Getting in on the ground floor ...

... a brief discussion with Dennis James and the film that started it all.

My lifetime journey of discovery through the history and culture of silent era film has presented me with no more valued or personally edifying contact than friend and mentor, Dennis James. As the Third Annual Port Townsend Silent Film Festival and Bainbridge Island’s Lynwood Theater prepare for his latest Pacific Northwest shows, I am reminded that Dennis was, and is an instrumental component in the modern revival of silent cinema with live accompaniment, and continues to perform as principal tour organist for the film considered a catalyst of this phenomenal movement.

I recently returned to the study of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), something I’ve intended to do since the film came up in a pre-show discussion with Dennis last year. He mentioned he has performed for the film since its 1981 American tour debut, and also as solo organist for the landmark MGM/UA video re-release. My initial viewing of Napoleon and purchase of the video (still available on VHS only) pre-date his first live silent film performance with Seattle Symphony Orchestra at Seattle’s Paramount Theater in 1985, as well as our personal acquaintance, and I’d failed to make the connection. Dennis and I discussed his fascinating and wickedly entertaining personal history with Napoleon in a correspondence interview last week.

SIFFblog - Can you describe the organ and the recording session?

DJ - The initial organ part was recorded without my knowledge (and surprisingly violating my hand-written tour contract with Carmine Coppola) by a professor of organ in Milan. I'm told he played some sort of cathedral pipe organ in an independent organ-only session during the overall soundtrack recording. Then even more surprising to all eventually involved,

when it came time in the Hollywood recording mastering studio to mix in the Italian-recorded organ track with the separately recorded and assembled Milan orchestra tracks the engineers heard bird chirps throughout the organ recording. It seems there were birds either living in or flying around in the church housing the Milan instrument and no one noticed the chirping when making the recording, so the resultant organ track was deemed unusable.

A week or so before the committed and scheduled premier of the soundtrack added 70mm edition release of Napoleon at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood I got a call from Robert A. Harris, the American tour film representative and producer of this new sound-track version. He asked me what I was doing for dinner that day. Since I was living in Columbus, OH at the time, and he was calling from Hollywood, I asked, "Are you coming here or am I going there?" He said there was a prepaid ticket waiting at the airport for me to fly out departing at 1pm and he also said for me to bring my Napoleon organ part - so I put 2 and 2 together and prepared to make the recording (rumor of that Italian session had made it to my ears by then). It was 11am so I hurriedly packed. Upon arrival I had my choice of recording locations and instruments and I selected a large Wurlitzer pipe organ at a studio-like museum installation in Sylmar, CA at a facility called San Sylmar, a byproduct of the Merle Norman cosmetics enterprise.

SIFFblog - Who attended this event?

DJ - Bob Harris (Robert A.), Carmine Coppola, Tom Luddy from Zoetrope and a host of audio technicians

SIFFblog - Did you participate in any live performances for this film?

DJ - Virtually all, following the NY premier run, conducted by Carmine Coppola plus the majority of those staged since Carmine's death, a total now numbering well into the hundreds of performances. Most recently was the one in Rome, Italy in August, 2007 at a sellout (some 9,000 attended) outdoor performance at a specially assembled performance setting built directly next to the Coliseum in the historical center of downtown Rome. I recall there was a circa 67 piece orchestra, the screen was specially constructed, 90 feet wide, and made out of boating sailcloth by a yachting sail maker. We did the traditional 3 projector linked together projection setup for the grand triptych finale and by a chance series of events, it turned out to be the first performance of the Coppola version of the film score performed with the image projected at the ideal projection speed of circa 20 or 21 fps.

SIFFblog - How does Napoleon and your participation in the recording relate to your career as the preeminent organ accompanist of silent film today?

DJ - It certainly enhanced exposure of my organ performance work into the orchestra world, and I have been bearing the career booking results ever since. I had begun playing organ and orchestra film scores in 1971 with a university performance of Broken Blossoms for which Miss Lillian Gish provided her personal print. I began regularly performing with an orchestra around 1979 or so . . . but with the Napoleon tour exposure boost in the early 1980's I began regularly marketing and then performing my own silent film orchestra and organ score restorations and reconstructions now with a list numbering over 125 orchestras around the world. Next up is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in Chicago on February 29 where I'll perform as organist with the orchestra to Buster Keaton's The General.

SIFFblog - I expect you have numerous stories involving your history with this film.

DJ - Indeed, many very funny backstage and tour anecdotes we can discuss sometime later . . . involving such oddities as a screaming peacock trying to mate with the organ speaker during a Honolulu outdoor performance / a nearly missed organ entrance cue following my running and leaping over the heads of thousands of picnickers to get down hill from the projection booth to the orchestra pit during a performance at Wolf Trap Park in D.C. / playing excerpts from the Napoleon score on a riverboat steam calliope to the entire downtown of New Orleans / and on and on.

SIFFblog - Are there any presentations of Napoleon on your current schedule?

DJ - Looks like my next performance to the film with orchestra, yet to be confirmed, is in Mexico on March 12 this year at the Twenty-Third Annual Guadalajara International Film Festival.

Photo courtesy of Puget Sound Theater Organ Society

Dennis James performs live piano accompaniment for The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), at the Third Annual Port Townsend Silent Film Festival, Saturday, January 26, 12:00 and 3:30 p.m. at The Rose Theater in Port Townsend. On Sunday, January 27, Dennis will play theater organ for Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), with 4:00 and 7:00 p.m. shows at The Historic Lynwood Theater on Bainbridge Island.

Not to be forgot …

No discussion of Abel Gance’s Napoleon should ever fail to acknowledge the tremendous debt all lovers of this film owe Kevin Brownlow and David Gill for their years of work in returning it to the screen, and the generations who would never have known it otherwise.