The Silent Movie Theatre is getting a new voice. After decades of near-exclusive devotion to the pre-talkie era, the theater is being sold to two brothers who plan to add more modern revival fare to the bill.
Charlie Lustman, who bought the shuttered building in 1999, is selling the business to Dan and Sammy Harkham in a deal expected to close at the end of the month. Lustman's last silent picture show as proprietor will be the Charlie Chaplin classic "The Kid," running Friday through Sunday.
Though Lustman will come back to present other silents, he's handing the reins to the Harkhams, who until a few months ago had only dreamed of owning a revival house.
"It's every movie nerd's dream," said Sammy Harkham, 26, a cartoonist who will be in charge of programming. His 24-year-old brother, Dan, who will manage the business, is just as excited. "It's like two kids buying Disneyland," he said.
They will be the fourth owners of the little theater on Fairfax Avenue in its 64-year history.
The Silent Movie Theatre was an anachronism when it was built in 1942 -- 15 years after the advent of talking motion pictures. But its founder, John Hampton, was smitten by silents at an early age, and his passion was undying. He projected movies in the living room as a kid, and later worked in theaters and painted movie posters. After he married, he and his wife, Dorothy, barnstormed theaterless towns in Oklahoma showing movies in rented halls and tents.
Asthma drove him out of dustbowl Oklahoma, and he began looking for a place to build a permanent shrine to silent film. He built his 150-seat Old Time Movie theater on Fairfax Avenue. Hampton would spin old records like a DJ to provide a soundtrack, while Dorothy collected the 5- and 10-cent tickets. They lived in a small apartment above the lobby.
In addition to running the theater, Hampton collected and restored silent films, which were shot on highly flammable nitrate film stock. Film scholars estimate that 90% of silent movies have been lost -- thrown away, burned in vault fires, degraded into dust -- and Hampton amassed a collection of considerable value.
The theater closed after a death in the family in 1979, and then Hampton's own health began failing and it didn't reopen. He sold half his films to collector David Packard to pay for medical treatment. Hampton died of cancer in 1990.
