Free Chariton screening Sunday of "Saving Brinton"

Back in March, I wrote here about the fact this upcoming Sunday is the 90th anniversary of the first screening in Lucas County of a "talkie" --- a motion picture with an integrated soundtrack. The site was the Ritz Theater; the film, Antonio Moreno and Helene Costello with Myrna Loy and William Russell in "The Midnight Taxi."

So to celebrate that fact, the Chariton Historic Preservation Commission will sponsor a free screening this Sunday of "Saving Brinton," a highly acclaimed 2017 documentary film from directors Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne about the link between Iowa, an Iowa farm boy and the silent films that paved the way for that talkie.  The movie begins at 12:30 p.m. at Vision II Theater --- and everyone's welcome to attend.

The film's focus is a Washington, Iowa, farm boy named William Franklin Brinton who, from 1897 until his death in 1908 traveled the American heartland and showed his silent films to anyone he could, becoming "America's greatest barnstorming movieman" in the process.

Former junior high history teacher and avid collector Mike Zahs, also of Washington, found Brinton's original nitrate show reels in the basement of a rural Washington farmhouse and then restoring them. One film even includes footage of President Teddy Roosevelt and another is a previously lost Georges Méliès short.

According to the the directors, "Mike uncovers this hidden legacy, he begins a journey to restore the Brinton name that takes us to The Library of Congress, Paris and back for a big screen extravaganza in the same small-town movie theater where Frank first turned on a projector over a century ago. By uniting community through a pride in their living history, Mike embodies a welcome antidote to the breakneck pace of our disposable society. 'Saving Brinton' is a portrait of this unlikely Midwestern folk hero, at once a meditation on living simply and a celebration of dreaming big."

The Zahs/Brinton collection also contained hundreds of related artifacts, now in the University of Iowa Library archives. The original films are in the care of the American Film Institute.

It's a great film about a great preservation effort --- and you're invited to attend!