It's a 'Lonesome' return to sound

It’s a ‘Lonesome’ return to sound

By Susan King

Sept. 2, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

KEN WINOKUR, Terry Donahue and Roger Miller -- better known as the Alloy Orchestra -- have been making beautiful music for silent films for the last 18 years.

Though they use such conventional instruments as keyboards, accordion and clarinet, they also play bedpans, horseshoes, musical saws, sheets of galvanized tin, bells from China and Japan and gongs from Turkey and China.

When they accompany the 1928 film “Lonesome” on Sept. 14 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater, they will also be employing hubcaps -- “because this movie has all of these city scenes with traffic,” says Winokur. “It also has all sorts of circus sounds, which will come out of a synthesizer.”

Alloy premiered the score for “Lonesome” back at the 1992 Telluride Film Festival. “It was a huge hit,” Winokur says, “and we did it around the country for a while. Then the print got wrecked.”

It was only recently that the George Eastman House made a new print from its restored copy. “It’s a very expensive print because it had been hand colored and tinted,” he says, and the archive has strict requirements about how it can be projected.

“That’s why ‘Lonesome’ is an occasional thing rather than one of our war horses like ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ ‘The General’ and ‘Metropolis’ that we have played millions of times,” Winokur says.

“Lonesome,” one of the few American films directed by Hungarian Paul Fejos, had languished in obscurity for years until Telluride resurrected it. Because Hollywood was making the transition from silent to sound films, “Lonesome” was released in a silent version as well as one with a musical score and three brief talkie sequences.

Winokur describes the film, shot on location in Coney Island, as a “heart-rending romantic film with a very happy surprise ending. It really has these charming characters.”

The print the Alloy is using has the original music score -- “it is terribly recorded” -- so projectionists have to rehearse with the group to learn when to turn down the sound and when to bring it back up during the talking interludes.

Though the movie was a critical success, says Winokur, it didn’t get wide exposure because Universal, lacking its own theater chain, didn’t have sufficient venues to show the sound version.

“So it fell through the cracks,” he says. “Charlie Chaplin raved about it, so I think that’s how it got its reputation for being a little masterpiece.”

Alloy’s score, he says, is very percussive, mixed with “ultra romantic” music. “There is a lot of action in this one because of all the Coney Island stuff -- the feeling of the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster in particular, plus there is a big thunderstorm.”

The Boston-based Alloy plays 60 to 80 dates a year. Winokur says that in 18 years, “I think we have done 24 features and 28 shorts.” The trio will premiere its new score for Josef von Sternberg’s gangster film “Underworld” at the New York Film Festival next month. “That film hasn’t been available for decades,” he says.

Winokur says the group has to like a movie before agreeing to compose a score -- Alloy even turned down the chance to work with the recently discovered Gloria Swanson-Rudolph Valentino film “Beyond the Rocks” because the members didn’t think it was very good.

“Basically, we spend a whole year on a film and then it stays with us,” Winokur explains. “We have about eight films in our repertoire.”

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‘Lonesome’

Where: Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: 8 p.m. Sept. 14

Price: $5

Contact: (310) 247-3600 or go to www.oscars.org./events/lonesome /index.html