Timeline
A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
1929
In 1929, a brief retrospective glimpse of Billy B. Van’s screen career appears in the recollections of Cissie Fitzgerald, known as “the girl with the wink.” In a published reminiscence, Fitzgerald looks back on her time in motion pictures, including her work with Van.
Though fleeting, the reference serves as a reminder that Van’s film work—already several years in the past—remained part of the living memory of performers who had shared in the early years of screen comedy.
Publicity photo of actress Cissie Fitzgerald, who is said to have appeared in some of Van’s films.
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.