A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
Timeline
1919
By early 1919, Billy B. Van appears to make a decisive shift in his film activities. In what may represent either a break from the earlier Equity Motion Picture venture or a restructuring of its assets, the Sunapee Film Corporation is formed, with Bob Russell in a leading role. Van subsequently sells his Georges Mills studio to the new company, reportedly realizing a profit of $10,000, and is engaged to star in its initial productions.
For the first time since the flurry of announcements in 1915–1916, there is clearer evidence of sustained film production involving Van himself. Work on the comedy “Van-ar-chy” was likely underway during this period, supported in part by internal evidence within the surviving film, including the appearance of a contemporary automobile license plate.
Production of “Where Are Your Husbands?” also appears to date to this time. A surviving fragment of original negative carries Kodak edge code markings that identify the film stock’s year of manufacture, providing additional confirmation of activity in 1919.
Together, these films offer the strongest indication to date that Van’s long-gestating motion picture ambitions had, by this point, translated into completed screen work.
Left: "Where Are Your Husbands?" This scrap of film negative eventually led to a miraculous find at the Library of Congress (story here). From the personal effects of Billy B. Van. This two foot long outtake from a professional film production shows an actress holding a camera slate noting that the previously scene was "no good." The next scene shows men in hats shot through a window. Actors unknown. 35mm Kodak negative nitrate motion picture film manufactured in 1919.
Suited up in a winter coat to enter the refrigerated nitrate film storage vault.
Above: Still-frame from “Van-ar-chy” shows a barely visible “1919” on a license plate.
Kodak “edge code” showing a 1919 date for the found negative of “Where Are Your Husbands?”
The U.S. Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia, home to over 1.9 million film and moving image items- including Billy B. Van’s “Where Are Your Husbands?” which was discovered there by chance in 2017.
Rachel Del Gaudio, Moving Image Processing Technician at the Library of Congress, with the “formerly lost” print of Billy B. Van’s “Where Are Your Husbands?”
Frames from the strip of film negative shown in positive
As an aid in the hunt for the lost films of Billy B. Van, this curated collection of contemporary trade press coverage serves as the foundation everything we know so far about one of New England’s earliest filmmakers. It is drawn from research on Lantern at the Media History Digital Library, a project of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which provides access to over three million pages of digitized trade journals, books, and magazines documenting the histories of early twentieth-century motion picture production, distribution, and industry activity as it occurred.