RM: You told me that the film that put you on your career path at an early age was called "American Aristocracy."

KB: This film "American Aristocracy" caused an extraordinary series of coincidences for me. The first was that someone told me about the British Film Institute and I discovered that they had an index of DW Griffith's film production notes. Now Griffith is supposed to have produced "American Aristocracy" so I got the cast list and memorized that list.

And when I joined the BFI, I kept hearing people talk about the Al Parker Agency, the agency that discovered Richard Attenbourgh and Trevor Howard. And having a one track mind, I knew that Al Parker was actually Albert S. Parker who played the villain in "American Aristocracy."

Douglas Fairbanks (with wife Mary Pickford) starred in "American Aristocracy" and other Albert Parker films.

So I rang him up and he invited me over to his agency. I brought my film projector and we had a look at the film. His wife insisted that we make an event out of it with a special dinner, so they invited all of the talent in their agency to come around for a special screening of the film. And at that dinner he invited Clive Brooks, Trevor Howard, Harvey Kruger, and a young actor named James Mason. I was 18 at the time.

And Parker would get the celebrity bulletin, so he would tell me when important Hollywood people were in town, like when King Vidor would be staying at the Hyde Park Hotel and so forth. I thought that if I was a student of literature, and Hemingway or Fitzgerald were still alive that I'd go and see them. Fortunately, I was working as an film editor and I could afford to go to America.

In 1964, I went to Hollywood and stayed with David Bradley, the famous film collector. He knew everyone from the silent era and I thought, "I could meet with anyone. How about Buster Keaton?"

Bradley picked up his phone, got through to his agent and fixed up a time to see Keaton the next day. "Well, that was easy. How about Josef von Sternberg?"

Directors Josef von Sternberg and Buster Keaton

He got Sternberg on the phone and von Sternberg says he can meet me the next week. "I'm sorry," I say, "but I'm only here for three more days."

"Why do you leave me until last?" says Sternberg in a thick German accent. "I am a polite man and I do not wish to injure our future relationship, so you will come at once and stay 30 minutes, and then go."

So we raced over to his place, but it was dark and we got lost. So I was panicked when von Sternberg opened the door. "Calm down Mr. Brownlow," he said, "a half an hour is a long time."

I was still panting, and I tried to express my appreciation for his work and admiration for his films. "Calm down Mr. Brownlow. You have the most parenthetical approach to every question that I have ever heard."

So after 30 minutes, I prepare to leave and von Sternberg says, "Where are you going?" "I have a meeting with Allan Dwan (silent era director)." I vill extend it!" he replied.

Cinematographer Bert Glennon (left) confers with John Ford.

RM: I have to ask you about the interview that you never got: John Ford.

KB: I meet him several times. And the best opportunity to talk was at a Foreign Press Association before the Academy Awards in 1970. And I had a friend introduce us and Ford said that he had just seen the recently re-discovered film "Straight Shooting" from 1917. "Can you tell me something about it?" I eagerly inquired.

Ford looked at me with his big eye patch, "Don't remember!" I pressed on, "You worked with Harry Carey, what was that like?" "Don't remember," he was stonewalling me.

Then he looked at my wife with her red hair and said, "Where are you from?" "County Waterford, Ireland" she replied.

"Ah," says Ford (with an Irish brogue), "do ya know the little bridge across the river in Ardmore." I could never get him to talk to me about film.

RM: You interviewed people behind the scenes like technicians, publicists, agents, etc. What were they like?

Karl Brown worked with DW Griffith on "The Birth of a Nation" (above) and "Intolerance."

KB: The film technicians that I talked to in Hollywood were absolutely passionate about their work and they had keep many stills and souvenirs from the productions that they worked on. I was working at the American Film Institute for the Louis B. Meyer Oral History Project and I received a call from someone asking me if Karl Brown was still alive. The name is magic to me because I had a copy of "The Covered Wagon" and the cinematography is breathtaking. So I longed to meet him, but I knew that he was dead.

Fortunately, they didn't believe me and contacted the California Department of Motor Vehicles and got an address for a Karl Brown. So I drove out there one night to a little bungalow up in Laurel Canyon and knocked on the door. There was no answer.

As I turned to leave, I noticed the end credits rolling on a film reflected on the window. So I went back and knocked again until an old lady answered. "How'd you find us?" she said. And it was as if Karl Brown was sitting there waiting to be interviewed.

So I turned on my tape recorder and out came the most amazing stories in great detail. I went back several times and finally convinced him to write a book about his life that was "Adventures of DW Griffith." Brown was the assistant director to Griffith on "The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance," so he had a front row view of the making of those two masterpieces.

Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon Bonaparte (France, 1927)

RM: Tell us about the restoration of Abel Gance's "Napoleon."

