“Not only is the music wonderful, but the timing is spot on.”
 -Roger Ebert, Virginia Film Festival

"Sharing an audience's thrill as it discovers Garbo's luminosity and revels in the imaginative boister score is one of life's great cinematic experiences."
 -Jed Dietz, Director, Maryland Film Festival

ONE OF THE MOST enchanting experiences a person can have at the movies is to watch a classic silent film accompanied by a live orchestra. And when the musical score is lush, inventive and intoxicating enough to hold its own as an instrumental composition....well, then the theater levitates. All will surely rise this Friday when the Smithsonian Associates presents Maryland composer Anne Watts and her band, Boister, performing their original score for Buster Keaton's 1928 film "Steamboat Bill, Jr." Boister's music has been described as Brecht meets Captain Beefhart, and with good reason. (Yes, those are strains of "Stormy Weather" and "We Are the Champions" you hear during the movie's climactic scenes.) That genre-blending iconoclasm is the perfect fit for Keaton's signature blend of pathos, physical comedy and technical virtuosity: Watts's composition creates an aural narrative just as poignant, witty and breathtaking as the images onscreen. Boister and Buster don't get out together that often (their most recent Washington appearance was at the Kennedy Center last April), so don't miss this chance to experience a sublime movie the way it ought to be experienced- by full, glorious immersion."
 -Ann Hornaday Washington Post March 17, 2002

Captaining a riverboat was clearly not a career for any character played by Buster Keaton , whose deadpan demeanor was usually set off hilariously by catastrophe. In 1928's Steamboat Bill, Jr., Keaton plays a wimpy college grad who returns to his small Southern hometown, where he reluctantly helps his virile father battle a business rival as a series of physical gags escalates to a climactic cyclone. The movie is an exemplary showcase for Keaton's distinctive style, which was rooted in live vaudeville - where the comedian began working at age 3 - but flowered on celluloid. This screening is also the Washington premiere of an eclectic, allusive score written for the classic comedy by Maryland composer Anne Watts, commissioned by Baltimore's Walters Art Museum and first performed in 1998. Watts and her six-piece band, Boister, will perform the score live, adding an element of spontaneity to Keaton's impeccably timed slapstick.
 -Mark Jenkins DC City Paper March 13, 2002

Reasons to support Boister does Buster

To jump-start Creative Alliance Movie Makers' new membership drive, the ultra-eclectic cabaret accordionist and composer Anne Watts and her group Boister will play their original score to Buster Keaton's mind-expanding silent comedy "Steamboat Bill, Jr." tonight at 9:30 at 413 S. Conkling St. Here are 10 reasons why this is a perfect night out for movie-lovers as well as an ideal event for a group that sponsors independent regional production on film, video or digital.

1. Buster Keaton was one of the great independent moviemakers, and "Steamboat Bill, Jr." (from 1928) was the last picture he made before relinquishing his independence and signing with MGM.

2. Keaton shot the movie in Sacramento, Calif., and placed ingenious sets in real locations with an offhand flair worthy of inspiring awe and emulation by contemporary indies.

3. Few pictures are more energizing than this often-overlooked masterpiece. In the manner of Keaton's earlier "Seven Chances," it starts as a bizarre yet modest farce about the vain attempts of a collegiate son (Keaton) to bond with his river-tramp dad (Ernest Torrence) and builds into a surreal epic that induces euphoria.

4. It demonstrates how Keaton, as star and as director, united comedy and moviemaking. The setup beautifully exploits his peculiar ravaged dignity, and the performances, images and cutting coalesce to form the filmmaking equivalent of a droll delivery. Keaton's compositions are as charged and formal as old comic-book panels; his angular poses complete them like stylized punctuation marks - and detonate the gags.

5. Unlike most of today's comedy hit-makers, Keaton doesn't push anything. He trusts the integrity of even his slightest jokes, while enlarging the frenzy in a climactic cyclone sequence to apocalyptic proportions. The escalating frenzy feels inevitable: It's an astounding set of variations on Keaton emerging unscathed from every sort of door, window or opening as buildings blow away or slide around him or collapse on top of him.

6. Keaton's ability to translate physical humor into the graphic art of the movies inspired comic-book draftsmen and makers of comic-book movies (such as Richard Lester in "Superman II" and "Superman III"), as well as avant-gardists like Luis Bunuel, who adored the way this singular man expressed his being through moviemaking. He wasn't only an independent moviemaker; he was also a personal moviemaker nonpareil.

7. Creative Alliance Movie Makers are presenting "Steamboat Bill, Jr." with a live original score by Anne Watts and Boister. Those who have never seen a silent flick with flesh-and-blood musical accompaniment will be astonished at how viscerally immediate and full of implied sounds a non-talking picture can be.

8. Watts and Boister wisely don't compete with Keaton for your attention. Their score, which quotes everything from "Stormy Weather" to "We Are the Champions," rises and falls with the ebb and flow of the reluctant hero's adventures.

9. "Steamboat Bill, Jr." inspired Walt Disney's first Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound, "Steamboat Willie"; "Mickey Mouse music" swiftly became the term for scores that mechanically echoed every bit of action on the screen. Luckily, there's nothing Mickey Mouse about Watts and Boister's music. Their segues from ambling pastoral themes to percolating urban riffs underline the Oedipal conflicts of a Boston-bred son and a barnacled Big River-riding dad.

10. With the right bohemian yet unpretentious crowd, seeing "Steamboat Bill, Jr." can bring back what James Agee eulogized as the lusty innocence of silent movie-going: "the laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall.

-Michael Sragow The Baltimore Sun May 18, 2001