AADL Talks To: Frank Uhle, Film Projectionist, Author, and Cultural Historian

Thu, 01/22/2026 - 2:46pm

When: July 14, 2025

Frank Uhle came to the University of Michigan as an art student, joined the campus film society Cinema II, and has worked for several decades as a University of Michigan and Michigan Theater film projectionist. He also hosts a radio program at the local U-M independent radio station WCBN, and enjoys researching regional music history. In 2023, Frank penned the book Cinema Ann Arbor, which takes a look back at the history of Ann Arbor’s vibrant campus cinema culture from the 1960s through the turn of the 21st century. I talked with Frank about Ann Arbor’s love affair with cinema, from its early history to its cutting-edge film festivals; the maverick professors and students who built the vibrant campus film societies; and the cultural changes he's witnessed in Ann Arbor and in the film industry over the past several decades. 

Frank's book Cinema Ann Arbor is available in our catalog to check out or download. You can also read Frank's essay about legendary Ann Arbor record producer Ollie McLaughlin, written for AADL's Ann Arbor 200 project in celebration of the city's bicentennial.

Transcript

• [00:00:07] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy. Today, I'll be talking with Frank Uhle. Frank is a cultural historian with deep ties to Ann Arbor's film community. He's been a film projectionist since the 1980s, and he wrote the recent book Cinema Ann Arbor, which takes a deep dive into the history of Ann Arbor's love affair with film, from its cutting-edge film festivals to the maverick professors and creative students who built a vibrant campus film culture in the 1960s. Frank also has a long-running show on WCBN and explores local and regional music history. [MUSIC] Welcome, Frank!
• [00:00:44] FRANK UHLE: Hey, Amy.
• [00:00:45] AMY CANTU: Thanks so much for coming. I want to talk about all of these things that I just mentioned, but I would first like to get a little bit of background to get...on your history, your personal history. Tell us where you grew up and what brought you to Ann Arbor.
• [00:01:03] FRANK UHLE: Well, I grew up in Coldwater, Michigan, which is -- can't see it -- but it's down here in the middle at the bottom of the state, about 90 miles southwest of here. Lived through the 60s as a little kid, and some of that stuff came into my brain -- the terrible events of that era. Then when I graduated high school in 1977, I went to Kalamazoo College for a year, and it was my goal to be an artist. It's like Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca. I came here for the waters, but it's a desert. [LAUGHTER] I was misinformed. I was like, Oh, maybe I'd better find a place with a real art school because they were telling me you got to take classes at Western. I'm like, well, we're paying for Kalamazoo College. Anyway, so I transferred to UM, which was miraculous because I transferred after one year, which apparently they don't like to do. But they did, fortunately for me. I ended up going to the UM Art School, and while I was here, some friends of mine had already been here. One guy in particular, Reed Lenz was a member of Cinema Guild, the student film society, which was the most prominent one and longest running one. I thought I'd really like to do that. Even though my movie knowledge consisted mostly of watching late-night horror films on The Ghoul on TV, [LAUGHTER] I tried, and Cinema Guild, it was pretty obvious that I didn't fit their art film groove. Then I tried to get the Ann Arbor Film Cooperative, which was very cutting-edge and run by a manic, but sweet guy named Gerry Fialka. I can remember going in this room, and it was like... The Cinema Guild thing was loitering and lingering and talking to people, and they seemed like professory people. There were in there. Someone was smoking cigarettes, and I just was like, God. [LAUGHTER] This little kid from Coldwater. Then the Ann Arbor Film Cooperative, they opened a door, and there's like a circle of people looking at me, and I was like, uh... They start peppering me with questions, and I just turned red as a beet and failed. But then, finally, there was a group called Cinema II that I was like, well, nobody's ever heard of Cinema II, but I got no other options here. I showed up at one of their film screenings, and they were low-key and friendly. I got into Cinema II. That became my dual major in college. I was going to art school. But your husband, John, is a member of Cinema Guild and he join in the later end of things, but it was just like, movies seven nights a week, two or three movies on Monday and Tuesday, but like 15 movies on Saturday, Friday, Saturday. I was just watching movies constantly, and that almost became a second major, although I never took any film classes here. I was just deeply involved with the film scene. When I graduated from art school, [LAUGHTER] I wasn't really that employable. I heard that the projectionist had an opening. So I got hired as a projectionist, and then continued doing that and trying to do creative stuff on the side.
• [00:04:16] AMY CANTU: It sounds like if you had not come to U of M... Do you think you would have fallen into film? It sounds like Ann Arbor was really the catalyst for that, then.
• [00:04:29] FRANK UHLE: Yes, it's a good question because Kalamazoo College had a film society that was more typical of colleges where there were movies like Friday and Saturday night in the Student Union, sponsored by the college. It wasn't really a creative input from the students that I could perceive. It was just social activities. It was like, oh, $0.50, you can go and watch a movie in the cafeteria instead of paying $2 at the regular movie theater or something.
