WATERVILLE — Mark Tipton remembers going to a video store when he was young and renting Charlie Chaplin movies. Given the career Tipton would go on to have, it's not surprising to hear where he found fault with the silent movie.
Tipton, who lives in Ellsworth and is the development director at the Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor, went on to study classical music at Oberlin College in Ohio and beyond, and he made good on wanting to spice up the score in silent movies. He's written about two dozen and frequently performs the compositions live during screenings of the films.
The 1927 film was one of three films to be nominated for Best Picture at the inaugural Academy Awards held in 1929. While it didn't win that award, it did clean up elsewhere. Actress Janet Gaynor won the first ever Best Actress award, and director Frank Borzage and screenwriter Benjamin Glazer each won the hardware in their respective categories.
The film is set in Paris just before World War I begins. It is a love story between a poor street sweeper and a prostitute. It was critically acclaimed upon its release and still boasts a 100 percent rating on the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.
Festival Programmer Ken Eisen praised Tipton's scores, saying they bring a different experience to the audience.
"It becomes more than just watching a movie somehow," Eisen said.
Silent films were never meant to be seen without accompanying music, Eisen said, and in the past they were always shown with live music — full orchestras in the big cities down to just a single piano in the small towns.
"If you're showing it without music, you're not really showing it," he said.
There is "incredible beauty and cinematic wonder in silent films," he said, but while most people know silent film stars Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, there are many more "wonderful and timeless" silent films for audiences to enjoy. Silent films can be "visually beautiful" in a way films made after that era can't be, he said, and they gave directors room to work in unique visual ways.
"I think audiences are going to be enchanted by it," Eisen said of the film.
Tipton, who plays the trumpet, said his passion for that era of music was inspired by a person he worked with in Brooklyn: Vince Giordano, who specializes in 1920s and 1930s jazz. Tipton said Giordano had thousands of recordings of music that accompanied silent films.
"Hanging out with him in my 20s was a big influence," Tipton said.
"There's usually a lot of quick changes in films from that era," he said.
From there he begins composing. Tipton said it takes "bits and pieces" of a month to write the composition, but he can get it done in two or three weeks if that's all he's focused on. All that boils down to about 100 hours of writing music, he said.
While it's difficult to find time for rehearsals with his job, Tipton said Les Sorciers Perdus, which has had a rotating cast over its 10-year run, tries to practice three to five times ahead of a screening performance. Plus added challenges are built in. Sometimes a venue will have a different version of the film than the one Tipton based his composition on.
"We have to adjust on the spot," he said.
Performing his original scores to silent movies from the 1920s and 1930s is certainly a niche market, Tipton said, but it's one that exists. Les Sorciers Perdus probably plays at least one of these shows a month, with some months busier than others. They have a good relationship with theaters up and down the coast, from One Longfellow Square in Portland — where he played his first film — to the Strand in Rockland. And scores continue to have multiple lives. The group will bring back scores to play multiple times.