Guest Author Robert S. Birchard

Bob Birchard and I might be related--we're not sure how or how many years back, but probably a couple of hundred--times removed as well as years. 
Bob is the president of the Society for Cinephiles/Cinecon, which presents the annual Cinecon Classic Film Festival. He also owns a vast archive of historic Hollywood images.

Bob's knowledge of film history is unsurpassed.

Please welcome today's guest author, Robert S. Birchard.

I was being driven to kindergarten when I first knew I wanted to become a reader. Peggy Phillips, she was seven, sat in the back seat reading out loud, showing off--and I wanted all the attention she was getting...

I was ten when I knew I wanted to write. Mrs. Zimmer handed us pictures clipped from old magazines and told us to compose stories using the pictures as a springboard for our imaginations. I can’t remember the first one I was assigned, but I asked for a second one to do on my own. There was an Indian on horseback, watching a train in the distance...

A year later I got interested in film when I saw the David Wolper NBC special, Hollywood: The Golden Years. I was hooked the second the host walked toward the camera and said: “Hi, I’m Gene Kelly, and I work in the movies . . . ” I thought to myself that I’d like to work in the movies, and discovered through clips from films like The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Ben-Hur (1925) and The King of Kings (1927) that silent films were much more than the chopped up slapstick comedies I’d seen on Howdy Doody Time and Lunch With Soupy Sales...

Growing up in Los Angeles, I got to know folks who worked in pictures in the early days—Tom Mix’s friend Sid Jordan, cowboy star George O’Brien, directors Allan Dwan, Henry King and Irvin Willat, comedian Harold Lloyd, singing cowboy Gene Autry and so many more.

I first got published at eighteen when I sent a “most interesting character you’ve ever met” college essay about an old cowboy I knew to Frontier Times on a whim. I received a fast $20 for that literary effort, but it was a start.

UCLA film school, then peanut butter and crackers until my friend from Junior High, Bill Evans, helped me land as a temporary PR officer for the Los Angeles Community College District. Night projectionist at BBS Productions, and projectionist on the “Bel-Air Circuit” for Peter Bogdanovich, Helen Reddy, producer Mike Frankovich, and Barbra Streisand...  

From BBS I landed at rbc films, non-theatrical distributors for the films of Charlie Chaplin, and through a series of “you can’t get there from here” circumstances I did work in the movies as a film editor. And all along the way I wrote...about the movies and the people that made them, and often about nearly forgotten films and filmmakers—over one hundred articles, and books that include Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, King Cowboy: Tom Mix and the Movies, Silent-Era Filmmaking in Santa Barbara and Early Universal City.  (Bob's books on Amazon here, where they all get five stars, by the way.)

I even found a lost silent movie studio hiding in plain sight in Panorama City, but that is a story for another time...

(However, we do have pictures!)

On July 22, 1925, nineteen trucks hauled lumber from the Builders Lumber Company in Vernon to Uneeda Acres in Van Nuys to begin construction on the Thomas C. Regan Studio. Van Nuys architect H.B. Pentland's design for the administration building, dark stage and dressing rooms was designed to give the studio a distinctive look and attract attention.

Regan Studio today

Although no commercially-released film ever came from the Thomas C. Regan studio, the distinctive "castle" administration building of this "lost" silent movie studio is still standing and looks very much as it did when it was completed in 1926. Today it is home to American Legion Post 817 of Panorama City.