Norman Film Studio
HOST: Florida has attracted sun-seeking tourists since the late 1800s. But about a century ago, Jacksonville lured motion picture producers, making it the winter film capital of the world. This is the site of a former movie company, Norman Studios, which is now a place dedicated to preserving the legacy of this area's silent film industry.
APPRAISER: Richard Norman began his film career around 1912. He was born here in northeast Florida. About 1919 he was living in Chicago. It had a very vibrant African-American arts and film community. And so he saw a market in race films. And that was when he decided to hire all-black casts. And he created then his first race film in 1919 called The Green-Eyed Monster. Race films, as they were called, between about 1915 and 1950 were films that starred black actors playing both the bad guys and the good guys. And most mainstream films back then, African-American characters were cast in a very negative light. These films helped turn that around. He made The Green-Eyed Monster here in Jacksonville, and he went on to make two more films here in town. One was The Flying Ace and one was Regeneration.
HOST: So are any of the Norman films in existence today?
APPRAISER: To our knowledge, the only film of Mr. Norman's that still exists is The Flying Ace.
HOST: So where was the last time that Green-Eyed Monster reels were actually seen?
APPRAISER: Well, Mr. Norman had about a half a dozen copies of that film. Some of them may have been left at the movie houses where they played. Back in the late '70s, early '80s there was an auction here of a lot of his assets. Also sometime in the early '80s a refrigerated truck apparently pulled up and boxes of reels were loaded in. So that may have been sold to whomever owned that truck.
HOST: So we don't know.
APPRAISER: We really don't know.
APPRAISER: Silent films and old films in general have suffered a sad fate. When the era of talkies came in, in the late '20s, it made a lot of these films-- and their film stars, unfortunately, and some film companies-- obsolete.
HOST: So what happened to the films?
APPRAISER: Well, a lot of them got stored in warehouses and forgotten. And the early films were made with what they call 35 millimeter nitrate film, which, as we found out over the years, unfortunately is highly flammable and can actually spontaneously combust. It's been estimated anywhere between 25% and 90% of silent films have been destroyed.
HOST: What is the market for silent films today?
APPRAISER: The collector market is a relatively narrow market, and very secretive. There are very few sales at auction. I think the last major auction that took place for films was in 1999. The largest market, in my opinion, is the archival market. And that is the Museum of Modern Art, UCLA, American Film Institute, Library of Congress and other university repositories, because these are the places that have the resources and the archivists to properly preserve and restore these prints and also store them.
HOST: How do race films compare as far as value goes?
APPRAISER: The vast majority of the silent film market, several hundred dollars to several thousand. But given the African-American crossover, in my opinion, it's worth substantially more.
HOST: What should people do if they think they have information or actually have their hands on reels of The Green-Eyed Monster?
APPRAISER: You can find our contact information on our website: normanstudios.org. And we can go to work on getting it to a place where it'll be, you know, preserved and shared with the public.
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