Restoring 1927 silent movie presents challenges, rewards

Film historian Jeffrey Crouse likens it to being “an Egyptologist and you open the tomb.”

Except that, in this case, the artifact is a silent movie that “eyes haven’t seen for a long time.”

The silent movie’s title: “Little Mickey Grogan,” the subject of a crowdfunding campaign (www.gofundme.com/2fpwc9w) and a documentary featuring its now-96-year-old star, Lassie Lou Ahern.

Crouse, who teaches at Nevada State College in Henderson, and a student crew interviewed Ahern last year at her home in Prescott Valley, Arizona, for a 48-minute documentary that will accompany the restored “Little Mickey Grogan’s” DVD release.

That DVD release can’t happen, however, until the project raises $14,800 for the restoration, Crouse says.

Once the money is raised, restoration “gets pretty complicated,” according to Indianapolis-based preservationist Eric Grayson, who’s overseeing the “Little Mickey Grogan” project.

The process begins with scanning the almost 90-year-old nitrate film print, one frame at a time, onto a computer hard drive. For the 65-minute “Little Mickey Grogan,” that means scanning more than 100,000 frames, Grayson points out.

Because the only existing print of the movie was discovered in France, the restoration will require replacing the French intertitles (title cards containing dialogue or narration) with ones in English. (Fortunately, Ahern still has the original script, but the restoration team will have to duplicate the typeface used for the original intertitles — and replace the movie’s missing title sequence.)

Stabilizing jittery images, removing splices and lines and frame-by-frame “dedusting” to eliminate scratch marks and dust are other stages in the restoration process, Grayson explains. The final step: creating an archival film print of “Little Mickey Grogan,” because digital is not considered archival.

The fact that a print of “Little Mickey Grogan” exists at all is cause for celebration, he notes; only six of about 300 features released by its distributor, FBO, survive.

“Right now, it’s living history,” Crouse says of “Little Mickey Grogan” and Lassie Lou Ahern’s memories of the silent era. “Once these last remaining people have passed, it’s just history.”

Read more stories from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.