| Screen Magazine:
June 2000
CHICAGO SHOW TO LIVE ON: HISTORIC FILMS ACQUIRES VINTAGE
GOSPEL TV SERIES
The great gospel singers of the '60s and '70s live again through
the archives of HISTORIC FILMS. Chicago producer Sid Ordower's long-running
local TV series, "Jubilee Showcase," has been acquired for representation
by the East Hampton, NY archives, along with "Woodstock '99" musical
and background footage and 135 half-hour episodes of country and
Western "Ernest Tubb Show" of the mid-'60s.
"Jubilee Showcase," Which began its lengthy run in 1963 over Ch.
7, is one of the best documents of black gospel music in American,
with the earliest known film performances of the Staple Singers,
James Cleveland, Willie Dixon and the father of gospel, Prof. Thomas
A. Dorsey.
Landing the three acquisitions was a natural for Historic, owner
and representative of one of the biggest music and entertainment
archives in the business, thanks to the background of president/
founder Joe Lauro, a musicologist and film producer as well as an
archival film footage expert. He has produced two documentary-style
music shows, "Louis Prima, the Wildest," and "Over the Rainbow,"
based on the composer Harold Arlen.
Holding a masteršs from NYU's Dept. of Cinema Studies in 1982,
he was working in film distribution with Ivy Films while in college,
and spent eight years with Archive Films as its library director
and national sales director. Leaving Archive in 1990, the following
year Lauro co-founded A.R.I.Q. Footage in 1991 and in 1997 formed
Historic Films with partner Andrew Solf, a film producer based in
Los Angeles.
Historic represents the Solt-owned "The Ed Sullivan Show" and
"The Steve Allen Show." Solt also has "dozens of hours of commercials"
that date back to 1950, notes Kevin Rice, research director who
over sees 30,000 hours of archival footage. The kind of archival
footage licensed by every project that uses stock, such as A&E and
"Biography," "is our bread and butter," he adds.
Included in the library are clip rights to Fox Movietone Newsreel
outtakes. owned by the University of South Carolina, and dating
back to 1919. "Viewing that collection is like looking through a
time machine." Rice notes.
But it's music that gives Historic Films its special cachet in
an extensively competitive market both for the acquisition of film
collections and their licensing- although the explosion of cable
networks and reality-based shows assures a boom stock market that
shows no signs of slowing down. "We cover all kids of genres," says
Rice. "We have blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, country and western,
but not classical or hip hop. We provide a lot of B roll of African
American culture, pop singers, and soul and urban and rural black
migration."
Lauro has been turning out music collections which often come
his way via non-traditional routes. "Someone found 1 inch, 1980's
music videos in a dumpster that we acquired," describes Rice. "Or
more usually, someone owns a collections, perhaps a filmmaker, or
someone happens to acquire the rights and wants representation."
Most of the database is online, says Rice, "and we are close to
putting on the Web a sampling of 1,000 clips. We are just starting
to scratch the surface of digitizing our collections."
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