Sound of Silents Lives On : Movies: One of the world’s only theaters dedicated solely to silent films still stands, thanks to its late founder, John Hampton, his widow and a friend.

Hollywood owes the late John Hampton and his widow, Dorothy. And their longtime friend Lawrence Austin.

Without Hampton, one of the largest private collections of silent film would never have been assembled. Without Hampton and his wife, Dorothy, the Silent Movie Showcase theater in Hollywood would never have existed, let alone endured for 51 years. Without the intervention of Austin, son of Cecil B. DeMille’s longtime personal tailor Ethel Austin and silent actor William Austin, the theater and collection probably would have perished three years ago in a dispute over Hampton’s estate.

Instead, one of the world’s only facilities dedicated solely to silent films still stands at 611 N. Fairfax--refurbished, spiffed up and open for business after a 12-year closure. To go there on a Friday or Saturday night and find a full house and organist is to understand a little of the ‘20s’ fabled roar. The place lives up to John Hampton’s hand-lettered words permanently posted in the lobby, which read, in part:

“Movie” is more than a museum, and those who regard the silent movies as museum pieces . . . are invited to patronize establishments where old-time stage melodramas are purposefully burlesqued.

“Movie” is Hollywood’s shrine of the old time silent pictures, and for the study of serious students of the film . . . .

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Seated one afternoon in the quiet theater surrounded by portraits of silent film greats like Mabel Normand and Mary Pickford, Austin and Dorothy Hampton recalled the history of the establishment and the sacrifices made by its founder. Austin, who joined forces with Dorothy to revive the theater after Hampton’s death, spoke gently, deferring politely and with affection to octogenarian Dorothy.

John Hampton’s dedication to silent film--and in fact, his whole life--is the kind of story that, well, ought to be a movie.

“John was always fascinated with movies,” Dorothy said. “When he was a boy, on Friday nights, he’d put on a movie in the living room of his mother’s home, and there would be about 25 kids in this little room. He used a 35-millimeter projector! It’s a wonder he didn’t burn down the whole place, my goodness!”

John Hampton said in a 1981 interview that it all began in Oklahoma City, Okla., at a penny matinee starring Elmo Lincoln. “I guess it was 1919 or 1920 when I saw this serial called ‘Elmo the Mighty.’ This gal was tied to a flatcar full of dynamite and Elmo was in a locomotive heading right toward her.”

The 10-year-old boy’s breath drew in as Elmo the Mighty got within 10 feet of the flatcar, and then--”TO BE CONTINUED.”

“That didn’t mean anything to me,” chuckled Hampton, who had never seen a serial before, “so I watched it four more times to see if it turned out differently!”

From that day on, he couldn’t get movies off his mind.

As a young man, Hampton went to work as a printer, yet continued to haunt the film exchanges and theaters in Oklahoma City, doing everything from painting movie posters (later a full-time occupation) to taking tickets. After he and childhood friend/fellow film-lover Dorothy Beatrice McBrayer married in 1934, the pair spent years barnstorming theater-less Oklahoma towns, showing movies in tents or rental halls.

But Hampton had in mind something more permanent for what was becoming a sizable film collection. Having developed a bad case of asthma, he finally decided to pack up and seek a healthier climate. In 1940, the Hamptons drove to Los Angeles and bought a nondescript little plot of land on North Fairfax--for the express purpose of opening a silent-movie house.

“I always had a dream of having a theater,” Hampton said in 1981. “I never really outgrew my love for silent films. They were a separate and distinctive art form, and I was afraid that they would be forgotten and lost when talkies became popular. . . . People out here said I was crazy to start a theater with only silent films. As it turned out, this was the logical place to go.”

The Hamptons christened the Old Time Movie, as it was originally known, Feb. 25, 1942--right in the middle of L.A.’s famous blackout instigated out of fear of invasion by Japan. Admission: a dime for adults, a nickel for kids.

For 37 straight years, Hampton--a bespectacled, ingenuous man with a broad, easy smile--perched in the theater’s projection room, six days a week, two shows a day, screening films and spinning records as makeshift soundtracks.

Downstairs, Dorothy took the tickets and ran the business. The couple lived humbly in a small apartment just above the box office.

With its 150 wooden seats (legendarily uncomfortable until recent upholstering) and musty interior, the little theater struggled along, year after year--surviving the advent of television and development of the surrounding neighborhood. At one point the building had to be narrowed by several feet to accommodate a neighboring structure.

The sign reading “OLD TIME MOVIE” that spanned the facade had to be shaved to accomplish this, resulting in the removal of the “E.” Oddly, Hampton never got around to fixing the sign, and for many years the theater was marked by big, flaking letters provocatively declaring “OLD TIME MOVI.”

Over the decades, the theater counted among regular clients the likes of Chaplin, May McAvoy, Gilbert Roland, Minta Durfee (Mrs. Fatty Arbuckle), even Hampton’s first screen idol, the star of “Elmo the Mighty,” Elmo Lincoln. Dorothy Hampton remembers that her friend Clara Bow “used to come a lot--in the ‘50s with her nurse--because she was an insomniac.” Chaplin, she said, visited regularly in disguise, because “he got a kick out of watching people’s reactions to his films.” Roland, now in his 80s, still comes to the theater for special, private screenings of his own films--and “looks terrific,” according to Austin.

