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It’s possible no one alive recalls how, or when, the cinematic time capsule that is “Spang’s First Century” made its way to a building in Uptown.
But we do know that sometime in the 1970s, the people cleaning out that building handed off the illegibly labeled, cube-shaped shipping crate containing seven reels of 35 mm film to a cinema enthusiast named David Newell.
While Newell was actually more interested in the portable 35 mm film projector he claimed that day, he also took home the mysterious container. Some 45 years later, he had yet to view the film inside. But this week, nearly 100 years after it was made, he’ll be able to watch the feature-length “Spang’s First Century” from the comfort of his couch.
And Newell — best known for playing Mr. McFeely on the WQED-produced “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” — isn’t alone. Thanks to the nonprofit Pittsburgh Sound + Image, anyone with a decent internet hookup can enjoy this detailed moving-picture record of what one corner of Pittsburgh was like just before movies entered the sound era (albeit augmented by music commissioned from contemporary Pittsburgh composers).
Spang Chalfant and Co., Inc. made steel tubing at its plant, in Etna. The 70-minute film, produced by the Lang Film Company in 1926 to mark Spang's then-upcoming centennial, opens with a rather elaborate recreation of a bustling Pittsburgh street circa 1828, when Spang became the first manufacturer of iron pipe west of the Alleghenies.
A title card reading “Pittsburgh today” introduces a shot made from Mount Washington; the camera pans from the Point to the Smithfield Street Bridge. But most of the film documents the functions of the Spang plant proper, with its furnaces, spinning flywheels, workers handling glowing-hot metal, and even detailed (and austerely beautiful) animated sequences revealing the interior workings of the machines that formed the pipes.
All the endlessly whirling gears and rollers might remind you of Charlie Chaplin’s classic “Modern Times,” whose release was still a decade away. But “Spang’s First Century” is no socially conscious comedy. Any film whose title cards offer notes like “the threaded tubes coming off the machine are at all times inspected as to thread depth, pitch and taper” is surely a marketing vehicle, and after its useful days ended it wound up haphazardly stored in the building where a WQED-TV coworker tipped David Newell to the projector he acquired along with the film reels. (The building was likely part of Pittsburgh’s now-vanished Film Row, where commercial distributors went to screen films before their release.)
Sometime in the 1990s, Newell donated his still-unwatched find to Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Gary Kaboly, the nonprofit’s longtime director of exhibitions, remembers opening the case and screening a reel or two with a few coworkers at the Fulton Mini, the theater Filmmakers ran in what’s now the Byham Theater. But ultimately, Filmmakers did no more with “Spang’s First Century” than hang onto it during the group’s moves to Downtown’s Harris Theater; its new headquarters on Melwood Avenue, in North Oakland; and finally the Regent Square Theater.
The Regent Square closed in 2019, part of the drawn-out dissolution of Filmmakers itself. After the building was sold, staffers offered a number of films stored there to a longtime Filmmakers volunteer named Steve Haines — the sort of enthusiast who keeps a manual rewind at home for perusing old celluloid. “I knew right away this was a really cool film,” he said.
Haines went on to co-found, with Steve Felix, Pittsburgh Sound + Image, a group dedicated to archiving and screening film and video. While “Spang’s First Century” was in good shape, its age demanded they avoid the wear and tear of repeated projections. So the film became the subject of the group’s first preservation grant proposal.
The prestigious National Film Preservation Foundation awarded Pittsburgh Sound + Image $20,000 to do a 4K digital scan of the original and create a new 35 mm print. The project cost more than $23,000; a successful Kickstarter drive provided the balance and allowed the group to commission seven local composers to create a new soundtrack.
In truth, unless you have a fetish for early 20th century billet mills and reheating furnaces, “Spang’s First Century” might be a bit of a slog without the varied and inventive music, from Hezreel Robertson’s jaunty, period-appropriate reel-one piano score to Margaret Cox’s industrial electronics in reel five. (Other composers include Bri Dominique, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Trē Seguritan Abalos, Bryce Rabideau and INEZ.)
Aside from a few brief portraits of (unnamed) workers, the film is curiously unpopulated, with a focus on the machinery. Yet, regardless of entertainment value, “Spang’s First Century” is unavoidably compelling as an historical document. With Spang itself long gone, the film reminds us that in the 1920s, the products of local industry were still being transported by steam train and the paddlewheel steamboat glimpsed churning the waters of the Allegheny River — even if, like Spang’s goods, they were bound for oil fields and skyscraper construction sites across the U.S. and around the globe as far afield as Burma (now Myanmar).
The film’s first two public screenings, on 35 mm film, sold out the Harris Theater in December. Haines said more public showings might be in the offing, but in the meantime you can watch it free on both Vimeo and YouTube.
