As clarinetist Chris Beheim recalls, he was playing with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra accompanying a silent movie three or four years ago when the thought crossed his mind, "I wonder if there were any Alaskan silent films?"
It turned out that there was, a 1923 made-in-Alaska-by-Alaskans "photodrama" titled "The Cheechakos." Beheim, the former supervisor of the Alaska State Crime Lab, now retired, turned his sleuthing abilities to the old film. He dug up a trove of information and proposed showing it with a live orchestra accompaniment.
With the centennial of Anchorage's founding being celebrated this year, grant money became available. On Thursday, July 16, Anchorage citizens will be able to see a free screening, with the symphony playing along, of the movie that consumed the city's energy and imagination in 1923.
In fact the origins of "The Cheechakos" reach back to the founding of the city itself. Bidding for lots at the new townsite started on July 10, 1915. Less than one year later, on July 3, 1916, Austin "Cap" Lathrop's fabulous 700-seat Empress Theatre on Fourth Avenue showed its first flick.
With a balcony and concert organ, The Empress represented the height of theatrical technology. A big stage accommodated live performances, which were often part of the ticket. A space in front of the stage held a small orchestra, which played along with the action and sometimes gave concerts on its own.
Lathrop, said to be Alaska's first home-grown millionaire, loved big ideas. When an itinerant preacher and sometime moviemaker, George Lewis, hit him with the idea of making a movie about Alaska in Alaska, Lathrop started raising the money to make it happen.
A "Moviedrome" -- or studio -- was built on Third Avenue, across the street from where the Snow Goose Restaurant stands today. Portland-based director Lewis Moomaw, who's credited with writing the script, arrived with a crew and a cast of professional actors. The town of about 1,800 embraced the celebrities with "jollifications" night after night and lined up to be extras.
Shooting took place in recently established Mount McKinley National Park. Superintendent Harry Karstens agreed that it would be good exposure for the park and Alaska, but only after Lathrop and Lewis assured him it wouldn't be a "cheap melodrama."
Interior shots were done in the Moviedrome. A gold rush town was built in the vicinity of L Street and Seventh Avenue, then burned down in a climactic scene. A re-enactment of sourdoughs climbing Chilkoot Pass in 1898 was shot in Girdwood and other footage was taken on glaciers around Portage and Cordova.
After closed screenings in Los Angeles and Portland, "The Cheechakos" opened to the public at The Empress on Dec. 12, 1923. It traveled to Fairbanks, then Portland and finally New York City.
The New York debut for several hundred national critics took place at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on May 1, 1924. The distributor changed the spelling to "Chechahcos" for reasons Beheim considers spurious. But they went all out with high-budget marketing. They took out full-page ads in trade journals, but gold nuggets in the invitations to the critics, and hired the Paul Whiteman Orchestra to play at the opening.
The reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Variety scorned the plot as "hokey" but praised the scenery. When the regular run started, New Yorkers waited in line for two or three hours. The audience in Washington, D.C., is said to have included President Calvin Coolidge, General John Pershing and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had been to Alaska and may have stopped by the shoot in Cordova. It eventually played across the country, in Europe and as far afield as New Zealand.
Then the talkies came in and silent films were filed, tossed or lost.
In 2000 the film was restored at the University of Alaska Fairbanks under the auspices of the National Film Preservation Foundation and released on DVD. In 2003 it was named a "culturally significant" film by the Library of Congress.
When the restoration began, it was thought that a 16mm version in the collection of the Alaska Film Archive was the only surviving copy. But a 35mm print had been turned over the Anchorage Museum by the Wometco-Lathrop Co. in the 1980s when it sold the 4th Avenue Theatre, Cap Lathrop's grandest movie house. It was found to be in excellent condition. Beheim says another 35mm print has since been located in Moscow, Russia.
For the music, Beheim turned to his brother. Eric Beheim is a musician working in California who has made a specialty of reconstructing silent movie cue sheets for silent screen classics like "Intolerance," "Birth of a Nation," "The Sheik" and the Douglas Fairbanks version of "Robin Hood." These tracks usually consist of snippets of public domain music by Classical composers and stock mood melodies by now-forgotten names who focused on churning out movie tunes.
Chris Beheim was the "curator" (author) for a theater piece about the film seen last week. It was the first installment of Cyrano's "Anchorage: The First Hundred Years," a decade-by-decade dramatization of the city's history. The staged reading contained much information, but felt like a teaser for the movie itself. Beheim's pre-concert talk just before the upcoming screening will probably be even more informative.
He's chased down newspaper stories from around the world. He's spoken to the descendants of performers and had access to their diaries and photo albums. When he talks about the movie he can't contain his grinning enthusiasm as he describes detail after detail regarding its production and career.
The production values were state of the art at the time, a stunning achievement given the remote locale. But the story of a lost girl rescued by a brave miner pursued by a murderous villain is indeed the cheap melodrama that Karstens dreaded. (Although that makes it at least as good as most new releases in theaters nowadays.)
The real thrill is in the film itself, an artifact that connects viewers today with the ambitious, starry-eyed doers who bet their hopes, homes and futures on the tiny new town here 100 years ago.
"It blows me away when I think of what they pulled off," Beheim says.
THE CHEECHAKOS will be shown with live accompaniment by the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 16 in Atwood Concert Hall. The concert is free, but attendees must get tickets in advance (limit four per person) at the CenterTix box office, 621 W. Sixth Ave., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday and noon-4 p.m. Saturday.
CHRIS BEHEIM PRE-CONCERT LECTURE will start at 6:30 p.m. July 16 in Atwood Concert Hall. Admission is free with ticket.
Reach Mike Dunham at mdunham@alaskadispatch.com or 257-4332.