David Kiehn to be on 60 MINUTES

[silentfilm]

Morley Safer of 60 Minutes was in Niles, California yesterday to interview David Kiehn of the Niles Film Museum. The segment will air sometime in October. The topic of the segment will be A Trip Down Market Street (1906) and how David figured out it was filmed a few days before the San Francisco earthquake.

[Daniel Eagan]

Rick Prelinger showed a beautiful print of this in NYC last April. It's basically a camera mounted on a trolley going down the length of Market Street, slowly enough so you can pick out the businesses and pedestrians on either side. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I was entranced.

[silentfilm]

The CBS News 60 Minutes segment will air on Sunday night's program at 7 p.m EDT, but actually probably later due to the football game's runover.

[Ray Faiola]

This Sunday (10/17)

MARKET STREET – Morley Safer reports on a mystery that was solved about a 100-year-old film that we now know was made on San Francisco's Market Street. just days before the 1906 earthquake. David Browning is the producer.

[Ray Faiola]

Here's a preview of the segment:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6958548n

And the entire 12 minute 1906 film will be shown on http://www.60minutesovertime.com

[Penfold]

Beautiful clip.....hopefully I'll be able to see the show later on the overtime thingy....

[Lamar]

Conrad Friberg's "Halsted Street" (1934) sounds similar to this. Halsted is in Chicago. I've never seen it but would love to.

[Steve Pendleton]

The Internet Archive hosts copies at various levels of quality at http://www.archive.org/details/TripDown1905.
Searching YouTube will yield versions that people have set to music or otherwise mashed up.

It was reshot AFTER the quake:
I've not found a good quality copy of the original.

Maybe the attention will encourage a modern, hi-def transfer that fixes the rolling and other glitches. Appearantly the surviving print might not survive another trip down telecine street, though.

--Steve Pendleton

[Steve Pendleton]

The "dot" after my first link will break it. Try

http://www.archive.org/details/TripDown1905

without the period at the end.

--Steve Pendleton

[silentfilm]

http://www.insidebayarea.com/argus/loca ... i_16350211

Silent-film shake-up, via Fremont
By Matthew Artz
Oakland Tribune
Posted: 10/16/2010 12:00:00 AM PDT
Updated: 10/16/2010 04:55:21 AM PDT

FREMONT -- David Kiehn didn't go into the movie business seeking fame. But thanks to some sharp detective work and YouTube, the soft-spoken Fremont silent-film historian will make his small-screen debut Sunday on "60 Minutes."

The CBS newsmagazine show is devoting an 11-minute segment to Kiehn, whose research proved that a silent film of San Francisco's Market Street was shot just days before the 1906 earthquake -- not in 1905 as previously believed.

Kiehn, a 61-year-old former camera technician, never thought the months he spent five years ago poring over microfilm reels in the San Francisco Public Library would lead to an entire day with correspondent Morley Safer.

"It's really a big surprise that all of this would come about just from doing something that I was curious about," said Kiehn, who oversees the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, and authored a 2003 book on the Niles district's role in the silent-film industry.

Little was known about the 12-minute film, "A Trip Down Market Street," when Kiehn began his research in 2005.

The Library of Congress had estimated the film was made about September 1905.

But Kiehn, who had seen the film many times, wanted to know more before the Fremont film museum showed it for the 100th anniversary of the 1906 quake.

Filmmaking was a big deal around the turn of the 20th century, so Kiehn was surprised that none of the San Francisco newspapers made any mention of a


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camera crew on busy Market Street in 1905.

He took another look at the film and noticed puddles of rainwater in street. But weather reports showed that it hadn't rained a drop in September or October of 1905.

Kiehn figured that the angle of the sun and shadows that led researchers to assume the film was made in late summer or early fall 1905 would have been identical in March and April of 1906.

He started going through publications of that time and found the April 28, 1906, edition of The New York Clipper, a film-trade magazine that ran an advertisement from the Miles Brothers, touting their new film, "A Trip (Down) Market Street."

"We have the only pictures of any value ever made of San Francisco," the advertisement says. "This film was made just one week before the complete destruction of every building shown in the picture."

For additional proof, Kiehn found more advertisements for the film, also dating it to within a week of the earthquake. He later jotted down license plate numbers from cars shown in the film, and found that two cars hadn't been registered until early 1906.

