In 1941 - Bob Word, Sr., the owner of the RITZ Theater in Scottsboro, Alabama, joined forces with filmmaker Lloyd Royal of Meridian, Mississippi to produce a promotional film showcasing the local people and businesses around town.
Over 80 years later, Bob Word, Jr., the son of Word Sr., provided an aging copy of the film to Annette Bradford of the Jackson County Historical Association. The film has was first digitized by Bradley Reeves of Knoxville, TN - inspiring me to restore it further. With additional cleaning and treatment of the deteriorating film I re-digitized frame-by-frame with excellent results.
Note: This is a silent film. Captions are used to show identities of people & places.
Bob Word, Jr. 1941 & 2023
with Elizabeth Payne Word
Prior to the advent of the home movie camera and the ubiquitousness of the camera phone, there was the local film. This cultural phenomenon, produced across the country from the 1890s to the 1950s, gave ordinary people a chance to be on the silver screen without leaving their hometowns. Through these movies, residents could see themselves in the same theaters where they saw major Hollywood motion pictures. Traveling filmmakers plied their trade in small towns and cities, where these films were received by locals as being part of the larger cinema experience.
My grandfather, Dr. Samuel P. Hall, was one of only two doctors in Scottsboro during the 1940s. I utilized his 16mm Keystone projector; retrofitted with LED light source, stepper-motor, and a machine vision camera with macro lens. Over 65,000 individual frames were captured and processed to generate the clips presented here.
