Ben Model

Ben Model creates music to accompany films from the silent movie era. 

Ben Model & Steve Massa, co-curators at MoMA, joins us to talk about the exhibit, “Cruel and Unusual Comedy: Astonishing Shorts from the Slapstick Era.”

Silent film accompanist Ben Model and film historian Steve Massa discuss “The Mishaps of Musty Suffer,” a forgotten series of silent slapstick comedies, which have been unavailable to the public for 97 years. “Musty Suffer” was wildly popular during its release, but the series has been oddly overlooked and neglected ever since. Fortunately the Library of Congress preserved the 24 surviving films from the Musty Suffer series. Model did the score and produced the new DVD, co-curated by Massa.

Christel Schmidt talks about Mary Pickford, cinema's first great star, along with Ben Model, piano accompanist. Schmidt is editor of Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies, a collection of essays by film historians that sheds new light on this icon's incredible life and legacy. Pickford is revealed as a gifted actress, a philanthropist, and a savvy industry leader who fought for creative control of her films and ultimately became her own producer.

Film and television historian Ben Model talks about curating The Ernie Kovacs Collection, a 6-DVD box set, which is the first-ever comprehensive collection of Kovacs’ work. Kovacs, whose offbeat humor graced the airwaves for just a decade in the 1950s and 1960s, was funny but never offensive, and his humor and flair for improvisation influenced generations of TV funnymen: from Johnny Carson and Monty Python, to David Letterman, Pee Wee Herman and “Saturday Night Live.”

W. C. Fields' granddaughter, Harriet Fields, and film historian/silent film accompanist Ben Model look back on the life and work of the comic great W. C. Fields.

Film historian Steve Massa and film historian/accompanist Ben Model on their series at the Museum of Modern Art, "Cruel and Unusual Comedy: Social Commentary in the American Slapstick Film." The series runs from May 20 through June 1 at MoMA. More information and screening schedule here. Visit the ...