KB: I was ill in bed, and the local library in Bromley, Kent offered to send me a film called "Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution." I rang the British Film Institute and they read a review of the film which was very bad. "The film has a Napoleon Bonaparte who preens himself like a turkey cock. It requires a great deal of editing." So I expected the worse.

But when it arrived I set-up a projector in the front room and I soon realized that I was seeing cinema as I thought that it should be. It looked like a brilliant 18th Century newsreel. The costumes and the art direction were magnificent. The camera work was incredible especially during the chase across Corsica sequences.

Gance realized that Napoleon was trying to escape Corsica at the same time that there were riots in Paris, so he intercut the action like a double storm: Napoleon in a storm at sea and the Paris convention in an uproar. I thought that it was just incredible.

I only had two of the six reels that were released, so it took months to find the rest of the film. The National Film Theatre eventually put it on in 1963, but the quality of the print was so poor that I walked out. My friends were very shocked by that at the time.

The following year, the Cinematique sent a much better print and I must confess that I did something illegal. I smuggled the print out and made a copy. Thank God I did, because they subsequently lost that print in a fire. But even that version was missing an awful lot, and was out of order. So I decided that I should undertake a full restoration.

Charlie Chaplin (left) in "The Immigrant." (1917)

RM: Another of your projects is "The Unknown Chaplin." How did you get access to the Chaplin archives?

KB: I produced a series for BBC about early Hollywood and when we got to the comedians I contacted Charlie Chaplin's agent in London. He informed us that the fee for using Chaplin's footage would be £100,000 per minute. In desperation, a friend recommended that we contact Chaplin's business manager Rachel Ford.

Rachel Ford was very intimidating on the phone. Her father was a General in WW1 and she herself had been a major in the French army in North Africa with 2,000 under her command. So she says, "Charles has agreed to let you use a snippet." "A snippet for a 50 minute program?" I replied incredulously. "If you come to the vault and I will let you choose your snippet," she continued.

David Gill (the series co-producer) and I went to the vaults in Devon and looked over the film cans, and I was disappointed because I was hoping to find something that I'd never heard of. As we were about to leave, I noticed a can at the bottom of a pile that was labeled "How to Make Movies."

I asked Ms. Ford about it and she said that it was something that Chaplin made for 'fun.' "What?" I asked, "you have films here that were never released?" "Oh yes, we have lot's of them," she replied. "Could we see them?"

In no time we were watching outtakes from "City Lights" a scene that had been cut from the first reel- absolute genius! Chaplin was using a stick that was stuck in a street grate to improvise a wonderful routine for seven minutes, and then had the courage to cut it from the film.

Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill in "City Lights" (1931)

Eventually we selected our snippet and then set out to get access to the rest of the archive. We were lucky to work for a rich TV company (Thames) because it took 18 months of negotiations, before a large vehicle arrived from France with over 300,000 ft. of "Unknown Chaplin" footage and 400,000 ft. of Sydney Chaplin (his elder half-brother) footage. This represented the outtakes of the Mutual Film Studio period of 1917 and they were all the original camera negatives.

We took the film over to Thames TV and David got the idea to join the film together in slate order so we could seen the takes in sequence as they were originally shot. And as we watched the first 20 - 30 clips, we realized that Chaplin made up his films as he went along. Apparently he used no script and he just tried something to see how it would work. If that failed, he'd try something different until he was satisfied with the results.

The second episode of "The Unknown Chaplin" series is about the making of "City Lights." We interviewed Virginia Cherill (the lead actress who played the flower girl) and many others who were involved in the project. And we learned about some footage that was shot by Ralph Barton on the set of "City Lights."

When we finally got access to that footage we were amazed because it looked as if we had sent a crew out to film the making of "City Lights" to our specifications- it could not have been better. Again we were amazed that any filmmaker could be so extravagant with time, because half way through, Chaplin began to remake the film with Georgia Hale who had been in "The Gold Rush."

Cecil B. De Mille- ready for his close-up.

RM: You describe Cecil B. DeMille as an artist who starts with brilliance of artistic integrity and then loses confidence in his audience.

KB: It was with some reluctance that I took on the DeMille project. My partner Patrick Stanwick had to point out to me that DeMille had made more great films than Eric von Stroheim- and he's right about that.

I'll tell you a little poem that was current in England at the time: "Cecil B. DeMille, much against his will, was persuaded to leave Moses, Out of the War of the Roses."

But I did regain much respect for him after I made the documentary "Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic." In making the film, I had to watch his second version of "The Ten Commandments" after avoiding it all my life, and I have to say that it's truly amazing as an epic production. If you look at the first "Ten Commandments," it's 'Hokum" with a capital 'H,' only the first two reels appeal to me.

But "The Godless Girl," another film he made at the time, bears a close relation to "I Am a Fugative From a Chain Gang." It shows the brutal conditions of American reform schools in the 1920's- It will amaze you, I guarantee it.