For more than 40 years, Ben Model has been accompanying silent films and finding new ways to bring them to audiences all over the world. Besides being a resident film accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Library of Congress Packard Theatre campus in Culpeper, Virginia, Model plays at film festivals like the TCM Classic Film Festival and the Kansas Silent Film Festival, along with performing at theatres, universities, and museums worldwide.

Model serves as the programmer accompanist for the Silent Clowns Film Series at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center as well as a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University. During the pandemic, he created the Silent Comedy Watch Party with Steve Massa, presenting silent comedy shorts over YouTube with his live accompaniment, which now happens monthly.

Model’s recorded silent film scores can be heard on various Blu-ray and DVD releases, TCM, and his YouTube Channel, as well as DVD/ Blu-ray releases of undiscovered silent gems through his Undercrank Productions, mostly featuring restored and preserved prints from the Library of Congress in a cobranding arrangement.

Undercrank celebrates its 10th anniversary in June with a massive Sale-a-Bration through various DVD/Blu-ray outlets, showcasing rare and forgotten silent films that deserve to be seen by wide audiences. I interviewed Model about Undercrank Productions and work in preserving and promoting silent films. The interview has been edited for length.

What got you interested in silent films?

I haven’t the faintest idea! My mom says I discovered Charlie Chaplin on TV when I was a toddler back in the 1960s when they used to show silent comedies on TV as kid’s programming or filler.

How did you begin accompanying films?

I began accompanying films while a film production student at NYU. I grew up being interested in silent films and taking piano lessons. At NYU during this time, they were showing 16mm prints that had no scores, so the silent films were being shown silent. It bothered me that the films were not going over well. My second year of college I went to the head of the film department and volunteered to play piano, even though I had never performed as a pianist. I think secretly I always wanted to try it. I initially began playing once a week at the Intro class taught by Robert Sklar and then found myself playing for William K. Everson’s class, which met twice a week. I made a point of meeting people in New York City who accompanied silent film to get tips and advice. I spoke with people like William Perry, Donald Sosin, and Lee Erwin. He had been a movie organist in the 1920s and at the time I met him was head organist at Carnegie Hall Cinema. Because Lee was in his late 70s and had more time, he became like a mentor to me.

Undercrank discs at Critics’ Choice Videos

Undercrank discs at DeepDiscount.com

Undercrank discs at Movies Unlimited

I know that you mostly improvise your scores, but how do you determine if you are going to use piano or organ with your accompaniment?

If I have the choice in a live performance setting, I normally use piano for films that would have been mostly what you would have heard before the Great War, with some exceptions, like “Intolerance.” Sometimes, for a Blu-ray or DVD project, I will do both so that there is a variety. I try to include the sound of the theatre organ on my home video releases so that the people hear it. It was popular during the 1920s and is underrepresented on the scores for home video releases. It’s a part of presentation preservation. That’s why I really enjoy the virtual theatre organ software that I use – because it allows me to take that sound to other places that don’t have a theatre organ, so that I can bring the sound of the mighty Wurlitzer anywhere so that people will know about it.

I want to thank you for Undercrank Productions. You’ve released some wonderful and obscure silent films bringing back performers who were huge stars of their time who are largely forgotten today because it is virtually impossible to see their work. How did Undercrank Productions come about?

It was never an intentional thing. It was like other things I’ve done with silent films over the last few decades, once I had the workflow together, it just kept working. The initial idea was that I had a couple of stacks of silent comedy shorts in 16mm that were the only copy or rarely circulated. I did a Kickstarter in 2012 that was released as “Accidently Preserved” in June 2013. This hadn’t been done before. Crowdfunding was extremely new, so the idea of using social media and email lists to go hat in hand to fans was brand new.

I realized the product needed three things:

• good films with quality scans
• good music
• good cover art

I realized that box art is your first line of defense online and I can’t emphasize it enough. I hired my friend Marlene Weisman who does amazing artwork. She is a brilliant graphic designer and artist! In the 1990s, she worked on “Saturday Night Live” doing logos and product design.

She is also a huge fan of the silent era and manages in her graphic wizardry to straddle the two eras.

“Accidentally Preserved” worked! It took a few weeks to get funded. Dino Everett at the USC HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive did the scans. I scored them and my friend Marlene did the box art. Dave Kehr, then reviewing home video releases for the New York Times, reviewed it in June 2013 at the end of a review for “Safety Last.”

My colleague Steve Massa suggested the films of Musty Suffer. I had seen a couple of the films at Slapsticon. There were 30 films, and 24 of them survived at the Library of Congress. Anyone can buy files from the Library of Congress. In conversations with LOC film curator and preservationist Rob Stone, on my various trips to accompany films there, he came up with the idea of having a co-branding arrangement with the Library of Congress, which was along the lines of what they had set up the year before with Kino Lorber. From Musty Suffer onwards until today, I have been working with the Library of Congress helping to get films they preserved and that deserve to be seen out there.

