Ron Hutchinson, 68, film historian/restorationist (The Vitaphone Project)

[That Derek]

https://mccriskinfuneralhome.com/book-of-memories/3710713/Hutchinson-Ronald/service-details.php

Ronald Porter Hutchinson

August 30, 1951 – February 2, 2019

Obituary for Ronald Porter Hutchinson
It is with great sadness that our family announces the passing of a wonderful husband, father, grandfather, and brother- Ron Hutchinson. He passed away on February 2nd in Piscataway, New Jersey. He was 67.

Ron was well-known as a film historian with unrivaled expertise on the transition to sound. As co-founder and director of The Vitaphone Project, he partnered with UCLA Film & Television Archive, Warner Brothers, the Library of Congress and private collectors to help restore dozens of shorts and feature films, most unseen since their original release. Ron’s unique knowledge has been sourced in over 25 books as well as documentaries for PBS and Turner Classic Movies. He presented completed restoration work nationwide at New York’s Film Forum, Museum of Modern Art, and TCM Film Festival in Hollywood. His expertise can be heard, alongside friend and bandleader, Vince Giordano, on the “The Jazz Singer” DVD box set commentary. In 2014, he was awarded the National Society of Film Critics “Film Heritage Honor” for his work in film preservation and discoveries.

In his professional career, as well as a board member of both the Association of NJ Recyclers and public transit initiative, Keep Middlesex Moving, Ron worked to promote safety and environmentalism. He was awarded the REX (Recycling Excellence) Award among many other accolades.

He is survived by his wife Judy; children Heather and Jared; grandchild Logan and a second grandchild due in May; brother Robert; and daughter and son-in-law Lyubov and Jason.

His love, humor, and support will be missed by many.

A memorial service is planned for Saturday, February 9th from 1-4 pm at the Piscataway Funeral Home in Piscataway NJ.


To send flowers to the family of Ronald Porter Hutchinson, please visit our Heartfelt Sympathies Store.
http://leonardmaltin.com/farewell-to-vitaphone-champion-ron-hutchinson-one-of-the-good-guys/

FAREWELL TO VITAPHONE CHAMPION RON HUTCHINSON—ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS
Home  Leonard Maltin  FAREWELL TO VITAPHONE CHAMPION RON HUTCHINSON—ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS
Leonard Maltin February 5, 2019

In It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart’s George Bailey required an angel to show him how much his life mattered to the people around him. I don’t think Ron Hutchinson needed evidence of the impact he made by cofounding The Vitaphone Project and resuscitating dozens of dormant films. He has done heroic work since the early 1990s and deserves all the accolades imaginable.

He didn’t do it for credit or glory; he did it because he cared. That’s one reason his untimely passing last weekend comes as such a blow to the film community.

For me it’s also personal. I counted him as a friend for more than 25 years, and I am devastated.

Some collectors hoard their goodies; Ron was the opposite, an unabashedly enthusiastic guy who couldn’t wait to share his discoveries. Whenever I found myself in New York on a Monday or Tuesday evening he would organize a gathering of like-minded folks to hear our favorite band, Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. We would happily pass the night away reveling in the vintage music we loved, laughing and trading stories.

His now-famous calling began as an outgrowth of his hobby. An avid collector of 78rpm records, he came upon a number of rare 16 –inch discs that provided soundtracks for some of the first sound movies ever made. The majority of them were Vitaphone short subjects featuring Broadway and vaudeville stars, and hadn’t been seen since they were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Several archives had the equally-rare 35mm film negatives for these shorts but were missing the audio to go with them. With no professional experience in this arena, Ron played matchmaker for major institutions like the Library of Congress and UCLA Film and Television Archive and got them to cooperate in order to make the films whole again. Before Warner Bros. made a major (and welcome) commitment to its vintage talkies, he raised private funds from individuals who wanted to see these tantalizing shorts. He organized Vitaphone programs around the world and even tracked down relatives of old-time vaudevillians to give them the thrill of seeing their parents and grandparents in action. Over the course of time, news of his work yielded more “finds” and helped put feature films as well as shorts back into circulation.
He was proud of his family, all the more so when his son Jared had Vince’s band play at his wedding. I know Ron’s wife Judy must have been a patient soul to see her husband devote so much time and energy to his hobby—a hobby that ultimately became an international resource. My heartfelt condolences go out to his entire family.
This is not the time or place to talk about the history of The Vitaphone Project, although it and Ron have become synonymous. I encourage you to visit the official website http://www.vitaphoneproject.com/ to learn more.

