First Friday: Silver Screen on the Square

Join us for an evening of silent film shorts featuring comedian Buster Keaton and western star Tom Mix.  In café style seating, we will snack on popcorn, jeer villains, and root for the good guys.

In front of the Burgess Carriage House.  Victorian selfie station.  Free.

Comedian Buster Keaton, known for his athletic stunts, is the victim of a prank in “One Week.” Newlywed couple Keaton and Sybil Seely attempt to build a house with a prefabricated kit, unaware that a rival sabotaged the kit’s component numbering. The underside of the oak staircase in the Rosson House has numbered treads. Based on this evidence, we believe it was ordered from a catalog, shipped on a train to Phoenix and assembled in the house.  As far as we know, this builder did not encounter the same difficulties as Buster Keaton!

In “Sky High”, Tom Mix plays an immigration agent on the Arizona border, sent to infiltrate a gang smuggling Chinese workers in from Mexico. Of course there is a beautiful girl in need of rescue and lots of horse riding and derring-do to accomplish before the happy ending. This film was shot in the Grand Canyon and features Mix dropping from a bi-plane in the raging Colorado River.

No program of early film is complete without “Those Awful Hats.” A commentary on large picture hats of Victorian ladies, this movie theater has in ingenious solution. Could this work with cell phones?