I thought that using crowdfunding supported the idea of empowering fans. If you chip in and help get these things out there, it will help fill out your shelves. I knew that there was an interest in films that the more established labels wouldn’t necessarily be interested in releasing. Manufacturing-on-demand means there is no minimum sales number that you have to adhere to. Once production costs are covered, there is no risk.

Did you think ten years later you’d still be going strong with this?

I didn’t. I wasn’t sure at first. For the first five years, I would finish one film and think I can’t continue to do this, but then I would come across a film that I would think would really need to be available…and kept going. It became another part of the work I do. I was able to license some of the films to TCM, and that helps with awareness and reaching new audiences.

I am now doing theatrical distribution on some of the titles as well, like Tom Mix and Marion Davies. I am now looking at where all can this go and is there a way to get more product out without cloning myself. Perhaps other people can do it or others can take up the cause and I can work with them to release their projects. Crowdfunding makes it possible.

Tell me about the Sale-a-Bration for Undercrank.

This is one of the rare occasions that Facebook is actually useful. Last November it reminded me that 10 years ago I had launched my first Kickstarter and a lightbulb went off over my head that June 2023 is the 10th anniversary of my first release. The Raymond Griffith disc is our 28th release. To celebrate, all of the Undercrank Productions titles will be on sale anywhere from 15-40% off depending on the platform. Throughout June, DeepDiscount, Critics’ Choice Video, Movies Unlimited, WOW HD, and Amazon will have all the Undercrank titles marked down. This will be a chance for anybody who has been on the fence about trying something they haven’t heard of or has watched through the Silent Comedy Watch Party to pick up something that isn’t well known. Remember, the reasony you haven’t heard of these films isn’t because they’re forgettable, it’s just that they’ve been forgotten. And the other thing I’m hoping is for people to celebrate that it’s been 10 years of fan-funded releases of newly discovered silent film gems that will help to fill out a landscape beyond the tentpole of the Mount Rushmore movies and stars that everyone tends to already know about.

How did the idea for The Silent Comedy Watch Party come about and why do you continue to keep it going with Steve Massa? You and he make a great team.

I had had the idea of virtual screenings from several years ago but didn’t want to encourage people to stay home and not come to live performances. But the week everything shut down, within 48 hours, every gig I had cancelled, and I thought, “I have this idea in my back pocket… let’s see if it will work”. The live-streamed pilot was March 15, 2020, projecting films on a wall over my piano and pointing my iPhone at it.The response was incredibly enthusiastic. Everyone on the planet was under so much stress; we suddenly had to stay home for we didn’t know how long, people were getting sick and going to hospitals, we didn’t know when it was going to end, and people really needed the release of just laughing for an hour and a half. I made technical improvements to the production a few months in. My darling wife Mana had not operated a camera or tripod in her life, and became what she called “the accidental cameraperson” for the show. The support we got from people who supplied us with files and gave us the okay to use DVD versions of films they had produced was overwhelming.

We never put the The Silent Comedy Watch Party behind a paywall; we were doing it for people who were watching all over the planet. We are still doing it because people are still watching, with basically the same number of total views as the shutdown, this time more from watching it later than live. Doing it once a month works for me because on the one hand, I need to go back to in-person screenings, but at the same time, it’s as if we’ve created a repertory cinema in the virtual realm, where we can’t see the people but there is an audience of people who come to the show on a regular basis. Maybe people still need to watch it to help themselves feel better about whatever they’re going through. People just need to laugh. The plan is to continue on a monthly basis, and we’ll see. It’s a lot of work. What really has been heartening is going back to in-person shows and hearing from people who thank us for helping them get through the pandemic and what it meant to them. It’s very moving for me and given me a new look at what it means to be an entertainer, giving people the chance to forget about their problems for a little while.

The other reason we want to continue is that there are a lot of people around the globe who don’t live near an art house that also shows silent films. What we’re doing live on the Silent Comedy Watch Party is the closest thing there is to the experience of going to a silent film show.

What do you get out of accompanying silents and what do you hope audiences take away from watching them?

For me, it’s more about sharing the films than playing the music. My film accompaniment is an extension of my interest in sharing films with others. I feel like what I do helps other silent film shows to happen. It helps people who want to see silent films have a good time. What I think I want people to get out of them, for those just discovering it, is for them to say, “This was much more fun than I thought it was going to be!”. And for folks who are fans, to just have a great time enjoying the films as they were intended by the people who made them. The heart of it all is audience preservation. The shows have to have support in order to make more shows happen especially at a time when we’re all getting used to gathering again. I really get a sense from being really aware of the vibe in the room of the audience dynamic – it’s kind of a sixth sense we film accompanists develop – and I can sense that there’s a sense of joy in being together and laughing together. The almost trancelike rollercoaster ride of how you go along with a silent film is just as magical and engaging as video games are. I want people to be thoroughly entertained and refreshed by coming to a silent film show, whether it’s mine or someone else’s.

Thanks for joining me and for all you do, Ben!