A Musical Mixup (Les Goodwins, 1928, 20 min, 35mm, tinted, silent, 24 fps)
ABOUT THE FILM
The Weiss Brothers operated a small motion picture production and distribution company in the silent era that occasionally dabbled in art film imports (including Fritz Lang’s Destiny!), but mainly stuck to comedy shorts. The firm was not well-capitalized, and often offered films to sub-distributors on a state’s rights basis, a business model that denied the films a national profile. Once a film was sold to hustling sub-distributors in individual territories, Weiss’s work was done. By the end of the 1920s, Weiss product was doubly ignored – silent comedies, in a marketplace where audiences clamored for sound, and cheap silent comedies at that, without star power or production values to elevate them.
It’s not that Weiss lacked notable names on its roster. The studio had snatched up Ben Turpin from Mack Sennett’s Keystone and Snub Pollard from Hal Roach – after their contracts had expired and well after their names assured box office revenue. The Weiss Brothers also had Jimmy Aubrey, a British comedian who had once been teamed with Oliver Hardy at Vitagraph from 1919 to 1921. Aubrey thought that Hardy was upstaging him and fired him. Within a few years Hardy found fame with Stan Laurel at Hal Roach while Aubrey passed the time at Weiss, home of the comedy has-beens.
A Musical Mixup is an Aubrey comedy about two friends who spend a drunken night at the Motorman’s Ball and wind up winning a piano in a raffle. Its distribution is spotty, and the film likely received wider play in Europe than it did in the US. Beyond a few stray newspaper listings, advertising was minimal and no trade papers took notice of its release or bothered to review it. The most sustained critical engagement may well have come from the Chicago censorship board, which ordered the deletion of a single shot in this Prohibition-era bender: a close-up of a bottle of Castor Oil.
ABOUT THE RESTORATION
In 2021 Chicago Film Society received a donation of a 35mm tinted nitrate print of A Musical Mixup, which had been discovered in an attic in Wisconsin during a drywall renovation project. Another 35mm nitrate copy survived in the Kit Parker/Cineverse Collection at UCLA Film & Television Archive. With the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation, both nitrate elements were scanned at 4K resolution at FotoKem. The restoration incorporates the best
material from each source, recreates the film’s color tinting, and retains the full American credits omitted by Gaumont British in the UK . The digital assembly is the basis for a new 35mm polyester internegative, and 35mm color prints.
Special Thanks: Olivia Babler, Peter Barrickman, Brian Belak, Mickey Gral, Kit Parker, Mike Quintero, and Todd Wiener