Not all the old stars approved of their films being shown. Harold Lloyd “would give John a bad time about showing his movies,” according to Austin, “because he wanted to make money off them.” Mary Pickford didn’t want her films screened because she was afraid people would laugh at their quaintness--to the extent that, according to Austin, “she would have her lawyer threaten John, but he would run them anyway.”

When Dorothy’s mother died in 1979, the theater was closed temporarily while the couple returned to Oklahoma for the funeral. The temporary closure stretched into one year, then another, and another, as Hampton’s health declined. He endured a number of cancer surgeries, which he paid for by selling nearly half of his collection--some 2,000 films--to David Packard, owner of the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto. Old Time Movie was never to reopen in Hampton’s lifetime, and his final years were spent, when health permitted, restoring and cataloguing his remaining films. The one-time movie-struck boy from Oklahoma City died in May, 1990, at the age of 80.

John Hampton’s “shrine” to “old-time silent pictures,” Dorothy and Austin believe, came at the ultimate cost. Years of standing while projecting films twice a day and cleaning old movie stock--a frame at a time--caused severe circulatory problems in his legs. Constant contact with chemicals used to clean nitrate prints--chiefly carbon tetrachloride--probably caused a variety of chronic skin and respiratory ailments.

A legal battle over the estate between Hampton’s brother Gilbert and grief-stricken Dorothy nearly destroyed the theater--and did destroy some of the movies.

“The brother knew nothing about films, and had no interest in them at all,” she said. “He sent his son out, who knew even less. And (this was) before I’d even gotten over the shock of my husband’s death. I could hardly think to contact our friend Lawrence Austin because I had been so ill anyway, before my husband’s death. Before Lawrence got back into the picture, they had almost torn the building down, they threw a lot of films away--Oh, I can’t tell it!”

The son, Lenn Hampton, according to Dorothy, had been instructed to “clean out” the theater. Thrown away during this “cleaning,” according to Austin, were: between 200 and 300 of Hampton’s movies--many of which were rare prints, or one-of-a-kind specimens Hampton had tediously restored, a frame at a time; an undetermined number of boxes of original posters, lobby cards and promotional stills Hampton collected from the silent era. The loss is estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Neither Gilbert nor Lenn Hampton could be reached for comment.)

Austin, who was first introduced to the Hamptons by a mutual friend in 1942, learned of the situation while making a routine visit to check on Dorothy’s well-being. He immediately took up the fight.

“The brother told me he didn’t care what I said or felt,” said Austin, who spent most of his life--he will not give his age--as a certified public accountant. “I said there’s something wrong here, and we began to investigate. Oh yes, we had a legal battle. Obviously, Dorothy won! She’d been married to John Hampton since 1934, so she was legally entitled to everything, and that was it.”

The casualties are bits of Hollywood history.

“Lost were films like Jetta Goudal in ‘The Forbidden Woman,’ ” said Austin, grimacing. “One box I saw before it was thrown away was all Charlie Chaplin films--prints that had never been used--on Kodascope, made by Eastman back in the ‘30s. That was about $50,000 right there. I had told the nephew to save the films. When I came back, he had just picked them up and thrown them out!”

Luckily, Hampton had secured the bulk of his collection--somewhere around 1,500 films, and boxes of stills and memorabilia--in a separate warehouse. With the building saved, Austin augmented Hampton’s remaining films with several hundred of his own and suggested to Dorothy in 1990 that they reopen the theater.

“I told him, ‘If you can do anything with that old pile of junk, go ahead!’ ” she laughed.

With donations of time, labor and money from community and friends, Austin presided over the five-month overhaul of the place. The theater reopened Jan. 18, 1991, with DeMille’s “King of Kings”--the film the establishment had originally opened with, and which was Hampton’s choice for reopening night had he lived to see one.

Today, it is Austin who perches upstairs with the projector. Dorothy, who now lives next door in the King Solomon Home for the Elderly, still comes to tear tickets and greet moviegoers, just as she has since 1942. “Sometimes,” she says proudly, “I see the grandchildren of customers who came so many years ago.”

What of the time when no one from the silent era is left to care for the theater? “We hope,” said Austin, “that there will be a future, that the theater can go on until the end of time. We’re trying to work that out now, but we can’t say how it might happen.”

Under Austin and Dorothy Hampton, Silent Movie regularly hosts rarely seen and “lost” films, comedy nights and an annual Labor Day weekend festival of rare movies. At this year’s film festival, Anita Page will be a special guest for the movie she starred in with Joan Crawford, “Our Modern Maidens,” and another she made with Buster Keaton, “Sidewalks of Old New York.”

“Buster Keaton is actually our No. 1 box-office draw,” said Austin. “It’s quite remarkable. He was quite an original, and a lot of young people seem to be discovering him for the first time--members of the ‘cool generation,’ as I call it.”

Johnny Depp spent several weeks at Silent Movie researching his Keatonesque character for “Benny & Joon.”

Austin--whose father, William Austin, appeared in films including “It” with Clara Bow--says bringing the theater back to life was merely the logical thing to do.

“My roots go back to the golden age of Hollywood,” he said, seeming to address the portrait photographs on the theater walls of Lillian Gish, Harry Langdon, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky. “My mother worked for Cecil B. DeMille for 30 years, and my father was in the business.”

“The thing about Dorothy and John--we knew many of these people. And Dorothy and I are the only ones who have survived. Over the years, John imparted a great deal of information which is still of good service to us. We use it all the time. So, with the knowledge that John Hampton imparted to us, and my business experience, we just sort of rolled it all together, and with Dorothy’s determination, here we are.”