Photographs of Billy B. Van as a younger man in a comedic role; and later in life, a well-to-do businessman. On view at the Sunapee Historical Society.
During the silent film era, the motion picture studio Reelcraft called its star Billy B. Van one of the best comedians on earth. With his malleable features and air of genial befuddlement, Van was a prototypical vaudevillian, offering up broad jokes and slapstick gags in the short flicks that screened before the main feature.
Van was also a filmmaker who, in the teens and early ‘20s, shot films in Lake Sunapee, Georges Mills, and Newport, New Hampshire. But with the introduction of “talkies” in the late 1920s, the heyday of silent movies was over. Like other silent film actors, Van faded from the larger public memory, never achieving the fame of a Chaplin or Keaton.
Now Van’s work is finding modern audiences with the restoration of some of his “lost” films.
On Sunday, Nov. 1, the Newport and Sunapee Historical Societies will screen two of Van’s rediscovered and digitally restored films, Where Are Your Husbands? and Van-ar-chy, at the Newport Opera House, with live musical accompaniment by South Pomfret, VT, pianist and composer Bob Merrill.
The event will also feature a pre-screening introduction to Van’s life and a post-screening Q&A with Lebanon film restorer and archivist John Tariot, Newport Historical Society board member Dean Stetson, and Becky Rylander, president of the Sunapee Historical Society.
The two 20-minute films, said Stetson, tie together “our history, which is very important to us. … There are some scenes shot right in Newport that are very familiar, but it was done over a hundred years ago.”
Becky Rylander, president of the Sunapee Historical Society, and Dean Stetson, Newport Historical Society board member, stand in front of a photographic tribute to Billy B. Van in the Sunapee Historical Society. All photos by Nicola Smith.
The two historians, interviewed at the Sunapee Historical Society and Museum, hope that the films may jog memories of other Van films that haven’t yet surfaced. (Van produced at least five other films, which may still be out there, Tariot said.) And audience members may recognize some of the as-yet-unidentified locations that Van used, or recall family members who might have served as extras, further rooting the films in the community, Tariot said.
The story of Van’s rediscovery threads through film and American history and involves more than its fair share of serendipity.
Tariot, who has lived in the Upper Valley for 30 years, spent time with his children on Lake Sunapee during the summer. In an interview in his Lebanon home studio, Tariot said that he began researching Van’s life in 2016 after reading up on the history of the area. He learned that not only had Van built a casino, but had also created his own movie studio, which he called the Equity Motion Picture Company.
“So I did a quick search and found that there was really no record of his films. And I said, well, okay, I'm a film archivist…” Tariot said. Working to locate and restore Van’s films has been a preoccupation since then.
“I saw that as something where I could contribute, not just to scratch my own personal itch, but to give this community—this special place that I loved—something back, and give them some history that they didn't know was out there,” Tariot said.
John Tariot, a film archivist and restorer in his home studio in Lebanon, looks at a reel from Billy B. Van's film Where Are Your Husbands?
In 2016, Tariot discovered a short strip of film from Where Are Your Husbands in a trunk in a barn on a Newport property which Van once owned. That led, Tariot said, to a “one-in-a-million” discovery of a print of Husbands in a Library of Congress vault in Virginia. After Tariot restored Where Are Your Husbands, it had a public screening in 2017 in Sunapee.
Earlier this year, a Japanese film student looking for films centered on the theme of “anarchy” found an old print of Van-ar-chy in Sendai, Japan, according to The Guardian. The student then tracked down Tariot on the internet. How Van-ar-chy got to Japan, no one knows, Tariot said.
Any discovery of a silent film is significant, because experts estimate that 75-90 percent of silent films have vanished, largely because the old film stock was highly flammable. “So anything that we can find from that era adds to the larger body of knowledge about silent film production globally,” Tariot added. Van-ar-chy’s reappearance has attracted widespread press attention, speaking perhaps to the public’s ongoing fascination with what films from more than a century ago say both about their time and ours.
A piece of film strip from Where Are Your Husbands? The clapper in the frame that reads "NG" indicates that the previous take was "no good."
Where Are Your Husbands, made not long after the end of World War I, imagines a world in which women went to war and to work while the men struggled haplessly to take care of the home and the children. And with its story of tensions between rich and poor and of unpredictable social violence, Van-ar-chy demonstrates that some subjects are perennial.
It is believed that Van first came to the Lake Sunapee area around 1900 after a diagnosis of tuberculosis, Rylander said. He bought properties in Georges Mills and then Newport, and was married twice.
When motion pictures began to achieve wide popularity, Van may have seen a way to broaden his appeal and his audience, Rylander said. He “started making some films that he often showed, along with vaudeville acts, as sort of a way to combine both art forms. And perhaps that prolonged the life of the vaudeville acts,” Rylander added.
In some ways, Van’s arc of continual reinvention strikes a particularly American note, as Van optimistically hopscotched from one career to the next: vaudevillian, filmmaker, dairy farmer, timber grower, pine soap maker, inventor, casino owner, and author.
Newport also owes Van a debt of gratitude for dubbing it “the sunshine town,” Stetson said, although there was noticeable grumbling when Van, still considered an outsider, proposed renaming Georges Mills as Van Harbor. The locals “did not take kindly to that, as you can imagine,” Rylander said.
An assortment of photographs, drawings and cartoons showing episodes from Billy B. Van's life, on view in the Sunapee Historical Society.
When the motion picture industry moved to Southern California, Van stayed in the east. He donated money to people and causes in Newport, and regularly attended town meetings, where he was renowned for his fiery and prolonged orations, Stetson said. He died in 1950 at the age of 80.
With both of his films, but particularly Van-ar-chy, Stetson said, Van is imparting “an age-old message of: ‘Where there's calamity you can benefit from it, and you can get out of it as well.’ And in the end, he does, and I think it's just a great representation of our local culture and the perseverance of the indomitable spirit.”
“Van-ar-chy Comes Home: Billy B. Van’s Lost Silent Comedies” takes place on Sunday, Nov. 1 at 2 pm at the Newport Opera House. The showing is sold out—but if you’re lucky enough to have tickets, doors open at 1:30 pm.
Nicola Smith is a freelance writer and former Valley News staff writer who lives in Tunbridge, VT.
