Pianist Ray Lowe had previously come up with his musical themes while he was in the car. On Saturday evening, he played them live alongside the silent films during the “Silents Under the Stars” event at William S. Hart Park in Newhall.
Over 200 people outside Hart Hall watched as Lowe provided musical accompaniment for a William S. Hart short film and a Harry Carey feature film. Lowe said he had a theme for the good guys, a theme for the bad guys, and four others, and he worked like an improvisational jazz musician, shaping those themes to the emotions he saw up on screen.
“A musical theme will pop into my head,” he told The Signal before performing at the event Saturday night. “I’ll record that or write that down. By the time I was ready to work on the movies, I actually had six themes. Two are for the first movie, four for the second one.”
Lowe, who’s provided musical accompaniments for 15 other “Silents Under the Stars” events, said he’d done three full run-throughs of this year’s two films before Saturday’s screenings. When it came to perform the music, which he played on a keyboard, creating the sounds of a piano, a banjo and other instruments to sound like a full orchestra, he was essentially bringing to life and preserving moving pictures that were created in the early 1900s, making them anew once again.
The Friends of Hart Park, joined by the Natural History Museum and Los Angeles County Parks, hosted the return of “Silents Under the Stars” after a five-year hiatus since the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the movie screenings, Mild Bill and the Mild Cats played live music, and guests ate a barbecue dinner, many also taking part in a silent auction. The two silent films of the night starred two legendary Santa Clarita actors, Hart and Carey.
According to Laurene Weste, a city of Santa Clarita council member and president of the Friends of Hart Park board of directors, the “Silents Under the Stars” event is the primary fundraiser for Hart Park. It helps support the operations of the park, Weste said, including the care of the barnyard animals and the rare bison herd. She said that the sold-out event attracted over 200 people who bought tickets at $85 a piece, generating over $17,000, not including what the silent auction was bringing in.
“We’re constantly impacting the park to keep it very upscale for the public,” Weste said. “People enjoy the park, and we enjoy helping the park serve them.”
Guests of the event could also see historic Hart artifacts, which were on display inside Hart Hall. According to Leon Worden, vice president of the Friends of Hart Park board of directors, these were never-before-seen items. They included William S. Hart Jr.’s baby clothes, actor Harry Carey’s suit jacket from 1939’s Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and an oil-on-canvas painting of Hart’s famous red pinto, Fritz, done by James Montgomery Flagg, who illustrated the 1917 World War I poster “I Want You for the U.S. Army” of Uncle Sam.
“In 1922,” Worden said in an interview, “James Montgomery Flagg painted a series of eight paintings to illustrate Hart’s novel ‘Told Under a White Oak Tree.’ Seven of the paintings are in the second story of the mansion. That one,” he said, pointing to the Fritz painting on display in Hart Hall, “has always been missing.”
Worden explained the journey the Fritz painting took, how it slipped away from the Hart house soon after the actor’s death in 1946 and came into Hart’s son’s possession. In 2018, Worden would track it down and purchase it. The piece, he said, was finally back on the Hart property for public viewing for the first time in almost 80 years.
And it’s this kind of history that many guests on Saturday are passionate about.
Valencia resident Brad Gray said a friend had invited him and his wife to the event, adding that he went because he loves the western heritage of the Santa Clarita Valley and the richness of the movie history here. Preserving the record of the area, he said, is important.
“I just think we’ve got to hang onto our important historical artifacts,” Gray said. “You can’t pave over everything.”
As part of the evening’s festivities, Weste presented Friends of Hart Park board directors Bill West and E.J. Stephens, and Stephens’ wife, Kim Stephens, with lifetime achievement awards for authoring the book “Images of America: William S. Hart Park,” which Weste called a significant part of the preservation of the Hart property.
“This (the book) was an amazing effort,” Weste said. “Their commitment and their love for the park really comes through in the history. The pictures are phenomenal, it’s factual, and everything about it is very precise and very historically accurate.”
The awards themselves were William S. Hart brands — replicas of the actual Hart livestock irons, forged by a blacksmith — mounted on a board suitable for hanging.
E.J. Stephens said after the presentation that he was grateful to receive such recognition.
“Those (lifetime achievement awards) are rare,” he said. “And that was quite a surprise and quite nice. She (Weste) said, ‘We need to honor you guys for doing the book,’ and we were like, ‘OK.’ I didn’t know we were going to get a branding iron.”
Finally, the evening skies darkened, the smell of popcorn from the popcorn machine cart drifted through the air, and it was movie time. The lights went down, and Lowe sat down at his keyboard to play music for the films.
The first picture of the night was 1915’s “Bad Buck of Santa Ynez,” directed by and starring Hart. It’s a 29-minute short about an outlaw who, upon coming across a widow and her snake-bitten child, risks his life to ride into town to get a doctor.
The second film was 1917’s “Straight Shooting,” starring Carey. It was director John Ford’s first feature-length picture (running at one hour and two minutes). “Straight Shooting” is about a professional gunman (Carey) who tries to help homesteaders during a range war.
On Saturday evening, over 100 years after the two movies were made, “Bad Buck of Santa Ynez” and “Straight Shooting” came to life again. Those in attendance seemed to enjoy what they were experiencing, responding aloud as the night went on. Not only was this audience seeing history, but they were also preserving it as they took part in this night of silents under the stars.
