Silents Synced, the silent movie/alt-rock hybrid experience from Austinite Josh Frank, has been a hit at independent art house cinemas across the nation. Now it’s going international, as the phenomenon heads to the United Kingdom.
The first of the Silents Synced films, Radiohead x Nosferatu, pairing F.W. Murnau’s 1922 expressionist nightmare Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror with Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, will play in UK cinemas this fall. It starts with a night of screenings nationwide on Oct. 2, followed by a longer run at the prestigious Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square.
After that comes his second project, R.E.M. x Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., which will open in February.
However, ahead of all that Frank will be flying to London for the special UK premiere of his version of the vampire classic at the famous Rio Cinema, an art deco wonder and a working picture house for over 100 years. “I’m very excited about it,” Frank said.Frank credits his U.S. distributor, CineLife, for connecting with their UK counterpart, CinemaLive, to enable this international expansion. It’s the next phase in the life of an experiment that has already become a runaway success, with Radiohead x Nosferatu playing at over 300 cinemas across the U.S. since its world premiere last September at the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles. Last month, Frank was at the Art House Convergence trade conference in Chicago, “and people were coming up to me when they realized I was the Silents Synced guy and shaking my hand. … They were impressed about how the audience came out for this new idea.”
He has had to make one tweak for the UK audiences. Anyone that’s seen the U.S. version will have seen a video introduction by Frank, in which he wears sunglasses in part as an homage to New Wave Theatre host Peter Ivers, and in part because it would hide his eyes moving as read the script. “It was fine here,” he said. “Some people thought it was funny, some people laughed, some people were like, ‘That’s weird, a guy wearing sunglasses in a projection booth.’ But I get a call from the promoter of CinemaLive for our monthly call, and he’s like, ‘You know, Josh, I never watched your introduction, and I sent our movies to one of our theatres, and they sent me this strange email saying, ‘What’s with this jerk wearing the sunglasses?’ He said, ‘Well, over here, people take offense to people not showing their eyes,’ and I was like, ‘Really?’ Nobody said anything over here, but over there that’s the first thing that anyone said. So it was the first time I went, ‘What am I in for?’ Cultural differences.”
Silents Synced brings together Frank’s three great loves – alt rock, classic movies, and creating intriguing and unusual programming for art house and independent cinemas. He’d been dabbling with syncing movies and albums together for years. (Did you know that Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile pairs up surprisingly perfectly with Metropolis? Josh Frank does.) However, he really kicked the project into high gear during the pandemic. With his other cinematic innovation, the Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In, now on hiatus, he’s been able to concentrate on Silents Synced and helping his fellow art house and independent cinema operators. He said, “What’s thrilling to me about this is that I learned all this stuff over 16 years running my onwn little art house cinema, and I’ve created something that’s bringing in audiences for them outside of the stuff they usually show, and seeing audiences so excited by it.”
Even with the big news of the UK expansion, Frank has more announcements of titles and collaborations planned. This isn’t just about him licensing the music but also working with the bands and their management: for example, it was actually R.E.M who suggested that he use their albums Monster and New Adventures in Hi-Fi for Sherlock Jr.
However, that doesn’t mean that Frank isn’t a little nervous about taking Radiohead x Nosferatu back to the band’s home country. “It’s really cool and weird, because that’s where they’re from,” he said.
Tickets to the UK premiere of Radiohead x Nosferatu are available now at Riocinema.org. Tickets for future screenings of Radiohead x Nosferatu are available at cinemalive.com.
For U.S. screenings and booking info, visit silentscynced.com.