially, I went as far west as Australia, which has already crossed the international date line. And then I've also surfing, Nick circumnavigated the globe, the other going east to west. So I've gone as far east as I can go. And I've gone as far west as I can go. Yeah. That's a couple of well-traveled gentlemen.
00:02:03
Speaker
There you go. But have you ever been to you? Sorry. The question we ask ourselves all the time. But I guess the reason I asked that question is because the artists you want to talk about today is obviously went West at certain point. But before we get there, we should probably ask you to, you know, describe who you are to our audience. Cause I don't, we, cause we don't do that. We're too lazy. I'm Mark Carney.
00:02:31
Speaker
and I have a new book out, which we will be talking about. My whole career has basically been writing and teaching, and I teach at Western University, along with the other mark in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, and also in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, where I teach some writing courses. You have written several other books as well as the one that has just come out, right? Correct. This is my first solo effort. I've co-written
00:02:59
Speaker
Ten books with a colleague of mine, a fellow writer by the name of Randy Ray on Canadiana, I guess is the best way to do it. The great Canadian trivia book is one of them. I know that name, which is about Canadian brand names and who they were named for and who were those people anyway. So who was Walter Zeller and who was Timothy Eaton, et cetera, et cetera. Those are people who remember those stores. So a lot of Canadiana things that we did over the years.
00:03:27
Speaker
So your last book is about Al Christie, and you're going to tell us all about Al Christie and his films of which, uh, Mark and I have seen at least one. And, uh, although they date, uh, way back, why don't you launch into this and.
Al Christie's Hollywood Journey
00:03:41
Speaker
Okay. So the book's called Al Christie, Hollywood's forgotten film pioneer. And it's called that because he's been a mostly forgotten silent film director from more than a hundred years ago. And.
00:03:56
Speaker
I guess the main point of the book from my standpoint was that he has been overlooked for many years. He shows up in the occasional history of Hollywood, but usually has a footnote or a few sentences that say, oh yes, he was here, blah, blah, blah. But that's about it. And so this isn't, I'm told is the first full biography of him. He was born and raised here in London, Ontario, where I live.
00:04:23
Speaker
Um, he left here when he was in his twenties to basically seek fame and fortune. He went to New York city first. Uh, he was, he had a stage background. So he went and worked there sort of behind the scenes for stage companies. And he kind of stumbled onto, this would be around 1909, 1910.
00:04:48
Speaker
And he stumbled onto a film set one day and was watching them make a movie. And the story goes that the director of the movie got sick or got injured or something. And he stepped in and took over and finished the movie and said, oh, here's something that I can do. And the rest, as they say, is history. He went to Hollywood in 1911. And Hollywood was a little town of fruit trees and farms.
00:05:18
Speaker
No one had been making movies in Hollywood. Nobody even knew what Hollywood was really, except the people there. And, uh, that's where he set up the studio and began shooting, shooting movies in October of 1911. Yeah. I've got a question already. So is that before like Samuel Golden and, uh, Louis B. Mayer and so on were there? Like he probably just before them. Okay. Wow. That's so there were some directors who were.
00:05:48
Speaker
shooting in and around Los Angeles, probably about a year before that, but nobody in Hollywood.
Early Filming Challenges
00:05:56
Speaker
You said he stepped into a film production that was already happening. Who were they? That was the Nestor Film Company. They were based in New York and that's who he worked for. I'll try to keep this brief, but what happened is there's two things that are going on at that time in the movie business. One is
00:06:12
Speaker
They're making movies. It's basically, the industry is basically, um, centered on the East coast of the U S sort of new Jersey, New York, New Jersey, New York. Yeah. And you can film very easily in the wintertime because it's cold and snowy and nobody likes to be outside and the light light would be terrible. Right. Remember those are very old cameras they're dealing with that. Right. And so they would have good light in the winter for, you know, five hours or whatever.
00:06:41
Speaker
So the thinking was we need to go somewhere warm. And the thought was either go to Florida or to California. And the other reason they wanted to leave was that Thomas Edison owned the patents to all the cameras. And if anybody tried to shoot a movie with a camera that he supposedly owned, the copyright I suppose too, he would sue them and he would put them out of business. And so people snuck around
00:07:09
Speaker
New York and New Jersey shooting films and covering their cameras because there were apparently Spies from Edison who would go and see what equipment they were using So we got to get out of here was basically the thinking and so the nester company sent Christie and a bunch of people Apparently they flipped a coin. Should we go to Florida or should we go to California and it came up? California so they went out there on the train and
00:07:34
Speaker
Christie and some actors and some technical people and they set up their studio in Hollywood.
Hollywood's First Studio
00:07:40
Speaker
Wow. Is it safe then to infer that they were really the beginning of all that in, in, in Hollywood? Yes. I like to say that all of Hollywood's film history starts with Al Christie. That is so wild. Okay. Let's go back. Let's go back because I'm a, obviously I'm a London, Ontario boy too. So I'm interested in like, where did he grow up in London, Ontario?
