Timeline
A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
1925
In 1925, Billy B. Van’s early film work unexpectedly resurfaces. Miller and Steen Film Distributors announce a series of six two-reel comedies featuring Van alongside Walter Hiers, Bert Byron, and the Beaumont Sisters, to be released for the 1925–26 season. The titles include “The New Clerk,” “The Janitor’s Birthday,” “The Inventor,” “Some Hero,” “The Bootlegger’s Legacy,” and “The New Woman.”
One of these, “The Janitor’s Birthday,” is particularly notable, having first been mentioned a decade earlier in connection with Van’s Equity Motion Picture activities in 1915. Its reappearance raises immediate questions about the origin and history of the series.
Miller and Steen’s president, A. G. Steen, asserts that the films were produced only a year and a half earlier and were originally intended for longer release before being re-edited into two-reel form. This account is soon challenged.
“I want to send out a denial, or something,”
Walter Hiers publicly disputes the claim, stating that the comedies were in fact made “about ten years ago” in Sunapee, New Hampshire, and minimizes his own involvement, describing himself as “just a punk small part player.”
The conflicting accounts leave the true provenance of the films uncertain, illustrating the difficulties of reconstructing early independent production histories—particularly when older material is repackaged and redistributed years later under new claims.
By this time, Van himself appears to have fully withdrawn from motion picture work. Settled in Newport, New Hampshire, he lives with his wife, Rose (Beaumont) Van, and her sister Nellie on an expansive estate described as “476 acres, embroidered with hills, trees, lakes, cottages and sky,” marking a striking contrast to the unsettled afterlife of his film career.
Vaudevillian Bert Byron is among the actors mentioned as appearing in the Miller & Steen releases. (Grey and Byron Collection, University of Denver)
Silent-comedy star Walter Hiers appeared in many of Billy B. Van’s films, but tried to distance himself from them in later years. (Getty Images)
A 1925 Miller & Steen advertisement lists 6 Billy B. Van films which had been made in 1915
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.