BY ROBERT CATTO
If you were to stop by my apartment, you might think I was mildly obsessed. And you’d be right—but it’s not quite what you’d think, at first glance.
There might be a Phantom of the Opera poster on the wall. You could find a Phantom action figure, lurking on my desk. And, sure, I do have six (SIX?!) copies of the film—many of which actually contain two versions of it.
But, I promise you—there will be no songs about him, no Broadway or London cast renditions of anything. This isn’t the Phantom you’re thinking of; well, probably not, anyway.
Almost twenty years ago, I was watching the 1943 film of the same name starring Claude Rains, and listening to the commentary track that came on the DVD by historian Scott MacQueen. At some point he made a kind of casual aside, saying “of course, the original 1925 silent film was directed by Rupert Julian, the son of a New Zealand sheep farmer; but, that’s another story!”
Wait, wait—what was that?
I was living in New Zealand at the time, just after Lord Of The Rings came out, and I thought I’d learned a thing or two about the industry there; but I’d never heard of this guy. Turns out, almost no-one else had, either—not even on the internet.
So I started researching Rupert, and one of the first things I found was that we shared a birthday*, give or take ~90 years or so. Somehow, it felt like I was meant to be the one to find him.
Over the past eighteen years or so, I’ve kept searching. In my spare time, when I travel somewhere he might have left a trail, I’ll go digging again. I’ve given talks about him, met members of his family, bought things in old junk shops in Hollywood and online, emailed silent era historians. I’ve been to libraries & archives, visited his expansive house in Hollywood (now apartments, but still intact), and even visited the Glendale mausoleum where he lies, sharing a wing with Michael Jackson and Lon Chaney. And of course, I’ve set up rupertjulian.com to tell a bit of his story.
Turns out, he was a New Zealander all right—though whether his dad farmed sheep or owned a pub in Whangarei is slightly less clear. (I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, though he may also have been in shipping prior to that.) Rupert (real name Percy Hayes) spent his early career as an actor based in Australia, where he met & married Elsie Jane Wilson of Sydney, who appeared in stage productions with him until they moved to New York, and then Hollywood, in 1912-13. She became a director too, but his career really started to take off in the late teens and early twenties.
I have to say, the historians and archivists I’ve met and corresponded with over those years have been wonderfully generous, both with their time and with their archived materials. Kevin Brownlow—the historian’s historian, who received an honorary Oscar for his work documenting the silent era—mailed me a copy of everything he had on Rupert, gathered over a fifty year span (or longer).
Quite incredibly, one even introduced me to Carla Laemmle, who was 103 at the time, and had actually BEEN in the 1925 Phantom! (She didn't remember him very well, but let’s be fair: I don’t remember people I met when I was seventeen all that well either.)
But possibly the most exciting find I’ve made, in all this time, is something that just arrived yesterday.
He published a book, about himself.
Okay, it’s only sixteen pages—and a number of those are just about the film industry as a whole, not specifically Rupert himself. But to have a physical copy of this delicate little book I’d never heard of, in my hands, ~100 years after it was published…honestly, I had to put it away again, I didn’t want to read it all in one go.
There are photos in here I’ve certainly never seen, including some ‘character studies for future productions’ that may or may not ever have happened, of Rupert himself in costume and makeup. This looks to be from the early twenties—it talks a lot about his 1918 propaganda film, “The Beast Of Berlin”, which he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and (according to this) earned more than a million dollars net profit for Universal, a staggering sum for a single picture in those days, equivalent perhaps to $20 million today.
So the search continues; and as has happened so often over the years, I’m reminded not to give up on him. You just never know what might suddenly appear out of the blue, when you’re looking for something else, and surprise you completely…!
UPDATE—I’ve now photographed, transcribed & uploaded the contents of the book to my site about Rupert Julian, which is here: http://www.rupertjulian.com/rupert-julian-an-appreciation
[* I could footnote a whole lot of things in this essay, but I’ll just say here that I’m not utterly sure when his birthday was, any more. I’ve seen a range of options—in his own handwriting—that span a range of over ten years…!]
