Debra McKinney
Anchorage Fine Arts Society revives 1923 silent film, a landmark in Anchorage history
Courtesy Photo of the Anchorage Museum's Cheechakos Collection, 1923-1924
Anyone living in Anchorage in 1923 oblivious to The Cheechakos must have been living under a still. The arrival of movie stars and a film crew that spring was a seismic event in the still wet-behind-the-ears, backwater-of-a-town. The Anchorage Daily Times extended a banner-headline welcome with the promise of “jollification” to come. And jollification did when half the town showed up for a “monster public reception” that included performances by the cast and dancing to a six-piece orchestra at a brand new movie studio built on Third Avenue.
Following a series of silent films about the Far North shot nowhere near the Far North, The Cheechakos was the first full-length motion picture filmed entirely on location in Alaska. With the plot set in the Klondike gold-rush days, the silent-film melodrama had it all—kind-hearted prospectors, a gambling scoundrel, a shifty-eyed henchman, a wrist-to-the-forehead damsel in distress, and a cherubic child with a dinner-plate face and finger-tight curls.
“Stupendous Epic of the Frozen North,” it was billed. There were fistfights, pistols, knives and whips. An explosion, a fire, a raging river, a calving glacier and a dogsled version of a car-chase scene. And in the end, there was Mother Nature serving the villain a heaping helping of exactly what he deserved.
During five months of filming with hand-cranked cameras, hundreds of Anchorage residents were cast as extras in such scenes as frolicking at a dance hall and climbing the Chilkoot Pass, filmed on the Bartlett Glacier south of Portage. And when the lead actress bid Alaska adieu and headed back to Hollywood, Anchorage sent her home with a brown bear cub as a souvenir.
The nine-reel movie premiered in December, 1923 at Austin “Cap” Lathrop’s Empress Theatre on Fourth Avenue. School let out early that day and city officials lifted the curfew so kids could attend the matinee and evening shows, where, according to the paper, they “wildly acclaimed” the villain’s demise and “shouted in glee” as the hero rescued the girl.
The Cheechakos was the most fun Anchorage had ever had.
But that was some 90 years ago. The once elegant Empress, built in 1916, is long gone, its most recent incarnation, the Anchor Pub, torn down just last year. Today, few Alaskans have heard of the film, and even fewer realize its significance in Alaska history. Chris Beheim aims to fix that.
Beheim has been, he would admit, obsessed with chasing down the story behind the film and its aftermath, using everything from genealogy research for tracking down child-star Baby Margie’s son to doing hard time parked in front of microfilm machines. And now, through the Anchorage Fine Arts Society, a nonprofit founded by his wife, Beverly, he’ll be sharing all he’s learned.
The Cheechakos Project will reunite Anchorage with its first movie, as well as celebrate the city’s early days through music, films, photographs and historical documents, a project made possible through a $29,000 Anchorage Centennial Community Grant, funded by Rasmuson Foundation and administered by the Alaska Humanities Forum.
A NEW SCORE
Silent films used “inter-titles” to convey dialogue and explain the storyline, with some, like The Cheechakos, using hand-painted backdrops behind the words. Famed Alaskan artist Sydney Laurence got that job. And silent films were never actually silent, but accompanied by a pianist, organist or, in larger theaters, an orchestra playing music fitting the mood of each scene, from joyful times to impending doom. Rarely would music be composed for a specific film, Beheim explained. Rather, movie theaters would be provided with cue sheets— “Dramatic Tension No. 2” here, “Love Theme No. 1” there. Major theaters had libraries of sheet music to pull from, while at smaller theaters with smaller libraries, musicians were more likely to improvise in places.
Although The Cheechakos survived, its score is lost. As part of The Cheechakos Project, Beheim’s brother, a nationally known, San Diego-area expert on the topic, has created a new one. The Anchorage Symphony Orchestra will premier this score at a public screening of the film on July 16.
