GELFAND’S WORLD-I became aware of the Nethercutt Museum in a chance moment of channel flipping, when I came across Huell Howser's show one evening. I'd never been to this museum until now, and I'm here to report that it's even better than you might imagine. It's definitely worth the trip to Sylmar if you are either into vintage cars or the history of cinema, or would like to see some amazing mechanical musical instruments.
First, a little about the Nethercutt Museum. The man called J.B. Nethercutt, like so many other Californians of his day, was born somewhere else. In his case, it was South Bend, Indiana in the year 1909. Like so many other transplanted Californians, he came here due to a family crisis and stayed. He eventually studied chemistry at Cal Tech, and dropped out to help his aunt develop a company that became Merle Norman Cosmetics. This eventually made Nethercutt and his wife Dorothy quite wealthy.
The Nethercutts applied their money to collecting objects of art and technology. Not only did they collect things of historical and artistic significance, they brought in experts to do restorations. Then they opened a museum in Sylmar to show their collection to the public and didn't even charge an entrance fee. The museum still doesn't charge.
The Nethercutt Museum is most famous for its collection of cars. Just to give you an idea, the museum has one of the General Motors electric cars known as the EV-1, the subject of lore, a documentary, and some angry protests at the time when GM took back its leased EV-1's and destroyed nearly all of them. The more dramatic part of this story is that right next to the EV-1, there is an early day electric car going back to the first years of the 1900s. The explanatory sign introducing the older car points out wryly that the technology of electric cars hasn't really changed very much in the intervening years. The earlier version has a better paint job.
And then there are the rest of the cars, including a Stutz, vintage Rolls Royces, and famous limousine brands that have long since ceased to be built. One of the things you learn while browsing the Nethercutt website or visiting the collection is how many classic cars were designed and built in Indianapolis during the heyday of automotive art.
The Nethercutts also collected musical instruments and early movie technology. The collection includes an amazing assortment of player pianos, player violins (really), and a player banjo, mainly going back to the early 1900s and a few years into the silent film era. They are beautifully restored, and we got to hear most of them.
The collection also includes a Wurlitzer organ which includes five thousand organ pipes. The Wurlitzer was put to good use during a presentation of Lon Chaney's 1925 classic The Phantom of the Opera. (Photo above.)
Now as to the classic film presentation:
One of the things that the Nethercutt does is to present concerts and film presentations, which are also free to attend. You have to go to their website, and apparently the tickets go in a matter of minutes after they go online. It's easy enough to see why, after the Phantom presentation.
You see, the film was screened using a 1909 hand cranked projector. The projector itself was in pristine condition, all polished and silvery looking, and attended by a dapper fellow in top hat and tails, who explained the history of the itinerant projectionists who carried their equipment from town to town.
The point, as he explained, was that any local theater could provide the electricity to power the light source, but the local electric supplies in that era were not always of the right quality to regulate the film speed properly.
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Thus the itinerant projectionist could show a film on his own equipment, and would control the speed of the action by varying the rate at which he turned the crank. In our case, the itinerant projectionist was Joe Rinaudo, who was the subject of his own Huell Howser coverage.
The screen image looked fine, and didn't seem jerky. You might say that this flicker didn't.
What really brought things to life was the live score by organist Dean Mora, who developed a reputation as a theater organist at the Silent Movie Theater in the 1990s, has his own orchestra, and continues to perform film accompaniment over a wide geographic region. The Wurlitzer organ at the Nethercutt is a fully featured instrument with all kinds of bells and whistles (in the literal sense) and lots of instrumental sounds.
As to the film itself, Lon Chaney was himself, which is to say, an alternating combination of creepy and desperately sad, and Mary Philbin as Christine was lovely. The film sets showing the underground depths of the Paris Opera are something to look at even today.
Lon Chaney performances tend to get dusted off around Halloween, and there is good reason, although modern audiences tend to miss out on the breadth of Chaney's abilities. A few weeks ago at the Silent Movie Theater, Chaney was featured in a couple of films in which his face is not disfigured. In West of Zanzibar, he plays an embittered fellow whose legs are useless. In a second feature, he played a circus performer who pretends to be without arms, and then (put down your cup of coffee here), he has his real arms amputated for the love of a woman. Of course, this being a Chaney feature, he still doesn't get the woman, but at least manages to die dramatically by being trampled under the hooves of a horse. In this performance of the Phantom of the Opera, he gets himself into all sorts of trouble and is eventually killed by an angry mob. (Or is he?)
At the Nethercutt performance, we were hosted by several people, not the least being the curator of the mechanical musical instrument collection, a fellow by the name of Kyle B. Irwin. He explained to me the provenance of one last exhibit, a smallish item that arguably has equal historical significance with the rest of the exhibits combined. This exhibit is only about a foot across and is placed in the back of the music hall, either as if it were of little consequence, or else is of enormous consequence but needs to be kept in a safe place. It turns out to be the latter.
The cameraman known as G.W. "Billy" Bitzer filmed for none other than D.W. Griffith, during the era when Griffith was making the Birth of a Nation and a year later, Intolerance. A 1912 Pathe movie camera owned and used by Bitzer is that exhibit, and there is a provenance to the exhibit linking it to those two films.
It would be like coming across Napoleon's hat, or the boat that George Washington rode in while crossing the Delaware River. It is an heirloom in its own right, and also an interesting piece of technological history. I wonder if the curators have ever taken this camera into the back room and run a reel of film through it. If they ever decide to do it, I would like to be there to watch.
All in all, a good night, and a good place to visit.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch and can be reached at [email protected].)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 88
Pub: Oct 31, 2014
