Timeline
A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
1918
A two-sentence announcement in November states that Billy B. Van may produce films under the Famous-Players Lasky banner. The mention is nonetheless notable, placing Van—at least momentarily—in connection with one of the most prominent production organizations of the period.
Famous Players–Lasky Corporation was one of the biggest players of the silent film era, operating from 1916 to 1933 Among its biggest films were “The Sheik” (1921), “The Ten Commandments” (1923) and “Wings” (1927). Stars in the company included such luminaries as Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and Ruth Chatterton, who had been a 1915 guest of Billy’s in Sunapee.
Advertisement announcing the partnership of Famous Players and the Lasky Corporation.
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.