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Reconnecting with Hollywood East
by Richard Horgan |
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11/4/2008 at 12:17:30 PM |
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Ask the average film fan where the art of silent moviemaking originated and you’re likely to get “Hollywood” as an answer. But the fact is that this honor belongs to Fort Lee, New Jersey, a town across the Hudson River from New York that last year celebrated its centenary as “the birthplace of the motion picture industry.” It was back in 1907 that future west coast all-star D.W. Griffith snagged his first starring role as an actor in the silent short Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (directed by – no kidding - Thomas Edison), and a few years thereafter, the community was a bustling silent movie studio locale that would help spark in 1912 the creation of what would eventually become Universal Studios.
On November 16th, the ghosts of New Jersey’s pre-talkie past will be on vivid display via the premiere at the Morris Museum in Morristown of Silent, a low-budget silent film spoof shot last year at Jersey locations a little further west of Fort Lee that were also once used by the industry’s pioneers (places like Boontown Falls and the Madison Presbyterian Historical Cemetery). And thanks to its plot, this highly unusual comedy-horror-romance-mystery written and directed by local filmmaker Michael Pleckaitis also has the black and white feel of more recent films like 1983’s Zelig and 1998’s Pleasantville.
Katie Ritz stars as Abigail Archibald, a woman whose sudden ability to speak and sing turns an otherwise silent world upside down and eventually sparks a massive witch hunt. Last month, Silent received a rave review from JoBlo.com after it played at the REEL Jersey Film Festival, and one of the great advantages it has in terms of a low-budget flick starring relative unknowns is that the style of the movie allows the performers to overact… and get away with it.
Pleckaitis comes to Silent after having made a pair of low-budget horror films that presaged the M. Night disaster The Happening (2000’s Trees and 2004’s Trees 2: The Root of All Evil). Even more paradoxically, the idea for the movie came to him several years ago when, while dozing on a New Jersey Transit train, he was jolted awake by a woman shrieking into her cell phone.
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