Buster Keaton appears in Sherlock, Jr..
Photo courtesy of Josh Frank
by Ryan Silberstein, Staff Writer
For those not aware, Silents Synced is a new theater program created by Josh Frank that pairs silent films from the public domain with rock albums to create a new score experience. Silents Synced started with Nosferatu, pairing F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) with Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, which I had the pleasure of seeing in the theater. Josh Frank has also paired R.E.M. with Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). In preparation for his newest release, which tracks A Woman of the World (1925) with Pearl Jam, MovieJawn sat down with Frank to get a behind the scenes look at how he puts together these film/rock combinations.
A Woman of the World (1925) X Pearl Jam debuts February 13. Theater list and other event links available on the Silents Synced website.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photo Courtesy of Josh Frank
How do you decide how to pair a film and an artist or an album? Like, what’s your thought process? Does it start with the film? Does it start with the music?
JF: What I did was start with actually working on three or four at a time. So I’ll pick movies that I really want to work with, and then I’ll start playing around with artists that might work. My first thought is always: what artists would make sense with this type of material?
For Nosferatu, I think I had like five or six artists that I knew might be good fits, but then there’s a lot of things that narrow it down to the one perfect one. For instance, I’ll start looking through the catalogs of those artists to see if there’s any albums that would work. More importantly, if there’s enough albums in their catalog that could fill the whole runtime. Part of what I do is I try to find movies under an hour and fifteen minutes because that’s about the length of an album plus the album’s B-sides. Or instead of B-sides, I might look at the album before or after in order to keep some sort of narrative tension. I’ll start experimenting. One of the first ones I thought of for Nosferatu was Radiohead. I immediately thought of Kid A and Amnesiac because they are exactly an hour and a half long and so is the movie. The first time I laid them out, they didn’t work because I put them in order of when they were made, Kid A into Amnesiac. I was really bummed out. But after a couple of days, I realized I should try switching the albums. So I did Amnesiac into Kid A and it was perfect. From that point, I go in and I do some micro-editing with the title sequences and the dialogue boxes in order to get it to hit narratively better.
So then I’ll have like five or six that are sort of demo syncs, where they mostly work or they don’t. The idea is that it shouldn’t take too much work for them to work. That’s the magic. Now that I have the songs kind of laid out, seeing if I could make each song work with each scene correctly. And if I can make that happen, then then it’s like, okay, I got one, you know?
Photo courtesy of Josh Frank
That totally makes sense. It is a mix of inspiration and trial and error and a little bit of that magic of just finding the combination that just seems to gel together.
JF: It’s funny. You can go half your life without realizing you’re good at something, Or you have this special gift and you don’t know what its potential is. Because I’ve had my own movie theater for 15 years here in Austin; I did everything running the movie theater by myself. One of the things I did was edit together all of the pre-show material. I liked taking my favorite rock and roll songs and using them for montages. At Christmas time, I’d take clips from Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, etc., and edit them to a song, you know, to get people pumped. And by doing that over all these years, I just got good at finding those beats. And so from doing that, I knew how to edit. I knew how to sync music. I have a deep history with cinema and rock and roll, because I’ve used music in my pre-shows but also because I’ve written books about the music industry. It is like all of these little talents that sort of served little purposes came together to make me the artist of doing Silents Synced. I think that alone is a good example of how when you’re a young artist and you’re like, you know, grinding the bits to try and make your mark in what you do, that the other things that you do are just as important, even though they don’t seem to necessarily be exactly on the pathway to the one top thing you want to accomplish as an artist or as a creator.
I’m very curious how Pearl Jam’s Vs. and Vitology, which have a more aggressive sound even compared to the rest of Pearl Jam’s discography. How do they fit with A Woman of the World?
JF: I’m actually incredibly proud of this one, and I hope theaters pick it up. REM and Radiohead and The Pixies were my go-to bands in the ‘90s; I really wasn’t a big Pearl Jam fan, but I do remember the one album I really liked was Versus.
When I discovered this movie, which is really a forgotten gem of a silent movie…I was watching it and the first band that came to mind was Pearl Jam because there’s a small town feeling to their alternative rock. There’s a warmth and romance to their stories.
