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At the Art House Convergence’s recent independent film exhibition conference held in Chicago, Josh Frank, author and urban drive-in entrepreneur, announced his radical initiative for luring people back into theaters: Silent movies.
Hold on, hold on, hear him out. “Silents Synced,” scheduled to launch nationally Oct. 4, will present classic silent films synced to seminal albums and songs by iconic alternative rock bands of the late 1980s and ‘90s. First up is F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” paired with Radiohead’s albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.”
The second release will be Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” paired with career-spanning songs by R.E.M. In a statement, Bertis Downs, the band’s manager, said, “The guys thought it seems like a good idea and they like the uncanny way their music and ‘Sherlock, Jr.’ match up — kind of perfect. What a great and unlikely way of presenting great art.”
“Silents Synced” will be distributed in partnership with CineLife Entertainment, a division of Spotlight Cinema Networks, which books exclusively to independent indoor and drive-in theaters.
“People look for what’s next and new,” Frank says. “My secret sauce is I look for what’s next in what was. I look at what was popular before my time and figure out how it is still valid today. I take what people liked about it and bring it back better.”
Inspiration for “Silents Synced” goes back more than 15 years. In 2006, Frank was invited to the premiere of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s presentation of Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s 1915 horror film, “The Golem"” with a commissioned score by Black Francis, front man for the band The Pixies, whose oral history Frank co-wrote.
“It was incredible, and left a lasting impression,” Frank says.
Three years later, Frank opened the 12-car Blue Starlite drive-in in an alley in downtown Austin in 2009. “It was more an art installation,” he jokes. The Blue Starlite focused on classics and revival house programming, not standard drive-in fare at the time, but one of his earliest programming experiments was to pair Fritz Lang’s visionary “Metropolis” with Nine Inch Nails’ “The Fragile” to show privately to a few friends. “I’ve never forgotten how cool that was to do,” he says.
The downtown location has moved out of the alley and onto a parking garage rooftop. A second five-screen location off of I-35 presents a mix of new indie releases (“Maxxine,” “Robot Dreams”) and contemporary classics and cult faves (“Jaws,” “Dirty Dancing”).
When the pandemic hit and drive-ins enjoyed an unexpected resurgence, Frank’s idea for “Silents Synced” further crystallized. “There was not a lot of new content,” he says, “which led to serious outside-the-box thinking. What new type of movie experience would give people a compelling reason to go out to a movie theater?”
Frank is no stranger to quixotic quests. He spent five years co-creating a graphic novel based on Salvador Dali’s 1937 14-page treatment for a proposed Marx Brothers film, which at the time, MGM deemed unfilmable. “Giraffes on Horseback Salad” was published in 2015.
He knew bringing “Silents Synced” to fruition would not be—wait for it—duck soup.
But “Silents Synced” may have been made for these times. Coupled with low attendance woes, theaters are grappling with the effects of last year’s six month’s writer’s strike, which wreaked havoc on Hollywood’s production pipeline. “Inside & Out 2” and “Despicable Me 4” may be doing boffo business, but efforts to get people to return to their pre-pandemic habit of regular outings to the movie theater have been seemingly a mission: impossible.
Frank drew on treasured movie and music memories from his Gen-X youth. “I grew up in the days of midnight movies,” he says. “Every weekend, you knew your people would be at ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ There was also the Pink Floyd laser light show at our planetarium that synced Pink Floyd music to this trippy laser extravaganza.”
Frank envisions “Silents Synced” as a having the same repeatable potential that will appeal to film and music buffs, particularly fans of that particular band. Titles yet to bs announced for 2025 will be synced to They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, the Pixies and others.
Frank has spent the last two years, he says, negotiating with record labels. The films are in the public domain, but he is taking care to find and negotiate for exceptional prints. such as Kino Lorber’s restoration of “Sherlock, Jr.”
But at the heart of “Silents Synced,” Frank says, beats the imperative that has endured for more than a century of film exhibition, from the first moving images, through such technical innovations as 3-D, Cinemascope and IMAX.
“It’s all about creating an experience you cannot get anywhere else,” he says.
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