00:08:04
Speaker
I mean, so when he was born, he was born in 1881. His father was a police constable who died not even a year later. His mother was a widowed and she had a son and another, they had a half sister from father's previous marriage. They ended up living on Richmond street, which for those who don't know is sort of the main North South street of London. They lived on Ann street for a while, which is again, sort of in the downtown.
00:08:32
Speaker
Then they went back to Richmond Street, but Al would have spent much of his youth there. So they moved a few times, but always downtown London. There are stories that say she took in borders as a way of getting money, but I don't think they would have been living in a place that would have had much room for people. She did get some kind of widow's pension, I guess, because he was a police officer, her husband.
00:08:57
Speaker
And then the boys, Charles, who's the older brother of Al, and Al would have probably started working odd jobs when they were teenagers. And he, Al, did a number of different jobs as a young man, but he worked part-time, as best I can figure out, at the Grand Theatre, which is the main theatre in London, Ontario, and was then in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
00:09:25
Speaker
Vaudeville people would come through London on the circuit. And he liked, he would watch those shows. He was a stagehand, I think, basically. And he would watch these shows and he thought that he could make them funnier. He would watch your shows and he would write down notes and he would go and see them and he would say, here, I've got this skit you can do or whatever. And word got around that this guy sort of knew what he was doing. And so people would try out his stuff and they got laughs and word got around.
00:09:55
Speaker
He got the showbiz bug and, um, that's why he headed to New York. Hmm. Well, he would have known, sorry, choice. I have one more question because I am always fascinated by Ambrose small. Right. So he would have known him then. Well, Ambrose small disappeared in 1919, I think. Yeah. And he owned the grand for a while.
00:10:19
Speaker
How Christie would have left after he left that probably around 1909. So I don't know if Amber was small, probably ever a small was around then. Okay. Who the heck is Ambrose? Ambrose small is Michael on dodgy has a great novel called in the skin of a lion, which is about the disappearance of Ambrose small amongst other things in the building of the Danforth overpass. Is that how you describe that? Yeah, the Danforth.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, so the building of that and then this character from the early part of the century who owned the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario. And he disappeared very mysteriously. Everyone assumes he was murdered. Right. And apparently he haunts the Grand Theatre. Exactly. We'll do another podcast about him.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So this is getting really deep into London, Ontario mythology now, but sorry. I just, I had to ask cause it's like, wait a minute. What? I want to ask him related as we get further and further off track. That's what this podcast is though. It's just like a series of rabbit holes, basically.
00:11:25
Speaker
So yeah, okay, so my little rabbit hole is his father died when he was like young. Did he die in the line of duty? Do you know? No, he died of, um, I want to say consumption or something. He just had an illness and died. I think fairly suddenly had been originally from Scotland and had moved here and became a police constable. Okay. So back to how Chris, are you done with London marker? Yeah, I've got no other questions. I just, I'm sorry. I just, I will read the book obviously Mark, but
00:11:56
Speaker
Absolutely. Okay. So he's
Early Film Production Insights
00:11:58
Speaker
in California. It's like 1911 or something. They've only basically just invented film like shortly before. And, uh, these are just starting, right? Like this is maybe 10 years, 10 years, well more than 10 years, but as a commercial thing, probably no more than 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. And how are they being shown and distributed at that time? Well, at that time, first of all, Hollywood, when he got there did not, I don't even think they was a movie, movie theater there. There was one in Los Angeles.
00:12:26
Speaker
They made three films a week when they got there. They made a comedy, a Western, and then a drama. And these would be short films of about 10 to 12 minutes long, which is what most people were watching then. They would, and Al Christie was the comedy guy. He oversaw the whole company, but he personally directed the comedies.
00:12:50
Speaker
They would shoot comedy like probably in a day or so. They could not look at the film because there were no facilities there. They would shoot the film. They would ship it east, back east, where it was developed and I guess maybe even edited. And then a month or two later, it would show up back in Los Angeles and they would go and see it to see what it looked like. And then the company, there was distribution throughout the US.
00:13:18
Speaker
but it wasn't as certainly as complex as it got in the years that followed. But obviously to the point where those films were certainly shown in New York and across probably North America, probably in Europe as well. In the first year or so for sure, Al Christie was making movies and not seeing the finished product until they came back and he got to see them in the theater.
00:13:42
Speaker
Wow. But they, but the films were getting some exposure. So probably people like Buster Keaton and whatnot are out there seeing this product and saying to themselves, I could do that. Yeah, probably that's quite possible. Right. I could do better. One of the things that Christie, I got access to a lot of his notes and documents and things which are housed at the University of Wyoming. And he, um, talks about in those early days,
00:14:12
Speaker
how there weren't really movie actors. There were actors, but they had been mostly stage people. They didn't really think movie acting was, you know, that was kind of beneath them, but they needed the money. Anybody who was there, if they needed somebody to play a role, you know, if it was like a technician or a carpenter or whatever, they'd put them on the screen and, you know, do this. So it was kind of a haphazard sort of business at that point.
