Timeline
A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
1922
1922 opens with renewed attention on “The Beauty Shop,” the Cosmopolitan Productions feature in which Billy B. Van had been cast the previous year. Released by Paramount in May, the film adapts a popular Broadway musical comedy, with Raymond Hitchcock reprising his stage role as Dr. Budd. Van appears as the undertaker Sobini, part of a scheme to lure the protagonist to the fictional land of “Bolognia” with the promise of an inheritance.
The film is met with largely unfavorable reviews. Critics point to the inherent difficulty of translating a musical comedy to the silent screen, with Film Daily remarking that such adaptations are “about as successful as a musical comedy would be minus the music,” and similar sentiments appearing in Exhibitors Trade Review. Despite its prominent cast, the production does not appear to have been a success.
At the same time, the distribution structure that had supported Van’s recent film work begins to collapse. In June, Reelcraft Pictures Corporation is forced into bankruptcy following an involuntary petition citing citing liabilities of $150,000-$160,000 and assets as low as $3,000.. A federal receiver is appointed to liquidate the company, and later in the year its library—comprising approximately 160 one- and two-reel subjects—is sold to the Export and Import Film Company.
Notably, surviving advertising for the sale highlights a number of Reelcraft performers but makes no mention of Van or the Royal Comedy series, leaving the status of his films within the catalog uncertain.
Following these developments, Van’s screen career appears to come to an end. No further film appearances have been identified, and he returns to touring in vaudeville, both in the United States and abroad, once again partnering with James J. Corbett.
A Famous Players-Lasky Corp. ad announcing the release of “The Beauty Shop.”
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.