Harold Lloyd: the graceful ghost

Like so many things, this piece has a history.

God knows how many years ago it was - could have been 15, could have been 20 or more. It was on the radio, so I didn't know who was playing the piano. It was one of those scenarios where I was stopped dead in my tracks. The armload of books I was carrying slid onto the floor, and my knees unlocked.

This first performance of a piece that I didn't even know the name of was something that grabbed my gutstrings and never quite let go. It was a long, long time until I heard it again and could put a name to it. I just sat there in a strange altered state, wondering how mere chords could stir emotion from the very bottom of the glass.

I never heard the piece played that way again. That first version was played smokily, stealthily, the chords impossibly elongated, with mists rising from it, a black cat sneaking along a midnight fence, or some melancholy gent in an expensive, rumpled suit walking home alone from empty revelry in a nightclub.  

Yes, and years and years and years blew by, as years always do.

When I found it again and found the title and the composer (Graceful Ghost Rag by William Bolcom), I was unsatisfied with every version I heard. Everyone played it too fast, too jauntily, almost player-piano-style, when the original was (I thought) meant to be interpreted with indigo sadness. At one point I found a YouTube version with a kid playing it, and it was bloody good, if lacking polish. For a while, it was my touchstone. Then I found this one, beautifully rendered by Barron Ryan. Not quite like the first, smoky midnight version, but lovingly approached with a tender melancholy that evokes a certain familiar presence.

When I began to write The Glass Character, my lovesick paean to Harold Lloyd, this piece became its theme song.  It somehow perfectly captured Muriel Ashford's hopelessly-fated passion for a man she could never have, a genius who did not portray so much as embody his character and evolve, quicksilverish,  from "knockabout" comedian to superb tragicomic actor. While Muriel watches in blissful, agonizing erotic thrall.

I like to say I loved writing this novel, and that's true. But it was also anguish. The writing took 18 months - and just about every day, I couldn't wait to get to the computer. But that, as they say, was the easy part. Getting any attention for it at all took three years. Three years of being told it was too melodramatic, too boring, too irrelevant. I've heard many a comment about my work and have learned to roll with it all, but the fact nobody wanted Harold was a misery to me. Why had I been lifted so high, only to be dropped with such a sickening thud?

The truth is, at some point I had become Muriel. The more I watched those incredible movies, the more enthralled I became. There is a surrealism in some of his earlier films in which he becomes a sort of cartoon cat-figure, impossibly agile and fast. Then as time goes on, his plots become infinitely more complex, deeper. Those who criticize his work for being too surface or "mechanical" haven't seen him weep in Girl Shy or The Freshman, haven't seen his tender yearning as a male Cinderella in The Kid Brother, haven't even seen his clock-climbing epic, Safety Last!, in which he does everything for love.

And he does. Everything. For love. He singlehandedly invented the genre of romantic comedy, and indeed, there is something romantic about him, the tightly-wound, impossibly agile body, the thick black head of hair, the eyes a little bedroomy behind the glasses with no glass in them. This is why Muriel's heart gets torn apart, and why she keeps coming back for more. There was an eleven-month period during the three years that it took me to get a contract that I just stopped. I quit Harold altogether. I stopped watching my favorite YouTube videos and perusing Google images for choice photos and even watching those DVDs I had become so addicted to.

I just stopped. I couldn't stand it any more - I was dying inside. Perhaps part of me hadn't quite given up, but I was trying to. I knew the novel was good. Why would I waste my time (or theirs) if it wasn't? But even when The Artist won Best Picture, editors were telling me things like, "The public isn't interested in silent movies."

Well.

I have a contract now, I'm with Thistledown and I will publish in spring 2014. I wanted to do it the traditional way, because to be honest I don't have a clue how to self-publish and hate taking "writer's courses" (when I could probably teach most of them, so there). I'm too old to go back to square one, and besides, I still believe in the process. So I told myself, "Just get the book out there. Then we'll see what happens." Would Harold back me up on this?

I have written before about Lloyd synchronicity, the eerie way in which the name Lloyd would come up four or five times in a day (and I devoted a whole post, which I might re-post along with some of my other Harold pieces, about "the church at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd", a huge brick tabernacle standing in the middle of nowhere). There is much more, of course, but I have been hesitant to put it out there, some of it is so odd and unbelievable. Throughout my life I've known mediums and spiritualist healers, and while I do not quite ascribe to all of it, I don't throw it all away either. 