00:14:41
Speaker
But they had stories. They didn't just shoot and make it up as they went along, although there's some of that. And so they would literally crank out these movies every week. And shortly thereafter, in 1912, the Nestor Company sort of got bought out or joined forces with Universal Films.
00:15:02
Speaker
which had just been around for a while. And if you go to movies now and you see Universal Studio, whatever, but the globe that goes around, that's the company. They've been around that long. So Christie went and worked for them as their head of their comedy for about another three years. Again, churning out all these comedies. And again, with Universal, obviously they had a little more money to play with. But still, he was still making probably a film, at least a film a week.
00:15:30
Speaker
Now, did it ever improve that they didn't have to do their production, like the setting the film out East? Yeah, they got the facility. Did he ever actually get a chance to start to edit his own material or was that always done by somebody else? That's a very good question. I do know that he made some reference to it later on in the 20s, I think, when he was making films, that it's better not to be the editor.
00:15:54
Speaker
I would guess in those early days, he was, well, I know he was writing some of the films. He was producing them. He was directing them. He probably was cutting them as well, editing them in some way because, you know, that's just the way the business was. So did he have like a chance to do theater work, like as a director before he did this, or did he just watch it done and then he brought it to film? My sense is that when he was in New York doing the theater stuff,
00:16:24
Speaker
I don't know that he was directing. I think he was managing. He would go on tours with the company and I think he was the guy sort of overseeing it all. But nothing that I remember seeing in the research that he was actually a director of plays. I don't think so.
00:16:44
Speaker
So it's interesting that he didn't do that. He just came up director of movies instead. Because it seems to me from the know thy wife piece that that I watched, there was a director at work there really clearly. Like it's the way that the facial expressions of the actors come. It's like, OK, so I have sort of imagined him sitting there with like a megaphone saying, OK, now you're surprised by that. And yes, I actually have a picture in the book. It's a picture of him around that time.
00:17:13
Speaker
It's shown from the back, but he has this big megaphone, and he's got his arm up, and you can see actors that are in front of him on a set doing something. So that's exactly what he would have been doing. He would have been coaching him. Even though it was silent movies, they would say some lines, just again as part of the process to get the story across. And so yeah, he would have absolutely been in charge. I think he knew what he wanted,
00:17:42
Speaker
And the actors would listen to him because he seemed to have, even by then, he had kind of a track record. This is a guy who knows what he's doing. And how old was he at this time in 1911? Would have been about 30 at that point. Okay. And so Mark mentioned Know Thy Wife, which is the link that you sent us initially.
Analyzing 'Know Thy Wife'
00:18:04
Speaker
Why draw our attention to that film in particular? Right.
00:18:09
Speaker
So Know My Wife was from, I think, 1918. It starred Dorothy DeVore, a name that silent film buffs would know, but the average person would not know. She's a big star in her day. And the film is of the reason I asked you to watch it, because it's very typical of an Al Christie film from that time, even from, you know, the Al Christie of the 1920s as well. He, I think when people think of silent films, they often think about
00:18:39
Speaker
car chases, pies in the face, keystone cops. So Max Sennett is the director of that kind of style. So that's the Canadian as well. So that's the style of film that probably was most popular then and probably most universal because everybody can laugh at a physical comedy or a sight gag or whatever. Christie's films have some of that for sure, but he's much more about situational comedies.
00:19:09
Speaker
And he's all about the plot, and a lot of his films are about a couple. They might be married, they might not be married, but it's a boyfriend, girlfriend, or a husband and wife, and there's usually some kind of mistaken identity, and there's something that goes a little wrong, and they have to figure it out, and things happen. And so Know Thy Wife is a really good example because the plot of it is that
00:19:38
Speaker
this young college guy and this young college girl are secretly married and the guy's parents back home don't know that he's married and they want him to marry the girl next door who he's sort of left behind. So he thinks, I can't tell them, they'll be so ashamed, whatever, whatever. So they concoct this plot, so to speak, where
00:20:04
Speaker
Dorothy DeVore, his wife, will dress up as a man and pretend to be his roommate from college. And they will go home and, I guess, sort this out in some way. But we can't shock them by coming home as a married couple. So they go home. He introduces this friend who's dressed as a man. And the mother's all excited. Oh, nice to meet you, blah, blah, blah. I'll leave you two boys alone in the room, the bedroom.
00:20:30
Speaker
And of course, when she steps out, you know, they start kissing and the mother comes back in because she's forgotten something and she sees this and seems to be fairly unfazed by it. There's a great line. She says, you know, you boys certainly get along well or something. So they keep up the pretense and the boy's father is kind of interested in her and they go out for an evening. And meanwhile, the girlfriend shows up and how, what are we going to do? And he does, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah. So all of these things go on to complicate the plot. And it's very much, I think the kind of things that you would see in comedy theater in those days, Gilbert and Sullivan's mistaken identities. It's classic Shakespearean comedy. Exactly. Yes. It's like gender bending. Exactly. But for film audiences, this probably would have been something unusual.
