Transcription
Dan: My name is Dan Beams, and I will be talking about the 100th anniversary of the Schoharie Street movies. So, in 2017, the Schoharie County Historical Society partnered with other organizations and other individuals to recreate the first Street movies event that happened in Schoharie.
So, the original event happened in the spring of 1917. And of course, these were all silent films. And so one of the partners we had was Dwight Grimm, who owns and operates the Greenville Drive in. He had connections at the Library of Congress and was able to research and find what the first movie was that we ran in 1917, which silent movie? He knew some people at the Library of Congress and was able to borrow the first real which had been copied of that original movie. He drove down to the Library of Congress to get it. He also knew some people, I believe, in Massachusetts that were old projector collectors and old projectors that actually worked. And he was able to make a connection with a guy that came out and had an original, I believe it was an Edison hand-cranked projector from right around the time period that we were able to use.
We also had some other friends that were into the antique automobile hobby and were able to loan us, I believe it was a restored early 1900s Model-A Ford truck with an open flatbed. And so we were able to put the projector in the flatbed of the truck and put the screen up against the courthouse where it had originally been and we’re actually able to locate an organist who collected a lot of the old scores, the music scores from all these silent films. And he came out as well to play the music accompaniment to it. And we had to work quite diligently with some of the local authorities to get permission to block off that small section of Main Street. They allowed us to do it for about 20 minutes.
We also invited a good number of the antique car clubs to come and park and watch the movie, which was represented in a lot of the history and the old photographs. It wasn’t just people with chairs. It was a lot of people in cars that would come and sit and watch the movie. In 1917 and up through 1942, it was a big event. Thursday, every Thursday, pretty much from June through to Labor Day, and everybody came to shop.
So, Schoharie, was very, very busy. And it really generated an awful lot of business for the village of Schoharie. And so recreating this was an awful lot of fun. A few things that you learn are that if you don’t pay attention because there are very few subtitles, you might miss some of the action if you’re not paying attention. The other thing you realize is how important the music is because there are no speaking parts, nothing audible. You often learn an awful lot from the music that’s being played, the mood that the music creates. And so it really, I think, taught us an awful lot about what the old silent movies were like, how interesting and intriguing they were, and of course, how much the Village of Schoharie benefited from this event that apparently drew tens of thousands of people in every week from Schenectady and in greater areas wider.
So, it was a great boom to the to the village, I think, in the economics of the county. And it was an awful lot of fun to recreate that event and see what it was really like and have an understanding of what people enjoyed 100 years ago. And that was part of my experience with the hundredth anniversary of the Schoharie Street movies.