Audio By Carbonatix
Although the popular perception is that Hollywood has always been the epicenter of the movie universe — and it has been for about 100 years now — David Emrich, a Colorado film historian and author of Hollywood, Colorado, notes that it wasn’t always that way. “If you went to Hollywood back then, you would have seen nobody making movies until about 1908, no movie business at all, really,” says Emrich. “The film scene actually started out on the East Coast and kind of settled in L.A. Around 1913, but there was a lot of filmmaking in between.”
Some of that in-between was set around Denver, which proved an ideal place to film the developing genre of the Western — because, as Emrich points out, “Delaware didn’t really look like the West.”
That boom of filmmaking circa 1904 to 1914 — during which time some 75 to ninety Westerns were shot along the Front Range — provides the fascinating topic of “When the Real West Met the Reel West,” a talk led by Emrich that features partial screenings of five silent films from the area, with sonic accompaniment provided by noted pianist Hank Troy. The program starts at 2 p.m. today at Starz FilmCenter, in the Tivoli building on the Auraria campus; get tickets, $12, and more information at 303-595-3456 or www.denverfilm.org.
Sun., Nov. 14, 2 p.m., 2010