00:21:26
Speaker
And if the film audiences were not going to see Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan, which probably many of them were not, they would go to the movies because the movies were cheap. This would have been probably a pretty wild movie for them. Look, this woman's dressed up as a man, blah, blah, blah. And then, of course, it gets solved at the end. And that's all in like 12 minutes. So he crams it all apart. A very short movie, yeah. Yeah.
00:21:52
Speaker
I've shown it now a couple of times to people. I did a public presentation and I showed a clip from that. People seem to really like this movie, which is great because it was well-received when it came out in 1918. I was going to ask, do we know the critical reception? How do we know that? There are reviews from the time. There are movie magazines by that point and there are movie critics. It's amazing that
00:22:18
Speaker
In less than 10 years, this movie business has suddenly grown to the point where there's magazines and critics and all that kind of stuff. And so, yes, they quite like this movie. It would have done quite well for Christie. He was having troubles making money in the late 19 teens because there was a lot of competition and the World War I was
Comparing Film and Book Industries
00:22:43
Speaker
on. And so that was hurting business. And then the Spanish flu started.
00:22:47
Speaker
And people were closing theaters and all this kind of stuff. So he did have some financial difficulties, but a movie like that would have done quite well. And actually, so speaking of which, he didn't go off to fight, I gather, but he was a fighting age. Well, he would have been in his 30s. He did sign up, from what I understand, for World War I, as I guess for the US.
00:23:10
Speaker
I don't know what signing up meant for him, somebody like that. They probably would have said, you're too old, but you can do whatever. As far as I know, all he did was he made movies. He did. I think he raised money. That would have been one thing that he would have done, raised money to war bonds or whatever, something they would have had back then. He was having a bit of financial troubles at that point. He had left Universal in 1915 to set up his own studio with his brother Charles.
00:23:40
Speaker
And, um, apparently they didn't pay people the most from like other studios were, but they had a loyal actors and they made a lot of films. I think the films did quite well. And they did manage to survive, which apparently a lot of film companies between sort of 1915 and 1920 did not. So to their credit, they did survive. I guess there was the big ones shaping up, uh, like Universal and, uh, was Warner Brothers around at that time? Warner Brothers was.
00:24:09
Speaker
A little later, I think, and just again for a piece of London Ontario trivia, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers was born in London, Ontario. The Warriors lived in London for about a year. So again, Christy would have known Warner when they were in Hollywood. They probably knew that they were both Canadian and probably knew they both came from London, Ontario, but I don't have any
00:24:32
Speaker
concrete things that say, oh, here's when they met and did this. Charlie Chaplin would have been around and, but yeah, Chaplin and Keaton and all sorts of big names would have been there by before 1920. Wow. Okay. So he's having trouble making money. Does he get back in his feet? Does he, he keeps in the, he's in this business for the long haul, right? He is. And he keeps turning out the movies. What happens is, and we talked about this briefly before about distribution. That was always the challenge is how do you distribute your films?
00:25:00
Speaker
And he used, up to that point, he used independent distributors and that worked okay, but it was kind of hit and miss to some extent. But they signed on with a company called Educational Films, which was based in New York.
00:25:15
Speaker
And it was a company that this guy had started up, as the name suggests, to make educational movies, but found that there wasn't much of an audience for it. And so he was looking to hook up with somebody making popular films, and he hooked up with Christie. And that's really what saved the Christie company.
00:25:33
Speaker
And they had a relationship through most of the 1920s with them handling the distribution and Christie making the comedies. And really in the 20s is when Christie sort of peaks, making some films that are doing really well, critically well received, better quality.
00:25:50
Speaker
Bigger budgets, all that kind of stuff. And, um, he's really thriving. So the film that we saw was a short film. And so we made a lot of them. Does he eventually make feature length? Yes. He started making some feature length ones around, I think in the sort of 1917, 1918 in that timeframe, he made a few. And then in the twenties, he made more of them, but he was still, he really still embraced the short film genre. So at that point.
00:26:19
Speaker
The words they used back then were one-reelers and two-reelers. And that's essentially what a one-reel film was like about 10 to 12 minutes, and a two-reeler was around 20 to 24 minutes.
00:26:30
Speaker
In the 20s, he's making mostly these two real films, these short films that have about 20 minutes or so. And there's a big audience for that. And a lot of people are still making those. They're called sitcoms. In a sense. 20 minutes is basically a sitcom, right? Yeah. And he's the situational comedy guy. So he's really making that fit that time frame. But there are other movies that are being made that are longer. And they might be seven reels or eight reels or whatever. Anyway, they were usually an hour or more, maybe two hours.
00:27:00
Speaker
He made them, but he was constantly saying in the sort of movie trade magazines that short films are the way to go. This is what the audience is really like. They go to these longer features and they're bored and they walk out and they don't really want to see that. They want to see fun comedy in the short time. And he tells us all through the 1920s, even while he's making the long films. So he's the Kodak of filmmakers.
