International Jazz Banjo Newsletter

I am writing on the slight chance that one of you may be able to help us in the restoration of Eddie Peabody's first Vitaphone film short, "Banjomania." This is a film that he made in 1927 with partner Jimmy Maisel. This was a process in which the picture is on film and the sound on a separate large record disc which was synchronized to the film. Several of us Peabody fans had donated enough money to have a California film laboratory restore it by cleaning up the deteriorating old film and merging it with the sound disc onto new film with the disc sound transferred to the sound track. The Library of Congress provided the film and the sound disc was to be provided by a California film collector. It turned out that the disc he had was not the one for Banjomania but for another Peabody Vitaphone short.
I am contacting you about this to see if you may have any knowledge of British collectors of old films and Vitaphone shorts that may have one of these Vitaphone discs for Banjomania. The Banjo on Record Bio-Discography book started by Brian Rust and completed by Uli Heier and Rainer Lotz listed this disc on page 342 in the section on Peabody recordings. The fact that it listed details such as the names of all the tunes on the disc indicates that they or an assistant had access to such a disc on your side of the ocean. If you have any contacts where you could check this out we would appreciate it. If the disc could be located we would be interested in making arrangements to get a CD from it that could then be synchronized to the sound track of the film over here.
Several of us Peabody fans had raised the $4500 necessary to do this high tech job at the University of Southern California film lab. It includes frame by frame cleaning of the old film in addition to synchronizing sound to new film. If a sound disc can't be located by October 1, the checks will be returned to the contributors and the restoration attempt abandoned for now. We hope that this will not happen.

Sincerely,
Lowell Schreyer