Timeline
A year-by-year accounting of some of the significant events in Billy B. Van’s movie-making career.
1948
In 1948, Billy B. Van offers a late-life retrospective on his career, recalling his years on the stage and his involvement in early motion picture production at Lake Sunapee. The account is rich in detail, naming numerous collaborators and revisiting episodes from his film work, though it also introduces elements that are difficult to verify and, in some cases, appear to blend memory with anecdote.
Among these are references to two additional film titles: “The Zulu Nightmare” and “The Lucky Hobo.” The latter may correspond to known variations such as “The Lucky Hoodoo” or “The Plucky Hoodoo,” given the fluidity with which titles were often recorded and reused in both stage and screen. “The Zulu Nightmare”remains more obscure, though a still photograph has been identified that is purportedly connected to the production.
The article also advances a claim that has been widely repeated in subsequent accounts: that the Equity Motion Picture Company, founded by Van in 1915, “later amalgamated with MGM.” While Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—formed in 1924—did acquire and consolidate numerous production entities, no independent evidence has been found to support a direct connection between MGM and Equity. As such, the statement remains uncorroborated and illustrative of the challenges inherent in relying on retrospective accounts, even those provided by participants themselves.
Still photo from the filming of “Zulu Nightmare” in Sunapee, New Hampshire.
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.