00:27:28
Speaker
It gets it wrong. It's interesting how these different businesses are shaking out the business model and equating it today and publishing. How do you make money in books? Because the model is changing and what's it going to turn into? Then it was making short films and then
00:27:49
Speaker
And then some people moving to longer films and becoming quite successful and then other people like, oh, Christie kind of resisting. And so how does he do with that? I guess what's helping him to some extent is that he is in fact right that there is still a big audience for short comedies. And what a lot of the movie theaters at the time are doing are they're showing a short comedy, a newsreel, maybe a cartoon, and then the feature.
00:28:14
Speaker
So it slots in there as part of the evening's entertainment. And he keeps saying that, you know, and I don't know where he was getting his information from, or you would say things like, you know, a research shows that, you know, the audience comes for the short film, and they stay for the future. It's not the other way around. That that's what's really drawing them in, blah, blah, blah. And he just promotes this constantly throughout the decade.
00:28:40
Speaker
And he's not the only one, obviously, that's making these short films. So he must have something right in that, yes, that's in fact what they're doing. They are showing these comedy films, these short comedy films, and people seem to like them. But
00:28:55
Speaker
He definitely dips into the feature movies because again, probably sniffs the wind and knows that there's, there's money to be made there.
Christie's Comedy Legacy
00:29:03
Speaker
And it almost seems like he was be before his time because maybe he was making product that would have been more appropriate for what became television. Well, that that's a really good question or observation because one of the people that I talked to a film story and said that he thought that
00:29:21
Speaker
I sort of like the father of the rom-com, and the TV shows that started in the 1950s were about a couple of husbands and wives and blah, blah, blah, and they get into crazy situations. That's a lot of what he was doing in the 20s and sort of into the 30s as well. And another film historian I talked to said that
00:29:44
Speaker
the so-called screwball comedies of the 1930s, the sort of wacky, fast-paced comedy films sort of from 1935 on. Again, he thinks that Christie's films were sort of the precursor of that. If he was alive today and roughly, let's say, 25, he would be on TikTok, right? Yes. He'd be all over that. He would be. Yeah, because one of the things that he
00:30:12
Speaker
that he did was he embraced the technology, silent movies. Okay, yeah, I'm gonna get into that and do that. Oh, that's working really well. I'm gonna try different things. There were some of his films where they did some technical things that nobody had done before. So some technician who was in a staff came up with something, just how a movie shot, dissolved into another one, that kind of thing.
00:30:36
Speaker
When talking pictures came in in the late 20s, he and his brother Charles were one of the first to start making them. They just said, yeah, okay, let's do that. And they bought a sound studio in LA, which was the major sound studio. They bought it and rented it out to various people.
00:30:52
Speaker
Uh, to make found movies. So yes, I'm He would have been on tick tock i'm sure and that's the short format too, which he would have loved Yeah, he would have liked the short front. So how did that work out though in terms of the talkies? Like did he make that transition? He makes the transition and he what happens is that he parts ways with educational films because Paramount again another company that's still around
00:31:17
Speaker
Paramount lures him over, I guess, to start making talking films. And again, I've seen a few of them, and the people, again, I've talked to who are sort of more experts than I am, say that, you know, basically Paramount bought him out and neglected him, just didn't really promote his stuff, didn't really care what he was making, et cetera. So he stuck with them for a while, he left them, and he ultimately ends up going back to educational in the early 30s.
00:31:47
Speaker
But the Christie Studio, which he'd had since 1915, they go bankrupt in 1933. Why? Well, because it's the Depression. That's the number one reason. And secondly, they're doing a lot of investing. They're buying a lot of real estate. They're buying cars that you can rent out to other movies. They're kind of going all in in various things. They bought the Metropolitan Studio, which was the sound studio, which would have cost them a fortune.
00:32:15
Speaker
you know, it goes too far and they can't keep up. Right. So they declare bankruptcy in 1933. And from what I'm told by a distant relative of Christie, who lives in LA, they paid all their debts. They had debts, they paid them all off, he sold the studio, they did whatever they had, they sold everything they had. They had a lovely mansion in Beverly Hills. And there's a story that goes with that.
00:32:39
Speaker
They sold it so that they could pay all their debts. And then Charles sort of leaves the business for a while and Al goes back to New York to work for educational films, making short comedy films, talking ones now. And they again would be in that sort of 20 minute or so range. Now, before we get too far past it, what's that story? Who lives in that house now? Come on. Yes, that's the, there we go.
00:33:08
Speaker
So they built this mansion in Beverly Hills, and it's called the Waverly Mansion. And if Mark Rayner might know from London, Ontario, there is a Waverly Mansion in London, which is now a senior's home. The guy who built that Waverly Mansion originally in London was named Durand, and he was Charles Christie's father-in-law. He was an architect, George Durand, and his daughter Mary Charles Christie.
