By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
True-life apocrypha: Melton Barker, auteur
Melton Barker? Chris Garcia of Austin American-Statesman makes the question more than rhetorical, the gorgeous enigma of “a man who has seemingly, and utterly, disappeared.” Too true to be good? “The man is Melton Barker. He made many movies, two-reelers featuring small-town children that mimicked popular Hollywood fare of the time… the Depression and the Golden Age.
“When she talks about her quarry, [Caroline] Frick, a film archivist and historian… at the University of Texas, lights up with a tangy fusion of fevered fascination and lip-pinching frustration. Since 2001, Melton Barker has wrapped his ghost around Frick’s head, haunting her dreams, work, life. Barker made so-called itinerant films… from documentaries to lightly veiled ads for local stores… He shot and screened the movies for an invariably delighted community, and likely made a comfy living.” Barker, Frick tells Garcia, shot in several states between the 1930s and 1950s. A naming of eight Texas towns is fragrant: “Austin, Waco, Childress, Munday, Keller, San Marcos, Huntsville and Quanah.” … [Frick’s] imperishable commitment to the case, has a big fat hole in it. She cannot discover who the man was, or where he went. No birth certificate. No obituary. Just a name, some movies and a lot of air… “There have been times when it’s all-consuming… My father came to visit and I brought it up and he said, ‘Seriously. Is this all you talk about? This is really scary.’ … Who is this guy who traveled from town to town? What was he thinking? Where has he not gone? Then I found out he was a Texan, and that solidified it.” … Under the banner of Melton Barker Juvenile Productions, the roving filmmaker would place an ad in the local paper offering to put children ages 3 to 12 in the movies for $10 a child—an opulent sum in the Depression paid by parents giddy to watch their children… Lead roles were auditioned. [Then] up to 125 other children just paid the fee and showed up. As a filmmaker, Barker had a genius for jangly messes…”They’re fabulous. They’re fantastic… They’re so bad that they’re so good… I’m not going to lie to you.” [Lovely, loving anecdotes reel on at the link; the ending of Garcia’s telling is marvelous. There are also clips of Barker’s legacy at the link.]