https://travsd.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/r-i-p-ron-hutchinson/

(Travalanche) The observations of actor, author, comedian, critic, director, humorist, journalist, m.c., performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speaker, songwriter, and variety booker Trav S.D. I am NOT a "scholar" or "historian".

February 3, 2019 February 5, 2019 travsd
R.I.P. Ron Hutchinson

I am devastated. Word has reached me that mentor and friend Ron Hutchinson, director of the Vitaphone Project has passed away.

No one was more generous or helpful to me in the creation of my book No Applause. Early in my research process, long about 2001 he had me and my five year old son over to his house and we spent the day talking vaudeville. He told me anecdotes, he showed me his collection, shared primary materials, played his old 78s, and even made my kid a sandwich and a glass of milk for lunch. He gave me phone numbers of people to interview…Rose Marie, Sylvia Froos, Harold Nicholas. Besides me and my editor, there is no one who’s more “in” the book than Ron.
Because, ALSO, I attended all of his Vitaphone screenings over the years, giving me my first real glimpse of so many vaudeville acts, moments that shook me to the core. He was generous with his audiences, too. He stood and talked to everybody. A lot of people don’t know that his work for the Vitaphone Project — which restores and preserves old Vitaphone films from the late 1920s and early ’30s — was performed on a volunteer basis. He didn’t take a penny. (Or at least a salary). That’s damned important work he’s been doing all these years. And he’s been GIVING it to us.

In 2012, Ron contributed to my pieces on vaudevillians Georgie Price and Richie Craig Jr . His work also greatly enhanced my posts on Eddie White, Jay C. Flippen, Herman Timberg , Ed Lowry, Shaw and Lee, and Joe E. Brown. Some other posts I’ve done about his work may be found here, and here. But honestly he’s had a hand in more posts than these. Do a search on Travalanche for “Vitaphone” and you will find 130 posts. It’s not an exaggeration to say that something of his work is in all of those posts and others.

In 2013 he came and screened a special tribute film at a benefit vaudeville show I put together at the Players Club for the Theatre Museum. This was the last time we hung out I think.
Just a few months ago, we were thrilled to watch him on TCM, presenting his Vitaphones to the country! I DVR’d the whole thing, kept the movies and Ron’s intros for months. Cherished them.
I’m told he was taken by cancer. He was relatively young. And right now, I’m having deja vu. Another generous friend, Rich Conaty, was similarly stolen from us almost exactly two years ago. I am sad on a personal level.
\

[That Derek]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/obituaries/ron-hutchinson-dead.html

Ron Hutchinson, Restorer of Early Sound Films, Is Dead at 67

[PHOTO] Ron Hutchinson in the coming documentary “Viva Film!,” directed by Peter Flynn. The Vitaphone Project, which Mr. Hutchinson founded with four friends, has been restoring short films from the 1920s and ’30s since 1991.

By Richard Sandomir
Feb. 10, 2019

Ron Hutchinson, an ebullient film buff who led a campaign to restore scores of largely forgotten short sound films from the 1920s and ’30s that featured comedians, vaudevillians, opera singers and musical acts, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Piscataway, N.J. He was 67.

His wife, Judy (Morton) Hutchinson, said the cause was colon cancer.

United by their passion for old films and vintage music, Mr. Hutchinson and four like-minded friends created the Vitaphone Project in 1991 with an ambitious mission. They set out to preserve the one-reel shorts that Warner Bros. made under the name Vitaphone Varieties at studios in Brooklyn and Burbank, Calif., from 1926 to 1931, as Hollywood was shifting from silent movies to talking pictures like “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talkie.