Kiehn wrote about his findings, but didn't get any mainstream attention until January, when his girlfriend, Rena Dein, commented on a popular YouTube video of the film, informing readers that it was shot in 1906.

Next thing Kiehn knew, he was receiving e-mails and calls every day from film buffs who wanted to know if his findings were accurate.

The video, which has been viewed more than 1.6 million times online, also caught the eye of a "60 Minutes" producer, who was intrigued that the original film was so popular on YouTube and that it may have been shot just before the quake.

It turned out that veteran newsman Safer also was interested.

On Aug. 20, Safer strolled Fremont's Niles district with Kiehn and interviewed him for more than seven hours about the film.

"He was very nice," Kiehn said of the 78-year-old Safer. "I was immediately at ease with him."

After showing more than 1,000 silent films at the Fremont museum, Kiehn -- with his friends and neighbors also in the audience -- will get to watch himself on the big screen at the museum when the "60 Minutes" segment airs at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Kiehn hopes "60 Minutes" finally can put the issue to rest. Although the Internet Movie Database has changed its date of the film to 1906, the Library of Congress so far has refused to make the change.

Kiehn has called several of his contacts at the library to alert them of the segment. "I'm hoping this will get them to finally make it accurate," he said.

[thomas_gladysz]

Further thoughts (at least a few) at "Fremont film historian featured on 60 Minutes" at

http://www.examiner.com/silent-movie-in ... 60-minutes

and as well at "San Francisco on Film: Days Before the 1906 Quake" at

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162- ... 91709.html

[silentfilm]

According to 60 Minutes, there is more than one surviving print. Archivist Rick Prelenger was shown with one surviving print. David Kiehn detective work was the most satisfying part though. Congratulations to everyone involved.

[Steve Pendleton]

Three known prints! I'm delighted to learn that Prelinger digitially restored the best print. I'm familiar with the the Internet versions and will look for a way to see the restoration. I wonder what kind of elements survive for the post-quake remake and other Miles films. They did one in Berkeley too. It's a miracle we've got Market St, the closest thing to time-travel I'll ever know. To Rick Prelinger and David Kiehn: thank you. I appreciate it.

Steve Pendleton

[rollot24]

Bravo - well done! I've always loved that film. It's great to finally know the history.
Of course the next question is: will this new restoration be made available on DVD sometime soon?

[Marilyn Slater]

If the period in California film history, which was covered on 60 Minutes on CBS News: Historic Film: Market Street 1906, Sunday, is of interest to you; you might want to explore the fantastic website created as part of the CELEBRATING THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF HOLLYWOOD AND THE MOVIE STAR (1910-2010) by William M. Drew
http://william-m-drew.webs.com/prehisto ... lywood.htm

With real good stuff about the work of David Kiehn and a link to information about his book Here is a quote from one of the pages:

“It was the Miles Brothers--Harry, Herbert, and Earl C.--of San Francisco who took the first step toward California production. The Ohio-born brothers had entered the cinema field by exhibiting films in Alaska during the Gold Rush. Then in San Francisco during the summer of 1902, they became a major force in the industry when they established a film exchange, the first in the United States. Soon, from buying, exhibiting and renting to fellow distributors films made by others, the brothers graduated to producing their own films. They became well-known for the quality of their actuality films at a time when audiences were enthralled by these cinematic opportunities to vicariously visit distant places, much as moviegoers a half century later would be thrilled by Cinerama. As Geoffrey Bell noted in his history of early Bay Area filmmaking, "The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen," the actualities shot by the Miles Brothers were particularly innovative. Instead of utilizing a static camera, wrote Bell, "the Miles team began to use the camera lens as the eye of a moving spectator." In "A Trip Down Mt. Tamalpais," for example, the camera was mounted in front of the train descending from the Marin County peak, revealing panoramas of the valley and the bay that captivated the spectators of the day. "A Trip Down Market Street," shot in April of 1906 with the camera mounted on a trolley car, used one continuous take in a full reel of film to provide a vivid depiction of San Francisco's bustling thoroughfare. Historian David Kiehn, who identified the film as a Miles Brothers production, also discovered through his research that Harry Miles put his technical ingenuity to good effect by equipping the camera with a thousand foot magazine capable of shooting the entire journey down the long street without need of reloading.

http://www.william-m-drew.webs.com/