So when I put Vs. over it, it did not work seamlessly. There were things I would need to figure out, workarounds. There was like 20 seconds here, 30 seconds there where it just didn’t make sense to start the next song. And that’s a long time to cut something. So in this case I used some of the original music from the original track in those little spaces. It kind of comes up and it works because when it happens, it’s specific to that moment that makes sense in the narrative that it wouldn’t have the Pearl Jam music. But all the songs, in the places they are, were right.
They were the right songs, and a couple of them were so dead on perfect, like “Animal.” That was the song that I first thought of when I watched it, because it’s a song about a woman who’s been scorned by someone. And she’s saying, I’d rather be with an animal than you, you know? And that is sort of the main throughline of the narrative of this woman’s story, not to mention she has a tattoo and it’s the 1920s. She’s literally the first punk rock girl to exist in movies. Imagine Footloose in the 1920s with Pearl Jam music.
Artwork courtesy of Josh Frank
I think also there’s a lot of perception about cultural things that are a hundred years old that they can’t be relevant today.
JF: You see a lot of people like going to silent movies because it’s a classy hip thing to do, but you know what you’re getting into. It’s not going to give you goosebumps like a new movie might, but when you put a modern, score behind it, one that’s familiar to people in a different context, it it really changes the experience and and puts it on another level to where you could be watching a hundred-year-old movie and be excited about it.
Here’s one thing I discovered from the process that I find really fascinating as a film lover and a cinema historian. One of my tricks or rules when I make these is I don’t cut into the actual film story, but I will make cuts into the dialogue boxes. And that helps me tighten the songs and where they hit best. But what that also did is it made the characters and the story 100% more engaging because you weren’t sitting there for 30 seconds watching one sentence of dialogue. And what I realized is those dialogue boxes really slow the pace of a movie down. Especially for people that are used to movies from, you know, starting in the ‘80s and ‘90s and, God forbid, the 2000s.
One thing that people have done for a number of years is live scores with silent films. Some peers of mine here in Austin have a rock band called The Invincible Czars, and they tour the country doing live rock rescores to Nosferatu, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and others. They’re very popular. There’s absolutely a place for those, and I love that. But also it’s hard to get live bands to do a show. It’s costly. It’s about when they’re available. It’s getting them there. It takes a lot to have even just one showing of that. And usually it is just one. So what I wanted to do is create another tier of that kind of entertainment that didn’t replace that but complimented it.
With Silents Synced, you don’t need the band to be there for it to be exciting. And it’s giving access to independent theaters that never would be able to have that kind of programming. All they have to do is have the DCP delivered to them, and they have this new scoring of a silent movie by a famous band. My initial goal was to offer it to independent cinemas first and see if they would take advantage of it, because I did recognize that there was a need for some type of new entertainment use for cinemas that could sort of add new revenue.
That’s something that I’ve always felt very passionate about. When you’re in a smaller pool of creatives, these institutions need to work as a community with content in order to raise up everyone.
A lot of these movies are in the public domain, but Pearl Jam and Radiohead and R.E.M. definitely are not. What’s the process like in terms of getting the rights to the music?
JF: With the music, you have to go through the band, you have to get their thumbs up, and then you have to go to the label and get their thumbs up to accept what the band accepted. It’s the least fun part of the process, but I had a lot of goodwill with these first ones because I made it clear, I’m not trying to make millions of dollars but that I believe in this for cinemas enough that if I am successful, I will feel like I’ve accomplished something and hopefully I’ll make back what I put into it, plus a little extra.
Is there a band or a specific album that you really want to use that you haven’t found the right movie for?
JF: There’s a lot of bands that I’d love to do this with. One of them is Nine Inch Nails. I would love to do something, but their label is Universal and they’re very hardcore with with their licensing.. So that’s sort of a non-starter, at least for now. But that’s sort of my white whale, I think, of this whole thing. But I’d love to find a way to do something someday with the Beastie Boys. Particularly with their two instrumental albums that are awesome that I think would be really cool to do something with.
I’m still looking for the right fit for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I’m still looking for the right fit for Sunrise.
With the death of so much print media and meaningful journalism, it is important now more than ever to support the writers and outlets you love.
If you enjoyed this article, show your support by donating to our writer. All proceeds go directly to the writer. Recommended donation is $5.
A WoTF Production
Powered by teamwork. And movies.