Tod Browning's The Unholy Three | With Stephin Merrit

Tod Browning’s

with live accompaniment and original music by

with special guest musicians

Daniel Handler + Pinky Weitzman

1 2 3 W e s t 4 3 r d S t N YC 1 0 0 3 6 | T H E T OW N H A L L . o r g

Wednesday, May 22 • 7pm

NEIL GAIMAN talks GOOD OMENS With Special Guest

NICK OFFERMAN Presented in Partnership with Strand Books Good Omens is published by William Morrow | HarperCollins

S a t u r d a y, M AY 1 8 , 2 0 1 9

THE TOWN HALL PRESENTS

Tod Browning’S

THE UNHOLY THREE With Live accompaniment and original music by

STEPHIN MERRITt With Guest Musicians

Daniel Handler Pinky WEItzman And a special presentation of

Guy Maddin’s Sissy Boy Slap Party

THE TOWN HALL 123 W 43rd st nyc LARRY ZUCKER, Executive Director

Cindy Byram PR, Publicity

M.A. PAPPER, Artistic Director

CARL ACAMPORA, Production Manager

JEFF MANN, Marketing Director

LEIA-LEE DORAN, Principal Designer

BILL DEHLING, Technical Director

ALEX KOVEOS, Digital Media Manager Melay Araya, Assistant Artistic Dir. / Archivist

THETOWNHALL.ORG | @TownHallNYC

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A L e t t e r f r om t he p r esi d en t s

Welcome to The Town Hall.

We are delighted to present tonight’s film and live score - Tod Browning’s “The Unholy Three” and welcome Stephin Merritt, Daniel Handler and Pinky Weitzman to the Town Hall stage. Tonight promises to be a special night.

When the Hall opened in 1921, our founders tried to organized evenings where movies could be shown with an orchestra performing live on the stage. It was the silent era, so if you wanted to add sound, why not bring in an orchestra.

Unfortunately, in order to see the films, the stage had to be dark. So you would not actually get to see the musicians.

It turns out that New York City’s Fire Department never agreed to let Town Hall run the movies. Back then, films were made of celluloid, a highly flammable substance made from cellulose nitrate and camphor.

Let’s fast forward to tonight: no more celluloid, in fact, no more film. Yes, it is the digital age. And just a few weeks ago Town Hall purchased a new projector.

This one doesn’t even have a bulb. Inside the 31,000 lumens projector is an ultra-high definition laser. Which make it possible for us to watch movies and, at the same time, keep the stage lights on.

After all, can you imagine Stephin, Daniel and Pinky on our stage and not seeing them play?

From everyone at Town Hall - thank you for coming, please enjoy the show.

Tom Wirtshafter President

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Marvin Leffler President Emeritus

Abo u t t he p r og r a m

Songwriter Stephin Merritt offers a new musical vision for The Unholy Three, an early and unsettling crime melodrama from director Tod Browning, best known for Dracula and Freaks.

Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields) premieres his original new songs and score in a live film screening of Tod Browning’s 1925 film The Unholy Three, starring Lon Chaney, at The Town Hall. Merritt will be joined by accordionist and novelist Daniel Handler (A Series of Unfortunate Events) and viola player and multi-instrumentalist Pinky Weitzman.

“Perhaps the greatest talent of director Tod Browning was his ability to make even the most preposterous story somehow plausible,” notes Bret Wood in his piece for Turner Classic Movies. “Throughout his early career he specialized in crime melodramas that were tinged with the unusual but The Unholy Three, his first of sixteen films for MGM, allowed him to plunge headlong into the perverse.”

For Merritt, this is the third installment in a trilogy of silent film scores and the first to debut in New York. Prior scores for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) and Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927) both debuted on the West Coast.

“Five years ago I played my ukulele score (with accordion climaxes) for the Lon Chaney–Joan Crawford vehicle The Unknown at San Francisco’s iconic Castro Theater. Continuing in my (eventual) Chaney trilogy, I’m happy to be performing The Unholy Three, with returning accordionist Daniel Handler, now with violistmulti-instrumentalist Pinky Weitzman,” Merritt notes. “TUT, as we call it, is so good it was remade – with Chaney again in the lead -- five years later as a talkie.

But as always, the silent is better.”