Those early shorts used Vitaphone, a Bell Labs technology, which synchronized the speeds of the film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs. The challenge was to find the largely lost records that contained the voices of entertainers like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Rose Marie, as well as lesser-known vaudevillians like the comedy team Al Shaw and Sam Lee.

Warner employed the Vitaphone system for its theatrical release of “Don Juan” (1926), a feature starring John Barrymore. But that movie had no dialogue, only music and sound effects.

“It went over great, but the people loved the shorts, with people speaking,” Mr. Hutchinson, who became a historian of the era, said at a meeting of the New Jersey Antique Radio Club in 2016.

So before showings of a subsequent Vitaphone feature in 1926, he said, “they had Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and other popular performers, each in five- to ten-minuteshorts, and this just set off everything.”

For Mr. Hutchinson, restoring those shorts became a delightful second career. A chemical engineer who worked for companies that specialize in environmental health and safety, he diligently searched for the sound discs through letters and emails to record collectors and relatives of the performers.

He found one trove of 80 discs from the family of a man who had taken them home from the theaters he ran in Connecticut. He tracked down discs as far away as Australia and New Zealand.

“The discoveries of soundtracks never seems to slow down,” he told the Chicago Film Society in an interview in 2011. “We average several hundred new soundtrack discoveries a year.

Mr. Hutchinson helped raise money for restoration of the shorts, largely through the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive, and Warner Bros. has released about 200 of them in various DVD sets. (He also found discs for other studios’ shorts.)

For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Hutchinson has hosted showings of the films at Film Forum in Manhattan. The cable channel TCM paid tribute to Vitaphone in 2016 with a 24-hour marathon of the shorts.

“He’d call me up and say he’d restored 10 more films and we’d schedule a showing,” Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s director of repertory programming, said by phone. “And it was amazing stuff; he discovered vaudevillians who had been forgotten for years, like Shaw and Lee, who made the funniest short of all time, ‘The Beau Brummels.’ ”

Ronald Porter Hutchinson was born on Aug. 30, 1951, in East Orange, N.J. His father, Frank, was a machinist, and his mother, Betty (Reese) Hutchinson, was a homemaker and volunteered for an organization that helped women with legal problems, especially divorces.

During Mr. Hutchinson’s childhood, his interest in vintage music and early talking pictures was ignited by watching Joe Franklin’s nostalgia-fueled New York television show. As a teenager, he made films with his friends. But he followed a more practical career path, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and pursuing a career in environmental safety.

“When we got married, he got a Victrola, and the next thing you knew we had 20,000 78s,” his wife said in a telephone interview. “And while collecting records, he came across these huge Vitaphone discs, and he knew other collectors had them.”

The Vitaphone Project was founded in Mr. Hutchinson’s house in Piscataway, which continued to be its headquarters.

“We were all friends, united by what we could find — treasure hunters in a way,” said Vince Giordano, a founder of the project and the leader of the band Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, which specializes in authentic arrangements of vintage jazz. “Ron had so much joy and exuberance in the discovery of the discs. It was almost like a hunger.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hutchinson is survived by a daughter, Heather Miranda; a son, Jared; a grandson; and a brother, Robert.

The first Vitaphone short restored thanks to Mr. Hutchinson was “Baby Rose Marie, the Child Wonder” (1929). Rose Marie, who decades later became known for her role as the wisecracking Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” was a child star who would go on to spend nearly every day of her life in show business. She was already a veteran when she sang to a Vitaphone camera.

“When I first told her that we’d found the disc, she said to me that Jack Warner had told her it had been lost,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview in 2014 on the America’s Comedy podcast. He recalled her reaction when the short was screened in Los Angeles in 1994.

“She looked at the screen — now blank — and said, ‘You know, the dress I wore was blue,’ ” he continued. “ ‘And I was looking over at the side, where my mother was.’ All these memories came rushing back to her.”