In 2014, 19th Century Willowbrook Village received a Maine Humanities Council Infrastructure Grant that partially funded the development of a mobile silent movie palace. This "palace" consisted of an enclosure in the shape of the museum's early motion picture projector which once belonged to Saco, Maine resident Ivory Fenderson ( who also was the original owner of the museum's 1894 Herschell-Armitage Steam Riding Gallery, or what is better known more as the "Willowbrook horse carousel". Fenderson, in partnership with "Haley",also travelled with an early movie projector, which included hand colored slides as well as cellulose film, setting it up at halls and auditoriums for public viewings at between "10 and 15 cents" a show at the turn of the twentieth century. Accompanying his presentation of "Moving Pictures" was a "Home Grand Graphophone", which is also in the Curran Homestead Village collection gifted by Willowbrook, and it was this early phonograph that plays wax cylinder records that "perfectly" reproduced the human voice and duplicated instrumental music "with perfect fidelity, tone, and brilliancy", according to Fenderson's own promotional material. Curran has quite a large collection of these wax cylinders that were largely produced by Edison; we have a collection of early shellac disc records dating from the first decade of the twentieth century as well also produced by Edison.
In addition, the "palace" created with assistance of the Maine Humanities Council includes a larger enclosure consisting of 4' x 24" x 36" plywood box constructions that have been painted with an ancient Byzantine tile motif. When stacked in a large rectangle, seating is arranged within for movie viewing. This is a cozy theater experience with a wood and canvas viewing screen. The palace has been set up at various locations around the Newfield campus including the Amos Straw ballroom above the Country Store. The desired effect of the construction is to re-create movie viewing from another time especially for our younger visitor; we also have a pop corn machine reminiscent if the time that some may have enjoyed the product of at this year's Bluegrass Festival at Fields Pond. Visitors at Newfield's movie festivals have also experienced live piano accompaniment through the contributions of Dr. Peter Stickney who lives adjacent to the museum and serendipitously took a graduate music course that explored composing musical scores for silent movies. The music is largely impromptu and amazingly fitting for each of the movies; kudos to Peter for tackling with mastery even some of the very long features like Douglas Fairbanks in one my favorites---The Thief of Baghdad.
The idea for the silent movie theater at the museum was originally inspired by a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York and the exhibition of Red Groom's 1920s Egyptian Revival Silent Movie Palace on temporary constructed within that museum briefly in the early 2000s. In 2012, as Executive Director of the Town of Warwick, NY Historical Society, and in partnership with the Neversink History Museum, that is located in upstate New York on the site of some early D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and other silent movie pioneers' early productions before Hollywood was born , Orange County, NY's first silent movie festival was born with a selection of silent movies, commentary and piano accompaniment. This inspired the realization of the more elaborate experience of a festival at Newfield, Maine in 2014.
Much appreciation goes to women from the Alfred Corrections Department who assisted in the painting of the tile mosaic motif on the "palace" walls over many weeks. Curran plans to set up the silent movie palace in Orrington during the summer of 2018 and include some period theater seating recently donated by board member Irv Marsters, which came from the holdings of Burr Printing which he recently acquired and donated many of its furnishing and equipment from to the Curran. Much of the early letterpress printing equipment will be the core of a letterpress printing shop at Orrington eventually. Letterpress printer Dennis Watson and Burr Printing continues on at the Bangor Letter Shop at the Penobscot Plaza on Washington Street in Bangor but the business was for many years located on Central Street in Bangor. No one is sure where the seating came from but we would like to think that it's no coincidence that it came from the same site razed during the Fire of 1911 where once stood Bangor's own "White Way" of movie theaters and vaudeville houses including the once well known Norombega Hall, which contained the Gaiety vaudeville house, and the Nickel, the city's first movie theater; maybe the seats from these establishments survived, and we can continue to experience silent movies in them as early Bangor residents once had!
Peter Stickney plays musical accompaniment to Stan Laurel's Blood and Sand:
https://youtu.be/-xhaPd6oiCk
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| Creation of the silent movie palace with Byzantine tile motif in progress. |
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| Detail of Byzantine tile motif; early movie palaces often used ancient motifs from Roman, Moorish, or other civilizations to transport the audience to another place. These palaces were often constructed of plaster and wood rather than stone and mortar of actual history; these were among our first virtual realities in America. |
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| This is the enclosure representing the original Fenderson projector and serving as place where a modern LED projector is hidden from view. The movies are all digitized versions but we may attempt to show a few shorts on regular film. We are always looking for Super 8MM and 16 MM copies of early films to be donated. |
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| The first Orange County Silent Movie Festival at the Warwick Historical Society in 2012. |
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| A silent movie festival at Warwick Historical Society with piano accompaniment in 2012. |
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This is the silent movie projector once owned and operated by Ivory Fenderson.  |
