The Lost Apocalypse of Romaine Fielding

October 29, 2018 12:48 PM

Romaine was interested in nightmares, how terror never truly disappears, but evolves the camouflage of routine. Romaine Fielding stepped off the train at Silver City NM in 1918 and settled his top hat the way he always did, with some of that conniving charm. He knew he had his finger on the country’s pulse. And he was ready to unsettle something in its soul. Soon he would fit his 28 horsepower Buick with military search lights and a massive machine gun. Soon he would strap a canon to an airplane. Soon he would gather thousands of pounds of explosives, gather and arm thousands of dispossessed laborers. Soon he would orchestrate an apocalyptic uprising the likes of which the world had never yet seen.
posted by MovableBookLady (16 comments total)

Er, should read "Romaine Fielding stepped off the train at Silver City NM in 1913 and settled his top hat..." Cause Buick 28 HP engines were outmoded by then.
posted by clavdivs at 1:27 PM on October 29, 2018

Should it? (Edit: nevermind, joking about an editing mistake that was fixed.)
posted by lostburner at 1:30 PM on October 29, 2018

Fooled me too. Anywho, back to the article cause it's good, never heard of the dude.
posted by clavdivs at 1:39 PM on October 29, 2018

Man, the headline and summary really hooked me. I was really hoping for some kind of massive worker revolution he wanted to start. I wasn't primed to enjoy a tale about movie production but I did enjoy the glimpses of the alien world of 1918. It's also neat how they make these movies sound interesting, I suspect, much more interesting to read about in this way than to have to actually watch. Even so, sucks how many of these are simply lost to time. The reactions to his stuff were sometimes maddening, the critic fussing about one movie having only women and in it a white woman wanting a native-american baby was just too much for the critic. It's hard to read about the past connected to our history and culture without wanting to just dress down these ignorant people despite knowing their ignorance was standard in their day. Is that an excuse? I don't think it is now, I'm not sure it should be back then? Not that there's anything to do about it now besides look down on past peoples, which I think is the natural inclination anyway.

"We will be content with nothing less than all power, with the possession of the whole world. We Socialists will wrest the power from the present rulers. By war, if necessary. Stop us if you can!"

I wonder what these budding socialist movements would say to see our world today, where capitalism has firmly and definitely choked out and smothered not just all other competing systems, but the mere hope of a competing system to ever have a chance to compete.

The biggest downer of this story is that the very film it leads up to is utterly destroyed without a trace.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:50 PM on October 29, 2018

What a great article. Romaine Fielding was completely new to me.
Thank you, MovableBookLady.
posted by doctornemo at 8:24 PM on October 29, 2018

what hilarious and appreciative design, maybe keyed to a few years later, but still lovely.
posted by mwhybark at 9:52 PM on October 29, 2018

also, the thought occurred that this was possibly fiction. Romaine apprars to have been real, at least.
posted by mwhybark at 9:56 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Man, someone needs to make this movie. Ed Wood style about Fielding... but also recreating or re-imagining scenes from The Golden God and others, shown silent embedded in the real movie. Would be so great.
posted by thefool at 8:36 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

author of the story here. Romaine Fielding was real and the story represents years of research. like many early silent filmmakers, much of his work is lost to history. almost everything we know of him comes from accounts in local newspapers when he passed through town. so i spent hundreds of hours in the archives of small town southwestern newspapers, looking for notices of his work, calls for extras, etc.

thank you all for reading! i designed and published the story myself, a first for me. a real labor of love. it cost me $5 to sign up for this website to talk to you about it...so let's make it worth it. feel free to ask me any questions you might have!
posted by jgwheel at 9:06 AM on October 30, 2018 [10 favorites]

Marvelous work, jgwheel, now I'm intrigued by your Acid West collection.
posted by e1c at 12:01 PM on October 30, 2018

jgwheel How nice of you to join us, and what a great story! How did he come across your notice? Are you a film historian? For a film that no longer exists, you certainly uncovered a trove of pictures and information. Hope you're enjoying the comments.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:27 PM on October 30, 2018

jg, welcome. May I share your work on Facebook, to "The Silent Movies Group"? I can't speak in an official capacity, I seem to recall there was a courtesty fee waiver for folks like you that come across our discussions here of a given topic or piece.
posted by mwhybark at 10:00 PM on October 30, 2018

no problem, mwhybark. happy to chip in. and yes, please do share!

MoveableBookLady, I write mostly about New Mexico, lots of history but also reporting on contemporary stories. when writing my book about southern New Mexico, Acid West, I found a few mentions of Romaine Fielding. he seemed to be one of the first filmmakers producing work in New Mexico, but none of the history books said much about him. so i slowly started to piece his story together. a scholar of Lubin Studios, who employed Romaine, helped me find some work done by graduate students in the eighties that shed some light on things, but was never published. many online sleuths helped me uncover info about his lost films. but mostly it was reading through many many many old publications, like the national motion picture magazines and the local newspapers. this is easier these days, now that so many of the archives are digital. but plenty of them are still old school paper archives and anytime I got a chance to spend time in a town where Romaine had been, i tried to track down the local newspaper archives.
posted by jgwheel at 4:14 PM on October 31, 2018 [2 favorites]

I spent almost a year near Deming, at Akela Flats, actually, which is really the middle of no-damn-where. Deming was the "big city" for shopping etc. Never did make it to Silver City, which sounded like an interesting place. Moved on to Alamogordo for a while, then up to Albuquerque. I really like northern NM. Is southern NM your home? I was one of those RVers who do seasonal work here and there. Fascinating story.
posted by MovableBookLady at 2:01 PM on November 1, 2018

I live in New Orleans but am from Alamogordo. My family has been in Alamogordo for seven generations. They were merchants and ranchers after the civil war and maintained a large ranch, the White Sands Ranch, until the early nineties.
posted by jgwheel at 3:36 PM on November 1, 2018

I kind of liked Alamogordo. I was working at the big souvenir store on the road going north, near the world's largest pistachio statue (2010). Found a decent bookstore in town, quite large for a town that size, and a really good senior center. It was winter when I was there but not terrible bad weather-wise. I was a smoker then so I would go east to the reservation store to buy cartons. Not a bad area at all.One thing I liked was all the historical signs along the roads; took photos of most of them (does the family ranch have a sign? I may have a pic of it). And New Orleans is one of my favorite cities; trained down from Asheville for my 50th birthday celebration and met friends who came from the west coast. Ate good stuff, poked around, had fun. Of course, that was 1993, so it's been a while.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:19 PM on November 1, 2018