TCM SPOTLIGHT: NATIONAL SILENT MOVIE DAY

From TCM:

September 29th | 9 Movies

To commemorate National Silent Movie Day (yes, it’s a real thing), TCM casts its klieg lights on an era when, to quote Norma Desmond, “this business had the eyes of the whole world.”

The silent movie era is one of the richest in film history. It was a time of invention and innovation, a “make-it-up-as-we-go” camaraderie. Director King Vidor, in an appearance at the American Film Institute’s series of conversations with Hollywood professionals (the Harold Lloyd Master Seminars), shared, “The important thing to realize is that we were all trying out things, figuring out how cameras worked, how to create effects. It was just more informal then, no hierarchy. Easy to get permissions and to go ahead with ideas, I could tell the head guy an idea, and he could say, ‘Yes, go ahead’… He didn’t say, ‘What stars are you going to have?’ I didn’t have stars. I had unknowns. He just said, ‘It sounds good, why don’t you just go ahead with it?’ That’s the way the best pictures were made. Just by saying, ‘Okay, go ahead.’”

Read the full article below:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/Programming%20Article/021833/tcm-spotlight-national-silent-movie-day/