A Silent Siren Song: The Aitken Brothers' Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926

By Al P. Nelson

Traces the journey of Harry (1877-1956) and Roy Aitken (1882-1976), two brothers from the Wisconsin farmlands who pioneered the studio system of Hollywood's Golden Age. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815410697
• ISBN13: 9780815410690
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Cooper Square Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 0.9" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

A story of Hollywood's silent screen era

In A Silent Siren Song: The Aitken Brothers' Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926, Al Nelson and Mel Jones effectively collaborate to tell a story of Hollywood's silent screen era as represented by Harry and Roy Aitken, two of film history's most innovative movie makers and their cadre of the great directors and stars of the day. This notables ranged from D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford, to Lillian Gish, Mabel Normand, "Fatty" Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. A Silent Siren Song traces the Aitkens' brothers rise from small-time film distributors to the captaining of a genuine movie empire and the production of silent era classics from the Keystone Kops to "Birth of a Nation". This is an impressive, informative, and very welcome contribution to personal and academic film history collections.

Unknown Masters of the Silent Screen

You have heard of Warner Brothers. Have you ever heard of the Aitken brothers? Probably not, but their innovations in the motion picture business before talkies helped make Hollywood what it is today. They are often left out of the movie history books, so that even silent film fans may not know who they are. This need no longer be the case. _A Silent Siren Song: The Aitken Brothers' Hollywood Odyssey, 1905 -1926_ (Cooper Square Press), by Al P. Nelson and Mel R. Jones, provides a biography of the brothers, who produced more than 2,500 films, including some legendary ones. These were, amazingly, Wisconsin farm boys. They knew they wanted to do something more lucrative and exciting than milk cows, and in 1905 when Roy went to a nickelodeon in Chicago to see _The Great Train Robbery_, he sent for Harry to come see it, too. They saw that movies were a business with a future, and set up their own nickelodeon. _A Silent Siren Song_ wonderfully traces the arc of the brothers' career, buying nickelodeons, then running a film exchange to rent films to other peoples' nickelodeons, then distributing films to Europe, then producing films themselves. They helped the careers of Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplain, the Gish sisters, and many more famous stars, but they knew to promote their directors as well. Their most famous director was D. W. Griffith, and he made for them the first superpicture, _Birth of a Nation_ in 1915. A smash success, it was followed by _Intolerance_, a critical success, and an expensive commercial flop. The Aitkens, for many reasons detailed in this careful book, could not survive as outsiders in Hollywood, and returned to Wisconsin.Harry and Roy were happy when they were on top and unembittered when they had to head back home. This book shows just how innovative they were. Besides making the first superpicture, they established worldwide branches for film distribution; they were the first to use public relations and full-page ads for films; they engaged the finances of Wall Street to make movies. An engaging, revealing work, _A Silent Siren Song_ gives us back some film history we lost in letting us meet the Aitkens. It is a happy overview of movie production, distribution, and display when the movies were just beginning.