00:33:36
Speaker
So my feeling, I don't know this 100% for sure, but I'm thinking they called the one in Beverly Hills, the Waverly has a tip of the hat to his father-in-law. They sell the house. It has about eight or 10 different owners over the years. And in the early 1990s, Phil Collins, the rock star, and his wife, then wife, Jill Collins, buy the house. Jill still lives in the house.
00:34:04
Speaker
She and Phil are long divorced, but she lives in the house, and her daughter Lily, who's an actress and quite famous in her own right, that's where Lily would have grown up. And I contacted Jill. She has some businesses in Beverly Hills, and I thought, it'd be so cool to go and see the house. So I just emailed her and said, you know, basically, you don't know me, but I'm doing this story on Elle Christie, and I know you live in his house, blah, blah, blah. And I'm coming there. Can we meet up? So she emailed me in about within an hour.
00:34:34
Speaker
Sure. Come on down. I'll show you around, but we can talk. So I did go down in summer of 2022. As I was finishing up the book, I met with her. I did an interview with her. She said, you know what? We should go and see the house because she didn't know who I was. Right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a stranger. You know, so we, I met at one of her antique businesses and she said, let's go to the house. I went there the next day and, you know,
00:35:01
Speaker
drive up and the gates open and you go into this mansion and it's got five car garage and all this stuff. And she walked, we walk around the house and she points out some things to me and then she says, you know what, I think we should go inside. And she showed me part of the inside of the house. She said, she asked me not to take any photos, but so she was very nice, very helpful, gave me lots of good information and told me a little bit about the history of the house, which I have in the book. I mentioned that it was just part of the book like that. And we've already established that Joe is a huge Phil Collins fan.
00:35:30
Speaker
Well, yeah. Genesis and Phil Collins. Absolutely. Yeah. There's your accuracy connection right there. Yeah. So, okay. So things have gone south for him in the worst year of the depression, 1933.
Christie's Overlooked Legacy
00:35:42
Speaker
He's divested himself of, uh, uh, all his belongings. He's now in New York and he's making short films again. Yep. And, uh, how does he make out from there? He does quite well. He makes, uh, again, he's got a pretty steady pace. He's probably making,
00:35:57
Speaker
Not quite the movie a week that he was doing in the silent film era, but he's probably making 20, I would guess maybe 20, 15 to 20 short films a year. He's working with Buster Keaton. He made a couple of films with Buster Keaton, whose career is kind of on the dance slide at this point. But he's also making films with up and comers. So he made a film with Bob Hope, who's just sort of on his way to becoming famous.
00:36:22
Speaker
Burt Larr, who was the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, Lucille Ball apparently, Danny Kay, all these people who were starting out, God worked with him in these short films that he was making for educational films. And I've only seen some of them. They're like, they're okay. The one with Bob Hope is not really funny at all. But some of the other ones are not bad. But they're, again,
00:36:52
Speaker
They're doing well. They're making money. They seem to be, you know, he was, he was earning a really good living once he hooked up with them. So everybody presumably kind of, you know, knew him in Hollywood at that time. He's rubbing shoulders with all those guys and gals and his DNA by this point is probably all over.
00:37:13
Speaker
you know, Hollywood product, nobody apart from yourself and a few others, silent film buffs and whatnot have heard of him. What happened to him? Why isn't he, you know, mentioned in the same breath as Buster Keaton? Thank you, Joe. That's my question too. Well, I think there's a couple of reasons and I sort of, I take part of the last chapter of my book to sort of talk a little bit about this. And again, from talking to other people who were silent film experts, one of the things is a lot of his films didn't survive.
00:37:43
Speaker
I mean, you made more than a thousand films, so I mean, still a lot that did survive, but many of them didn't because a lot of those films, either they were made of a material that didn't last, or if they weren't stored properly, they would just crumble. For whatever reason, people probably didn't think they were worth keeping, that kind of thing. So that's one reason. The second reason is,
00:38:06
Speaker
He never made sort of the one great film that lives on or the one great actor or actress that lived on as a legend. He had a lot of people who did really well, someone who worked with him early on in their careers and then later went to some other places and did have great careers. And his actors were sort of that middle of the road. They were stars at the time, but never really
00:38:33
Speaker
lasted beyond probably, I don't know, maybe the 30s or 40s. So that's another reason. Somebody else has told me that when TV came in in the 50s, a lot of silent films, that's what they showed in the more Saturday mornings or whatever, silent films. And I'm told that they did show Christie films, but they were badly edited. And they had sometimes they would have dialogue over top of them. And
00:38:59
Speaker
So yeah, people didn't really recognize his product or something. I don't know. And I think he's kind of just faded away, but strangely enough, he does have a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. So enough people were around. I think, I think he got a star in 1961 or something. So he would have been dead for about 10 years. So he was appreciated at some point by somebody. Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't know. There's, there, there are some people who've written histories of,
00:39:28
Speaker
silent film who have just sort of dismissed them. They mention them, they go, yeah, well, Christie, I made a bunch of films, but nothing too amazing. So therefore, we've gone to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton instead. And then there's other I mean, there's all kinds of silent film directors from that era that, again, we wouldn't know their names. We would never heard of them. They're not getting any publicity much either. So
00:39:51
Speaker
So, okay, so then that begs the question. Is it a shame or let's ask the hard question? Because I actually, I was watching, so just based on the one film we watched, the 13 minute film, I was like, how is this, like he's doing like a drawing room comedy with no dialogue.
