Directed by Harry O. Hoyt in 1925, The Lost World is a silent film that combines live action acting with pioneering stop-motion to depict what is now called the first dinosaur flick. It’s so influential that the Jurassic Park series went so far as to name a whole movie after it.

Now I understand Silent Film may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s at least one guy who really likes this movie. Jeff Rapsis.

Some people go g o e f f. That’s not me. I’m Jeff with a j. And Rapsis is spelled r a p s i s, and it’s Lithuanian.

Sounds Greek, but it’s not. It’s Lithuanian. And I live in Bedford, New Hampshire. I’m a native New Hampshireite, though I’ve been all around. I wound up living there again.

Jeff Rapsis has had a lot of titles in his life. He is the director of an aviation museum in New Hampshire, and has been a journalist for most of his life. He’s even composed a score for a feature length film, Dangerous Crosswinds. But one of his more unique titles is silent film accompanist.

Once a month Jeff takes a two hour drive from his home in New Hampshire to play for screenings in Greenfield Massachusetts. It’s a small theatre with a loyal fanbase. Jeff isn’t the only one to trek to this locally-owned theatre. Families and silent film buffs alike flock to the GreenField Cinema to see these Silent Films as they were meant to be seen.

And so I’m kind of an archaeologist of cinema in a way. I go around, and I recreate the experience so people can, get a sense of why these films have a lot to say to us still today at their best.

I think the first and most important thing is to point out that the way it’s done was very different than what we’re used to today for for ninety years, for almost a century.

Right? We’ve had soundtracks, recorded soundtracks with dialogue and background music, which can sometimes play a really important part of the movie’s total effect. And we’ve seen that over the ages like Bernard Herrmann scores for Alfred Hitchcock films or John Williams for Star Wars. I mean, there’s no other music. Right?

It’s part of the experiment. You take all this time to get it just right. So it’s exactly what it should be. And that’s it.

It never changes. You start the movie and the music comes out the same every time. Isn’t that how it should be done? It just seems right.

Well, it was not like that at all during the entire silent era. Music was made locally and it could be anything. It was made up in the theater. There was no official score or anything. If music was used in Hollywood, it was used on the set to create a mood or a tempo while the scenes were being filmed, but no one would hear it in this theater.

It was, you know, there was no recording. So it was up to local musicians to come to the theater and do the best they could to come up with music that would help whatever film was playing come to life for their audience.

In smaller theaters that couldn’t do an organ, it would often be a group of maybe five or six players who kinda work together as a combo. It might be a piano, a violin, a reed player, a drummer, whatever. And they would generally work with what we would call today a fake book. And it’s like a big book full of tunes that they would all each know, all numbered. Right?

And, you know, it’s kinda like something for every occasion. There’d be a wedding music in there. There’d be, like, chase music, and everybody would have a certain part to play. So here’s what would happen. You’d come to work as a musician, and what are they playing today?

It’s a western. Okay. Get out the horse music. Right? And so that’s number 33.

So everybody start with number 33. Let’s go. Boom. You know? And they do that for a while.

And then if the music, if if the movie invariably, there’s gonna be, like, some kind of chase at the beginning or some exciting thing to get everybody’s attention, and so they’d switch to, like, their chase music, number 39. Right? And they’d all, like, do it together. And, you know, if you do that often enough, you get really good at being able to kind of work in real time, and you’d compile a film score, as the film went along. And each time the film was shown, they’d probably get a little smoother at it.

So by the time the evening performances came along, they really had it down, you know, slick. And, it was what people would experience.

But I think it’s a mistake for people today to think that the movies were shown with, like, old rinky tink piano kind of music out of tune and all that. That would have been totally unacceptable to most movie audiences during the whole silent era. The music had to be good, and it had to be professional. And it had to really work with the movie for everybody to think that’s good.

And it was, the job of tens of thousands of musicians throughout the era to make music for movies, and they got very good and fluent at being able to support a film of any type with whatever music was needed. So here I am a hundred years later. What do I do?

Some accompanists today will try to find some of those fake books from way back when and put together a kind of music that might sound like what people might have heard in 1923 or whatever. And there’s a lot of value in that to hear what would have actually been played. That’s actually kinda interesting, very difficult because so much was thrown out, and it’s difficult to know for sure. And nobody kept anything. You know?

