Institute Seeks Old Films Made in North Carolina
This article describes the work ofECU professor Alex Albright to preserve early North Carolina films. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: Rees, Franceine Perry, "Institute Seeks Old Films Made in North Carolina," ECU Report, Spring/Summer 1991, Volume 22, No. 3.
Filmmaking in North Carolina is nothing new.
Long before the Tar Heel state became a favorite location for Hollywood producers, some 800 movies of all types were made here. Now many are lost or forgotten, but the East Carolina University Institute for Historical and Cultural Research is looking for them.
"We're especially interested in town documentaries, local-cast productions, or footage of parades, festivals and sporting events," said Alex Albright, director of ECU's North Carolina Film Project.
"We're also documenting pre-1960 Hollywood-style movies that used North Carolina locations in filming," he added.
An example of the latter category is Ruby Gentry, a 1952 movie starring Jennifer Jones which was partially shot in Beaufort County.However, older films featuring recognized stars are rare, Albright said. The "stars" of most of the films ECU is seeking are people from North Carolina's small towns and rural communities.
The majority of pre-1960 made-in-North-Carolina films were "town documentaries," often commissioned by local boosters as an outlet for a town's civic pride.These were generally produced by specialists, such as H. Lee Waters of Lexington or Holly Smith of Charlotte.Waters was particularly prolific, shooting some 227 films of small towns between 1936 and 1942, according to Albright.
While most of the town documentaries are apparently lost, including the 1947 Lord-Waters Pictures film, Greenville on Parade, the Film Project has collected information about surviving documentaries for Reidsville, Rockingham, Burlington, Elkin, Yanceyville, Louisburg, Chapel Hill, Wilson, Scotland Neck and Albright's own hometown, Graham.The earliest town documentary appears to have been made of Statesville in 1913.
Other homegrown films include local-cast productions promised by their producers to be seen by "major Hollywood agents."
"Unlikely as this may seem, there were probably 100 or more movies made across the state in the 1930s, featuring local casts of children in an Our Gang-style comedy/adventure," Albright says. "Parents paid a fee, perhaps $5, for their children to 'star' in these, which featured as large a cast as possible."
The ECU Film Project is also seeking information on early films documenting North Carolina celebrations, veterans' reunions, manufacturing or processing operations, and even school sporting events or "home movies" which focus on places, people or events of significance.
"Imagine how significant a Wilmington high school basketball game film might be, if one of the players happened to be Michael Jordan," Albright said.
The Film Project's purpose at this point is simply to seek out and identify sound or silent films, be they "shorts" or full-length, 8-, 16- or 35-millimeter gauge, black and white or color.
Later plans call for establishment of a North Carolina Film Archive to be based at ECU.No statewide effort to preserve film in North Carolina has ever been made, according to Albright.
"There's a small collection of Waters films at Duke, and the North Carolina Museum of History has an uncatalogued film collection in storage," Albright said."But until now, there has been no systematic, comprehensive attempt to identify, collect and preserve North Carolina films."
"Meanwhile, this priceless source of information about people and places of past decades has disappeared over the years," he added.
Albright has learned that, typically, the flickering images were screened a few times in movie houses. Film reels were then filed somewhere and later forgotten.
Some of these films survive in only one copy, stored in a dusty bin in a municipal building, storage attic, theater projection booth or, possibly in the town or county public library, Albright believes. "Many of the existing films are in private collections," he said.
The old films are "uniquely valuable" as resources for historical study, said Albright's Film Project collaborator, Dr. Henry Ferrell. Ferrell is director of the ECU Institute for Historical and Cultural Research.
The town documentaries, for example, give a clear view of how a town's neighborhoods, streets, businesses and public facilities looked 40 or 50 years ago, Ferrell said. "So much of what exists on these films disappeared from the state's landscapes and cityscapes years ago.
"A North Carolina Film Archive would preserve the rich film heritage of the state, commend it to the state's citizens and promote that heritage throughout the United States," he said. "Thus far there has been nomove nor interest shown by state departments, agencies or other universities to even recognize -- much less collect and preserve -- what can be saved of this priceless history."
Assisting Albright and Ferrell with the Film Project is David Baumer of Mobile, Ala., a graduate student in history at ECU.
As part of the initial search-and-catalogue phase, the Film Project has requested public librarians across the state to send information on films in their respective localities.So far, about 30-35 librarians have responded with news of existing films.
"We've already extended by nearly a decade our knowledge of the first film made in the state," Albright says.The earliest film previously known was Then I'll Come Back to You, made in Asheville in 1915 with silent screen actress Alice Brady. Now they've learned about a much earlier production -- a fireman's parade film made by Sigmund "Pop" Lubin in Wilmington in 1907.
Other films identified recently are a 1939 Washington, N.C. Tulip Festival film, the 1925 Durham's Heroes silent feature, a 1956 film about the Yadkin River, a 1950s hurricane documentary and a feature, Stark Love, made in Robbinsville in 1927.
"These are not necessarily discoveries on our part," Albright said."People in these respective communities have known about them for years. But soon we'll have a centralized and comprehensive list of North Carolina film."
Among special-interest films already catalogued are features made specifically for black audiences, such as the three 1920s black-cast films produced by Willam S. Scales in Winston-Salem and a Greenville-made all-black cast musical featurette, Pitch a Boogie Woogie, which Albright had restored for a re-premiere several years ago. Pitch has since been shown on WUNC-TV several times and on PBS affiliates in 22 states.
Albright and Ferrell hope their efforts will result in the discovery of many pre-1960 film treasures.
Anyone with information about an early North Carolina film is asked to contact the N.C. Film Project, c/o The Institute for Historical and Cultural Research, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858.