00:40:10
Speaker
And I was quite entertained. No, could I have watched an hour of it? No, absolutely not. But for 13 minutes, it was quite entertaining and the actors were great. And I laughed, I think at least four or five times out loud. And that's pretty good.
00:40:28
Speaker
For for a silent film, I mean, right? Well, but OK, but here's the hard question. So you and I, Mark Rayner, I'm an easy laugh. I'll admit that. No, no. But and probably yourself, Mark Kay, I'll say we know many writers who have written excellent books who are, you know, not going to sell more than 100 copies or whatever and are not going to achieve greater renown. How is he any different than them? Where does he actually fit?
00:40:58
Speaker
in the Pantheon. So I think he fits in the Pantheon as primarily as the guy who started starts Hollywood. I mean, you know, if nothing else, he's the guy that goes to Hollywood and actually makes films in Hollywood and Hollywood becomes the movie capital of the world. So he's got to get some credit for that. He's an advocate of short films. That's probably worth noting. He's a
00:41:23
Speaker
The other theory about Christian, I'm not sure that I buy it, but he was very much a promoter of women in films. Many of his films star women, women are not, they're not just playing housewives, they're often in some career. And some critics have said, well, because his big films starred women, women were overlooked in the silent film era, therefore he's overlooked.
00:41:50
Speaker
That's a possibility as well. I actually, I would agree with that again, just based on the limited sample size of Do they wife that that's actually a kind of feminist film in a way it really is. And he's, he's been called that he's been called a feminist director, which is interesting. I don't think he would live up to that in his, in real life, but he was definitely, he, he had several articles that I came across where he talked about
00:42:18
Speaker
How it's the women of America or North America who decide which films they're going to go see. And I know that that's who just makes the decision. So that's why I'm making films for them. So he's blatantly saying that for sure. Wow. So, okay. And why do you say that he wouldn't live up to that in his real life? Cause we haven't really talked about his personal life much. How does he shake up there? Well, he was, he was married before he got to Hollywood, married a woman from here in London, Ontario.
00:42:45
Speaker
They had a daughter, they divorced in probably around, I'm going to say 1920. And she goes on to live till she died in like 1983. And I don't know a lot about her, but she did remarry at some point as well. Al was sort of known a bit as a bit of a ladies man flirted with his actresses. I'm told he had some kind of a hot, had some kind of a bear with Dorothy Devore.
00:43:11
Speaker
his actress I believe that he got remarried he did remarry in 1927 to a very young actress I think they later divorced although I never got any specific year details on that but
Al Christie's Personal Life
00:43:26
Speaker
And she then lay later remarried. So he was setting the pace for Hollywood. Not just like being the first there. He was also setting the standards. Setting the standards of whatever. Everyone's like, Oh, okay. All Christie does that. Well, I guess we could do that too. That's what we do. Well, who knows, right? So, um, so there's that bit of that reputation. Um, but on the other side of it, he lives in this mansion. It has sort of three wings. He has one, his brother Charles lives in one wing and his mother.
00:43:55
Speaker
and his sister and live in the other one. So the whole, they spend their whole lives, almost adult lives together in one house. Um, wait, wait, where did his mother and sister wind up when he had to downsize? I think what happened is Charles got into real estate and he actually bought another house in Beverly Hills, much smaller, but the mother and the sister lived there with, with him. And then out when he came back from New York in 1940, I think,
00:44:25
Speaker
he came and lived with Charles as well in this smaller house. Did he have children and are any of his descendants around? Yeah, so Al and his first wife Nora had a daughter, Lenora, Christy, who was called Shirley. Shirley Christy was about 10 years old when she died in a horse riding accident.
00:44:47
Speaker
She was on a horse with some people at a local club in, I guess, LA and somehow fell off. Don't really know why. There was a little, there's a bit of a story in the newspapers at the time. She went to the hospital and died fairly soon afterwards. He never had any more kids. Charles, Charles's wife died in 1918 or 19 and he never remarried.
00:45:13
Speaker
And he didn't have kids, but he, he also was known as a bit of a ladies man too, apparently. And when did the daughter died? 1922. I was thinking, I just watched Gone with the Wind recently. And of course that's a major plot point. You know what? I'm glad you brought that up because when I read the accounts of her falling off the horse, I thought about that scene in Gone with the Wind where the daughter falls off the horse and dies. And I looked and I Googled and I, you know,
00:45:40
Speaker
Is this inspired in any way by that story? I couldn't find any connection. And I don't know when Gone with the Wind, the book was written, but I think it would have been after his daughter's death. So I don't know. Mark R is starting to have some means of figuring this sort of thing out. I'm looking it up as we speak. Yeah, 1936. So you're right.