That brother, Eric Beheim, has been a film fan for as long as he can remember, of silent films in particular. As a college music major, he stumbled upon some silent-film sheet music at a secondhand store in Columbus, Ohio. After that he went looking for it. His collection grew exponentially in 1981, when he acquired a historical theater’s entire library. A few years later he started his own small, silent film orchestra. These days he works with noted film preservationist David Shepard providing scores for some of Shepard’s silent-film video releases.
Besides the screening and new film score, The Cheechakos Project has several other components. (New York film distributors changed the spelling of the film to Chechahcos for a reason Beheim can’t nail down, but he’s reverting to the original one.) There’s a work-in-progress website, Cheechakos.org, plus a series of musical performances with a mobile exhibit about the film. And “An Evening at the Empress Theatre” is coming that will recreate the 1920s movie-going experience. This event will feature silent films, including Buster Keaton’s The Frozen North, with another musical score arranged by Beheim’s brother and performed by the resurrected Empress Orchestra, as well as newsreels Beheim put together using historical footage, archival photographs and newspaper headlines of the day.
The Cheechakos Project is also collaborating with Cyrano’s Theatre Company for its own Anchorage centennial project, the staging of 10 "living newspapers" plays, featuring the headlines, stories, and colorful characters of the day, one of which will be about the making of The Cheechakos.
FRAGILE FILM
Beheim, a board member and clarinetist with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, is among those behind the symphony’s Silent Film Night, an annual event showing such classics as Buster Keaton’s The General, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, accompanied by the orchestra. But even Beheim hadn’t heard of The Cheechakos until about five years ago.
His infatuation with the film began the way these things often do, with a Google search. After several years of helping put together Silent Film Night, he started wondering whether any had been made in Alaska. A search for “Alaska silent film” led him to a site called John’s Alaska Railroad Web Page, the discovery of The Cheechakos and the role the railroad played in getting the cast and crew to the remote filming sites. That site led him to Elizabeth Tower’s book on Cap. Lathrop, Alaska’s First Homegrown Millionaire, which led him to her papers in the UAA/APU Consortium Library Archives which led him to what is now a full-blown mission.
The research has been tedious at times but he’s used to that. Being a retired forensic scientist and former director of the state crime lab hasn’t hurt.
“It’s just like an investigation, really,” he said. “You find one little clue and then add to it. I just really got caught up in it. It’s an obsession. And I still have more detective work to do.”
Cap. Lathrop’s nephew donated a 16mm copy of the film to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1971, and it was thought to be the only one in existence. But after UAF archivists received a grant to restore it from the National Film Preservation Foundation, a higher quality, 35mm copy was discovered at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and, in 2000, that copy was restored instead.
Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that more than 90 percent of American films made before 1929 are lost, Beheim learned.
“The film was very fragile,” he said. “It was nitrate film, highly flammable, and they just burned up a lot of it because it was a safety hazard. Then the talkies came and no one wanted silent films anymore.
“We are very fortunate that The Cheechakos survived.”
NO FAKE SNOW
Lathrop, Alaska’s most prosperous entrepreneur, George Edward Lewis, an adventurer turned minister turned adventurer again, and Lewis Moomaw, a Portland-based writer and director, created the Alaska Moving Pictures Corporation to produce, write and film The Cheechakos. Until then, films about the Far North were based primarily on the books and short stories of writers like James Oliver Curwood and Rex Beach, and screenwriters’ wild imaginations.
“Films about Alaska were extremely popular, but they were filmed in Hollywood or if they really wanted snow they’d go up to Truckee,” Beheim said. “And if there was no snow, they’d spread out salt.”
Alaskans didn’t think much of that.
“Sourdoughs Rise Up: Nursed Wrath Warms Resentment Over Faked Alaskan Scenes to Boiling Point,” reads a headline Beheim found in the Los Angeles Times.
The Cheechakos would show the world the real deal.
Lathrop’s film company built a 7,000 square-foot movie studio with eight dressing rooms near what was then the Anchorage Elks Club, now the Snow Goose Restaurant, and a replica of a gold rush town not far from where Simon & Seafort’s is today. In one scene, after a fire breaks out in the dance hall, this movie set is torched as the whole town burns down.