So if any of it is true, I have been in touch with a ghost who is graceful indeed, and his music still plays in  my head on a continuous loop that might just last forever.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Harold Lloyd: the ghost behind the wall

Ghost signs from Vancouver’s past spring up to haunt us still

Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a “ghost sign” for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun February 23, 2012

 Ghost signs from Vancouver's past spring up to haunt us still

  

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, PNG

VANCOUVER — Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a "ghost sign" for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

The demolition of a few buildings in the Granville/Robson block has unveiled a "ghost sign" advertising a Harold Lloyd movie at the Capitol Theatre.
The sign promotes the Harold Lloyd comedy Grandma's Boy, which played at the Capitol theatre Oct. 2-7, 1922.

The sign is painted onto the north wall of the Power block at 817 Granville, across the street from where the Capitol opened in 1921. Hence the sign includes a red circle reading "Capitol over there," and features a wonderful disembodied hand with a finger pointing across the street.

The sign reappeared during the demolition of the three-storey Farmer building at 801 Granville. The Farmer building was constructed in 1922, so the Lloyd sign would have been covered up almost immediately after it was painted, and hidden for nine decades.

Signs like this are called ghost signs, because of their ghostly faded beauty and/or because they advertise long-dead businesses.

Several ghost signs have cropped up in recent years in Vancouver, including a lovely ad for Shelly's Bakery on Victoria Drive and a bunch of long-hidden painted signs on the Woodward's building. Part of an old painted sign for the Pantages theatre showed up on the side of the Regent Hotel when the 1907-08 theatre was being torn down.

Still, heritage expert John Atkin says he's never seen a painted sign for a movie, which would have had a short shelf life.

"You can certainly see movie posters and billboards [in old photos], but not [signs] painted on the wall," he said.

"I think the management of the theatre took advantage of the brief period when a building [on the corner] was demolished and before construction started on the new one."

Harold Lloyd is largely forgotten today, but he was one of the giants of the silent screen, a comic genius whose popularity once rivalled Charlie Chaplin. Like many silent stars, he cranked out movies at a breathtaking pace - he made 205 films between 1913 and 1947, including 40 short films in 1919 alone.

By 1922 he was doing longer features such as the 60-minute Grandma's Boy, which an ad in the Oct. 1, 1922, Vancouver Sun called his "first five-reel comedy."

The movie was released a month before it hit Vancouver, and was already a huge hit. The Sun ad boasted Grandma's Boy "holds the world's record for continuous comedy run in one theatre - over 450,000 people have seen it in one house in Los Angeles and it's still running!"

It played the Capitol for only a week before moving to the Dominion for a week and then leaving town. A painted sign would have cost the owner of the Capitol much more than hanging a poster, but would have grabbed attention away from competition like the Tom Mix movie The Big Town Round-Up that was showing at the Rex, or the Cecil B. DeMille movie Manslaughter at the Dominion.

The full glory of the painted ad for Grandma's Boy may be unveiled over the next few days as the building that covered it up comes down, brick by brick. But it won't be visible long, because the building it's on is also coming down, save for the facade.
The Power block dates to 1888, with a distinctive art deco facade that was added in 1929. It originally housed a saloon, later became a bank and in recent years was the location of Charlie's, a used CD/DVD dealer.

Both 801 and 817 Granville are being redeveloped into a five-storey building that will have two floors of retail on the bottom and three floors of office space above. The new building will have a contemporary glass facade, but the deco facade from the Power block will be incorporated into the new structure, because the facade was designated on the city's heritage register.

The rest of the Power block will come down, however, including the wall with the ghost sign. The city will be documenting the sign with photographs.

Another historical quirk unearthed during the demolition is an old "areaway" under the sidewalk along Robson. An areaway is a room under the sidewalk that merchants used to expand their premises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can often tell where they're located because there are small purple glass bricks in the sidewalk that were installed to bring light into the space.

The original Capitol theatre was torn down in the mid-1970s and replaced by the Capitol Six multiplex. That in turn was torn down in 2006, and replaced by a condo tower, the Capitol Residences.

jmackie@vancouversun.com

OK. With considerable weariness, I write about Harold Lloyd once again: in a startling bit of synchronicity, a painted sign advertising one of his most popular movies has been uncovered in my home town. Up to now it was covered up by a brick building. Everyone's scratching their heads over the fact that a mere movie would warrant an ad painted on a brick wall, but though the writer insists HL is "largely forgotten today", he was HUGELY successful back in 1922, to the point that it would not have been surprising if someone painted a bloody canvas and hung it in the Louvre every time a new Lloyd movie came out.


I don't know if this is synchronicity or not. For a long time the name Lloyd was coming up two, three, even FIVE times a day under different circumstances. Like the Gloria Baptist Church, situated at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd (Gloria was the name of his daughter). Like the movie with four different Lloyd references in it. I was going insane, and I'm still going insane.


I became so possessed by HL that I wrote a novel about him called The Glass Character, and though a sane person surely would have given up by now, I haven't: I just hate myself too much, I guess. I want to see this published before I die.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm