Timeline
A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
1926
More of Billy B. Van’s early films find new life in 1926.
In 1926, several of Billy B. Van’s earlier films find new circulation through an emerging distribution channel: the Kodascope Library. Operated by Eastman Kodak, Kodascope offered 16mm movies for rental through a growing network of library locations across the United States and abroad- an early version of the home video rental businesses which dotted almost every neighborhood in the pre-streaming era.
Among the titles available were two of Van’s Reelcraft Royal Comedies, “The Plucky Hoodoo” and “Van-ar-chy,” indicating that his films continued to circulate even after the collapse of Reelcraft and the end of his screen career.
Given the volume of prints created, and the network of libraries, the Kodascope Library continues to be an avenue being searched for additional/more complete prints of “The Plucky Hoodoo” and “Van-ar-chy.”
These Kodascope editions were produced as “reduction prints,” transferred from the original 35mm negatives to the smaller 16mm format and often shortened or even re-edited for home exhibition. While intended for non-theatrical use, such prints would later prove significant for preservation. The only known 1926 print of “Van-ar-chy,” for example, is from the Kodascope Library.
More broadly, the Kodascope system represents one of the earliest mechanisms by which silent-era films were duplicated and redistributed outside traditional theatrical channels. For Van’s work, it may also account for the survival—however fragmentary—of titles that might otherwise have been lost entirely.
For many years, Kodak ran a library of films for home rental. Two of Van’s films turn up in this collection.
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.