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Ron Hutchinson, Restorer of Early Sound Films, Is Dead at 67 – The New York Times






Ron Hutchinson, Restorer of Early Sound Films, Is Dead at 67 – The New York Times



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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/obituaries/ron-hutchinson-dead.html


 
nytimes.com
Ron Hutchinson, Restorer of Early Sound Films, Is Dead at 67
By Richard Sandomir


Ron Hutchinson in the coming documentary “Viva Film!,” directed by Peter Flynn. The Vitaphone Project, which Mr. Hutchinson founded with four friends, has been restoring short films from the 1920s and ’30s since 1991.CreditPeter Flynn

Ron Hutchinson in the coming documentary “Viva Film!,” directed by Peter Flynn. The Vitaphone Project, which Mr. Hutchinson founded with four friends, has been restoring short films from the 1920s and ’30s since 1991.CreditCreditPeter Flynn
Ron Hutchinson, an ebullient film buff who led a campaign to restore scores of largely forgotten short sound films from the 1920s and ’30s that featured comedians, vaudevillians, opera singers and musical acts, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Piscataway, N.J. He was 67.
His wife, Judy (Morton) Hutchinson, said the cause was colon cancer.
United by their passion for old films and vintage music, Mr. Hutchinson and four like-minded friends created the Vitaphone Project in 1991 with an ambitious mission. They set out to preserve the one-reel shorts that Warner Bros. made under the name Vitaphone Varieties at studios in Brooklyn and Burbank, Calif., from 1926 to 1931, as Hollywood was shifting from silent movies to talking pictures like “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talkie.
Those early shorts used Vitaphone, a Bell Labs technology, which synchronized the speeds of the film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs. The challenge was to find the largely lost records that contained the voices of entertainers like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Rose Marie, as well as lesser-known vaudevillians like the comedy team Al Shaw and Sam Lee.
Warner employed the Vitaphone system for its theatrical release of “Don Juan” (1926), a feature starring John Barrymore. But that movie had no dialogue, only music and sound effects.
“It went over great, but the people loved the shorts, with people speaking,” Mr. Hutchinson, who became a historian of the era, said at a meeting of the New Jersey Antique Radio Club in 2016.
So before showings of a subsequent Vitaphone feature in 1926, he said, “they had Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and other popular performers, each in five- to ten-minuteshorts, and this just set off everything.”
George Burns and Gracie Allen in “Lambchops” (1929), one of the many short films restored by the Vitaphone Project.CreditWarner Bros./Photofest
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George Burns and Gracie Allen in “Lambchops” (1929), one of the many short films restored by the Vitaphone Project.CreditWarner Bros./Photofest
For Mr. Hutchinson, restoring those shorts became a delightful second career. A chemical engineer who worked for companies that specialize in environmental health and safety, he diligently searched for the sound discs through letters and emails to record collectors and relatives of the performers.
He found one trove of 80 discs from the family of a man who had taken them home from the theaters he ran in Connecticut. He tracked down discs as far away as Australia and New Zealand.
“The discoveries of soundtracks never seems to slow down,” he told the Chicago Film Society in an interview in 2011. “We average several hundred new soundtrack discoveries a year.”
Mr. Hutchinson helped raise money for restoration of the shorts, largely through the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive, and Warner Bros. has released about 200 of them in various DVD sets. (He also found discs for other studios’ shorts.)
For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Hutchinson has hosted showings of the films at Film Forum in Manhattan. The cable channel TCM paid tribute to Vitaphone in 2016 with a 24-hour marathon of the shorts.
“He’d call me up and say he’d restored 10 more films and we’d schedule a showing,” Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s director of repertory programming, said by phone. “And it was amazing stuff; he discovered vaudevillians who had been forgotten for years, like Shaw and Lee, who made the funniest short of all time, ‘The Beau Brummels.’
Ronald Porter Hutchinson was born on Aug. 30, 1951, in East Orange, N.J. His father, Frank, was a machinist, and his mother, Betty (Reese) Hutchinson, was a homemaker and volunteered for an organization that helped women with legal problems, especially divorces.
Vitaphone equipment, like this — used for “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talking picture — synchronized the speeds of a film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs.Creditvia Turner Theatrical Library
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Vitaphone equipment, like this — used for “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talking picture — synchronized the speeds of a film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs.Creditvia Turner Theatrical Library
During Mr. Hutchinson’s childhood, his interest in vintage music and early talking pictures was ignited by watching Joe Franklin’s nostalgia-fueled New York television show. As a teenager, he made films with his friends. But he followed a more practical career path, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and pursuing a career in environmental safety.
“When we got married, he got a Victrola, and the next thing you knew we had 20,000 78s,” his wife said in a telephone interview. “And while collecting records, he came across these huge Vitaphone discs, and he knew other collectors had them.”
The Vitaphone Project was founded in Mr. Hutchinson’s house in Piscataway, which continued to be its headquarters.
“We were all friends, united by what we could find — treasure hunters in a way,” said Vince Giordano, a founder of the project and the leader of the band Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, which specializes in authentic arrangements of vintage jazz. “Ron had so much joy and exuberance in the discovery of the discs. It was almost like a hunger.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hutchinson is survived by a daughter, Heather Miranda; a son, Jared; a grandson; and a brother, Robert.
The first Vitaphone short restored thanks to Mr. Hutchinson was “Baby Rose Marie, the Child Wonder” (1929). Rose Marie, who decades later became known for her role as the wisecracking Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” was a child star who would go on to spend nearly every day of her life in show business. She was already a veteran when she sang to a Vitaphone camera.
“When I first told her that we’d found the disc, she said to me that Jack Warner had told her it had been lost,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview in 2014 on the America’s Comedy podcast. He recalled her reaction when the short was screened in Los Angeles in 1994.
“She looked at the screen — now blank — and said, ‘You know, the dress I wore was blue,’ ” he continued. “ ‘And I was looking over at the side, where my mother was.’ All these memories came rushing back to her.”
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2019, on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Ron Hutchinson, 67, a Restorer of Early Sound Films. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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