A city fire engine was standing by in case things got out of hand. A notice in the paper referred to it as “the burning of Rome, in a miniature form,” and asked residents to stay away.
In addition to Anchorage, the crew filmed in Mount McKinley National Park, as it was called at the time, and in other remote locations accessible only by train. Harry Karstens, who guided the first successful climb of McKinley in 1913 and was superintendent of the park, served as a stunt man, driving the park’s sled dogs in a high-speed chase scene.
Girdwood stood in for Skagway. To film a night scene there, with film speed being sluggish in those days, the crew shot off giant radium flares and rockets to light up the night sky.
Among other purple-prose gems, Beheim found an article in the Anchorage Daily Times rallying volunteers for a train excursion to shoot the Chilkoot Pass scene.
“Think of it: Get your picture ‘took’ for nothing! This same picture will be flashed on a thousand screens and viewed by a million movie fans and husbands. Nothing like this opportunity has ever been given the people of Anchorage.
“Every business house in Anchorage should be represented; every citizen who can get away from the rut of life, every husband who can duck beating carpets and escape the terrors of house-cleaning days, every grouch dissatisfied with life, and every loyal Anchorageite should either go on this excursion or send a representative.”
The effort generated a trainload of stampeders, some of whom had climbed the real Chilkoot Pass 25 years earlier.
The long-since defunct Copper River and Northwestern Railway took the cast and crew from Cordova to shoot scenes at Eyak Lake and the Copper River’s Abercrombie Rapids as a fill-in for the Yukon’s White Horse Rapids. The final scenes were filmed on the Childs Glacier, where President Warren Harding showed up at the movie set after driving “the golden spike” in Nenana signifying completion of the Alaska Railroad. And where lead actress Eva Gordon fell into a crevasse—not part of the script—and was stuck for four hours.
The mishap didn’t taint her impression of Alaska, which she left with “deep regret.”
“Never in any part of the earth—and I have circled the world five times—have I met with such unaffected welcome, such kindness from the heart, as was bestowed upon me by the people of the north…,” she told the Los Angeles Times upon her return to Hollywood. She did, however, note that the four-month-old brown bear cub Anchorage had given her as a farewell gift was in dire need of some manners.
STUPENDOUS GRANDEUR
After showing around Alaska, the film hit the States, including a private showing for the Interior Department in Washington, D.C. so cabinet members and government officials could see what Alaska actually looked like. Prior to opening in theaters around the country, a preview gala was thrown at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City, with dinner and dancing in the Crystal Ballroom to the famed Paul Whiteman Orchestra. As a promotional stunt, a young woman dressed in furs with a giant malamute in tow showed up at media and movie-trade offices to hand-deliver fancy invitations garnished with a small gold nugget. The extravaganza drew nearly 1,000 newspaper and magazine writers, industry representatives and others.
The reviews were overwhelming positive, Beheim said. One reviewer called it “a stirring story, given a setting of stupendous grandeur.” Another promised “drama and romance and thrills.” But not all were impressed with the plot or acting. One found it hokey. For the most part, the highest praise went to the scenery—a “scenic masterpiece” even.
Although the film went off to travel the world, it was a commercial dud for Alaskan shareholders who never saw a return on their investments. Some blamed the film’s unpronounceable name. Whatever the reason, that was the end of Cap Lathrop’s foray into the movie-making business. The movie studio his company built on Third Avenue, that he’d hoped would become “Hollywood of the North,” became a community center instead, used for everything from an exhibition hall for the Western Alaska Fair to basketball games.
Although The Cheechakos fell into obscurity, in 2003 it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Now that it has a new score, Beheim has high hopes for The Cheechakos’ comeback, that it will be seen and appreciated by Anchorage audiences and well beyond for years to come. If it were up to him, there would be a public showing every year.
And why not? As the Anchorage Daily Times put it in 1923, “Alaska money, brain and brawn made the Cheechakos possible. Truly it is Alaska’s own.”
Debra McKinney is co-author of "Beyond the Bear" and a freelance writer living on Lazy Mountain near Palmer.
www.debramckinney.com
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