00:46:08
Speaker
Yeah. So I don't know. I always, I thought that would have been a cool connection, but I couldn't find any evidence to back it up. Yeah. Still. Yeah. Quite, quite tragic. Right. And apparently again, this, uh, this, I meant talk about this in the book as well. He apparently never talked about it. Nobody ever raised it. Some, some people who worked with Al Christie years later, didn't even know he'd had a daughter. So it's just nothing happened. He didn't seem to slow down his work pace after she died. He just went on and she's buried. They're all buried in the same.
00:46:38
Speaker
area of the Hollywood forever cemetery. So Shirley and the daughter and Nora, the first wife are right beside Al Christie. Charles is there and apparently the half sister is there somewhere. So they're there, even though they split up. They were close, even though things didn't work out great. I imagine that dying from falling off a horse was more common.
00:47:04
Speaker
in that era than we think. Yeah, for sure. I think there were probably a lot of that, those kinds of accidents for sure. Yeah.
Mark Carney's Book on Christie
00:47:12
Speaker
Okay, so in the last few minutes then, let's talk about your book about him, which just came out in August, I believe. That's right. It came out in August. Bear Manor Media is the publisher. They're based in Florida. They do a lot of entertainment books. If you were to go on the Bear Manor Media,
00:47:31
Speaker
website, you would be overwhelmed with the number of Hollywood slash movies slash TV books that they put out. So that's why I hooked up with them. It's available. Well, as far as I know, it's available certainly anywhere where Amazon is. So I know somebody emailed me to say that in Australia that they bought the book on Amazon Australia or whatever. So it is on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com and all the Amazons, I guess, that are out there.
00:48:00
Speaker
It's on Indigo. It's in some of the Indigo bookstores, I'm told. It's on Barnes and Noble's website in the US. It's probably available everywhere. It's available in Britain, et cetera. Mark, I have another question. Just because of London connection, and go back to that a bit, how did you find out about this story, and how excited were you when you did? I've been a fan of silent movies.
00:48:30
Speaker
for a while, not a big fan, but I kind of liked the era and I'd read some books about it and I was kind of fascinated by it a bit. And I've seen a good chunk of silent film films. I was in the Weldon Library at Western one day, some years ago, probably in the late 90s. And I was just going through various movie books and I came across a guy by the name of John Robertson, who was a silent film director
00:49:00
Speaker
who was also born in London, Ontario. And I started looking into his life and thinking, yeah, maybe I'll write a book about this guy. And I got some information. And I was, you know, I was still thinking about it. And then somehow he led me to Al Christie. And Al Christie seemed to have a little bit more written about him and seemed to be more well known.
00:49:26
Speaker
And as I say, as I found out some years later, his documents, a lot of his papers and Christie Studio papers are housed in the University of Wyoming, which has a place called the American Heritage Center, where they have all kinds of weird and wonderful Americana. So that's one of his actresses, when she died, she had all these documents and she donated them. So that's how I got into
00:49:51
Speaker
Al Christie and the fact that he was, as I say, he was from London, Ontario and seemed to be this overlooked, quite prolific, well-known, well-respected director made me say, okay.
00:50:03
Speaker
I should write a book about this guy someday. And I finally did it after so many years. So I'm glad that it's out and I'm hoping that people will, you know, obviously buy it and read it and find out about this guy. Well, congratulations. So what's next for you? What are you working on now? I'm working on trying to promote itself a book, mostly. Good answer. Good answer. Your publisher is very happy. I'm hoping that
00:50:31
Speaker
that I will get more media attention, certainly in Canada, but also in the US. I'm going to be at the Columbus Silent Film Festival in next May, doing a presentation on Christie and talking to people there. So that's good. People are saying, so what book are you going to write next? I don't know. I'm going to see how this goes.
00:50:54
Speaker
And then I'll see whether I want to do another kind of entertainment book or what exactly. I'm going to just write it out for at least a year before I make any big decision on what to do next. Well, good luck. Yeah. And we'll have all the information about your book and where to get it on our website. Great. Thank you. And Mark, any final thoughts or questions? Oh, no, just thank you so much for bringing this to my attention because it was fascinating to me.
00:51:20
Speaker
Good. I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. I do know that people who have read it say, yeah, I didn't know about this guy. Now, is there going to be some kind of effort to get him a star on the Canada walk of fame?
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:51:33
Speaker
It's good you mentioned that I just filled out their form the other day. Okay.
00:51:37
Speaker
There's a form online where anybody can make a recommendation. So I'll attach a link to the form in the show notes so that we can get this happening. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. But most importantly, a link to the book. A link to the book. So everyone can go by the book. Mark, thank you very much for being on our podcast, Recreative. Thank you so much, Joe and to Mark. I really appreciate the time you gave me to talk about this. It was great.
00:52:15
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web designed by Mark Rainer. Show notes and all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney at donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.