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What I do though is I try to do I do my own original music, to films from a hundred years ago. And what I try to do is I try to reflect the fact in the music that I do that, most people watching a movie today have had a whole lifetime of hearing movie music of all different types. We’ve just been surrounded by it our whole lives.

And we have a certain expectation of how music would be used to support a film,

So what I try to do is I reverse engineer the film with what’s more of a modern movie score. I make it sound like something you would hear in a theater today to some twenty, twenty five picture that just came out. It’s it’s more of a modern movie score.

I think my goal is to prevent people from holding the film at an arm’s length as if it’s a museum piece, you know, that doesn’t have anything to say to me. It’s something from another era, and, what does it have to tell me?

What I want to do with the music is to kind of erase that that distance and have people let it in. And if the music is familiar enough or if it sounds like a movie score today, that really, I think, helps bring people to it, or they’ll, like, take it seriously or or at least let it in a little bit, and have the film and if they can do that, the film, if it’s any good, will kind of assert its own power eventually. But the music can be a great enabling, tool to allow the film to have a chance with an audience a hundred years later. So, it’s not the way everyone does it. But, again, there’s no rules that say you have to do this or that.

There’s no official score for most of these films. And so it’s a remarkable combination of yesterday’s art with today’s tastes or desires.

Now one might assume it took months of practice and expertise for Jeff to play an original film score in front of a live audience. And he does have a lot of musical expertise to play these showings. But Jeff actually improvises all of his movie scores. He doesn’t even use sheet music. which means every show is different.

You know, for most of the time when you work with music, if it’s especially if it’s, like, composed in advance, you’re never quite able to kind of get out of your own head and that you never turn off the the, part of your brain that’s criticizing and saying, oh, it could be better or let’s stop and try it again or I just wanna do it one more time. When you do this, you can’t do that because the film is going and it keeps going.

And it takes about maybe ten or fifteen minutes, but that part of your brain starts to quiet down. And you start to have the ability to just have the music flow out of you without any doubt or without any questioning, and it’s a very special place. I understand that psychologists call it flow or creative flow where you the rest of the world kinda drops away and you don’t worry about, you know, your dog’s vet bill or, you know, aunt Emma’s in the hospital or you know, not nothing concerns you because you’re totally absorbed in what you’re doing, which you kinda have to be when you’re in the middle of doing improvised music for, you know, film that might be two hours long.

Jeff likes to think of himself as an audience member, only with a keyboard in front of him. Which I think helps the audience engage with the film. The action is punctuated, so even if attention is pulled away for a second, and audience member can still keep track of the plot. It’s a style that can entertain every age group, from the squad of senior citizens, to the four year sitting front row.

I think that what’s interesting about this era is, you know, it’s over a hundred years ago mostly. Right? And so you think as time goes forward, it recedes further in the background and gets less important and there’s less interest in it. That’s the natural way of all things in terms of history and human experience.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. I think the silent era films were truly misunderstood as just, you know, nostalgia or grandma’s primitive movies or whatever for a couple of generations when there were still people around who remember them. And they would always talk about their glory tiring than hearing somebody talk about, woah. When I was a kid, you know, the movies are really great. And I think a lot of people from our time sort of wrote them off as just somebody’s old time, you know, memories.

Nostalgia, you know, at its kindness. But what happened was all those people died off. Nobody is around today who was alive to watch those movies in the theaters. If they were, they’d be a hundred and thirty years old at this point. Right?

But these older films are a body of work that now that we can see with more clear eyes, eyes, they’re not tinged by nostalgia or mistaken interpretations. We look at them fresh. And if the music is right and the conditions are right, there’s a certain power to them that I think is matched by some of the other timeless artworks

and I think they allow us to understand what’s timeless about our own existence, the big emotions that we’re supposed to still have if we’re gonna be human and survive. These films are a great way to kinda check-in with that.

And in that sense, they’re not fading away at all. They have more and more interest, I think, to our generation now. And going forward, we’re gonna discover there is a time was quality about them that we could only do if we waited this long. So it’s a great time to sort of rediscover the best of these films. And the only way to do that is to go to a screening like we’re gonna do tonight, and see them on the big screen with the live music done sensitively, in a good looking print of a good film, but most importantly with an audience.