Starring Lon Chaney, Victor McLaglen and Harry Earles, The Unholy Three also features a “monstrous ape” who is unleashed in the film’s suitably outrageous final reel.

“So popular was Browning’s twisted tale that MGM made The Unholy Three, conceived as nothing more than a low-budget melodrama, one of their highprofile releases of the season, alongside such monumental films as King Vidor’s The Big Parade, Ben-Hur and Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow. It scored a multi-picture contract for Browning and enabled him to direct seven more films with Chaney, surprisingly unique thrillers populated by twisted bodies and criminal minds.” @TownHallNYC @TownHallNYC || 33

Abo u t t he p r og r a m

The Unholy Three made its theatrical debut at the New York Capitol Theater where it as an immediate hit, heralded by Life magazine’s R.E. Sherwood as “the best picture of its kind since The Miracle Man,” the 1919 silent that also featured Chaney in the lead. The 1930 re-make of The Unholy Three was a scene-forscene duplicate of the original but directed by Jack Conway (Browning had by then left MGM). It turned out to be Chaney’s first and only talkie.

Director Tod Browning, perhaps best known for two later films, Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932), is on identifiably strange ground with The Unholy Three.

Says Merritt: “The plot concerns three fairground performers -- a ventriloquist, a midget, and a strongman -- who open a pet shop as a front for their burglary ring. Chaney—the Tilda Swinton of a century ago—spends much of the film in completely gratuitous, totally serious drag. Why not? Chaney is the star but Harry Earles (who also appeared in Browning’s Freaks) hogs every scene, often disguised as a gleefully obnoxious baby. Also, there is a gorilla.”

Stephin Merritt Stephin Merritt releases albums under the band names the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes. Merritt has written and recorded eleven Magnetic Fields albums, including his popular 1999 album, 69 Love Songs.

Merritt and the Magnetic Fields performed as part of Lincoln Center’s ‘American Songwriters’ series and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s ‘Next Wave of Song’. Merritt composed original music and lyrics for three music theater pieces directed by Chen ShiZheng. In 2008, Merritt composed music for the Off Broadway stage musical of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, for which he won an Obie Award. Merritt composed the score for the Academy award-nominated film Pieces of April (dir. Peter Hedges). He composed incidental music for the HarperCollins’ audio books of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler’s pen name), and for Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and released albums for each. Merritt created and performed a live score for the 1916 silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and for Tod Browning’s 1927 film The Unknown, both at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. In 2014, Merritt released a book of poems, 101 Two Letter Words, about the tiniest words in the Scrabble dictionary, illustrated by Roz Chast. In 2017, Merritt released his latest Magnetic Fields album, 50 Song Memoir, on Nonesuch Records. houseoftomorrow.com 4 | @TownHallNYC

Photos courtesy of the Artists

Abo u t t he p r og r a m

Daniel Handler Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Bottle Grove, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing in August 2019. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including Swarm of Bees, illustrated by Rilla Alexander.

His books have sold more than 70 million copies and been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for screen and stage. His first play, Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit, was produced in 2018 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The first season of Netflix’s adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, for which he served as Executive Producer and Writer, won a 2018 Peabody Award for its “lively excellence, strange silliness, and compelling storytelling,” and the teleplay was nominated for a 2019 Writers Guild Award. The show’s third and final season was released in January of 2019.

As a musician, Handler was in two bands following college, He began his collaboration with Stephin Merritt playing accordion on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs. Since then Handler has gone on to play accordion in several other Merritt projects, including an album by the Gothic Archies featuring all thirteen songs from the audiobooks in A Series of Unfortunate Events, along with two bonus songs.

Pinky Weitzman Pinky Weitzman is one of New York City’s few but proud rock violists. Although viola is her first love, she’s awfully fond of the Stroh violin and lots of other odd instruments, too. She sings and plays music ranging from cabaret rock to Texas swing to Gypsy punk, and has been fortunate to work with some very talented musicians along the way, including indie rock luminaries such as Moby, Belle and Sebastian, the Magnetic Fields, and The Hold Steady. She’s also been featured on labels such as Sony, Merge, and Nonesuch with folks like Crash Test Dummies and The Living End, toured with the Tony Award-winning rock musical Spring Awakening, and performed and recorded on the NPR series This American Life. When not making music, she serves as Chief Digital Officer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Photo: © SimonNYC

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