• [00:04:57] AMY CANTU: So in the art school, what were you imagining you would do?
• [00:05:02] FRANK UHLE: Painting and drawing stuff. Yes.
• [00:05:04] AMY CANTU: Yes.
• [00:05:05] FRANK UHLE: A lot of people get their hopes up, and then they get out in the real world, and they realize, Oh, there's... The Museum of Modern Art isn't like opening a gallery just to show my student artwork. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:05:20] AMY CANTU: So film became everything in your life, at that point?
• [00:05:23] FRANK UHLE: Yeah, it was pretty major, pretty in the foreground, but a lot of it was a social aspect. The people in Cinema II, and it turned out the other film societies that I got to know, were just a fun group of people. As I highlighted in my book, a little plug here.
• [00:05:39] AMY CANTU: Yes.
• [00:05:39] FRANK UHLE: The campus film societies, it turns out, were an outlet for the nonconformists on campus. There's I'm sure, others here at U of M today, but a lot of people that didn't quite know what they wanted to do with their lives wound up in the film societies, and a significant number of them, it turned into...that was their career, ultimately, as being an academic maybe or actually being in the world of film. My housemate, John Sloss was a guy in law school, and he apparently, just like his roommate or friend down the hall in his dorm, was like, Hey, I'm in this film society. You should join. It ended up that he now produces Richard Linklater's films and Todd Haynes' films. He's one of the top independent film producers around. But he told me in the book he would have never probably gone into film, other than, "Oh, I was in this film society, and I realized I really like film."
• [00:06:39] AMY CANTU: I want to come back to that and talk a lot more about your book and what you've discovered. But you also have an enthusiasm for local music -- music history. Where did that come from? When did you start pursuing that interest?
• [00:06:56] FRANK UHLE: That's a parallel track. My brother and I in high school discovered the 70s punk rock, and we were -- my brother in particular -- was writing away for 45 mail order, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, that kind of stuff, and subscribing to magazines that were like New York Rocker, and Slash from LA. We had some other friends that were into that stuff, so we went to see Devo, their first Michigan show and stuff like that. We were getting into that, and I, truthfully, was into that, but I started reading interviews where people in some of the bands were talking about, the earlier stuff that they liked, from the 60s, was influencing them. I guess I wasn't as keen on some of the punk aesthetic of negativity and the fashion safety pin nonsense. [LAUGHTER] I was like, Well, this mid-60s garage rock, if you will, had more of a natural feel, you know, Beatles-esque, Rolling Stones-esque. I started getting into that. Then it was a time period where there was still -- it wasn't that far removed -- you could go to a garage sale and find some 45 or some LPs that had become abandoned by some now, like 35- or 40-year-old. The local bands would put 45 out in those days just for fun to sell on the bandstand and sometimes have radio hits. Once I started realizing there was this whole undercurrent of local music, I started just digging into it, and I was lucky at a time when it was not...now, there's hundreds or thousands of dollar prices on some of these records. But I was just scarfing up this stuff, and eventually also here at U of M, or actually I started at Kalamazoo College. There's a campus radio station, so I got a show, and I continued to do that show. Over the years, I've interviewed a few dozen of the musicians that were in some of those bands and written a few stories about them, like the one you mentioned here, for the library.
• [00:09:05] AMY CANTU: You've been with WCBN how long?
• [00:09:11] FRANK UHLE: Probably started in 1978.
• [00:09:14] AMY CANTU: Well, that's a long time. Wow.
• [00:09:16] FRANK UHLE: It's a long time.
• [00:09:17] AMY CANTU: You play a lot from your own collection. Can you just tell a little bit more about your show and what you attempt to do, what you're trying to convey?
• [00:09:29] FRANK UHLE: Well, I just, again, as with the movies, I like the exploitation side of things, not exclusively at all, but, I like the spark of, like, weirdness that seeps in that's not in the Hollywood zone. Same thing with local records that people would go to the recording studio and have, like, an hour and do, like, three takes or something, and then they'd pick the best one. It wasn't super polished necessarily. It just has a bit more life, a little bit more spontaneity feeling to it. On my show, I just of string together music that I feel has a mood to it. I switch... Over the years, I got into different genres. I wasn't so much into soul music earlier on, but now I am a huge fan. Ollie McLaughlin, Ann Arbor's own record producer, he recorded things like "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols and huge hits. A ton of other artists that didn't make it. That's just some of the greatest music ever. I think it really stands the test of time better than a lot of things from that time period, late 60s, soul and I don't know, I just like to expose listeners to stuff that they might not otherwise hear.
• [00:10:47] AMY CANTU: I want to get into the weeds a little bit. I know that you're a collector. You're an archivist. You're a cultural historian. You're a librarian.
• [00:10:56] FRANK UHLE: I went to library school. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:10:57] AMY CANTU: You went to library schools somewhere in there, yes.
• [00:10:59] FRANK UHLE: Yeah, yeah.
• [00:11:01] AMY CANTU: It's interesting to look at Ann Arbor. You said you got here in the late 70s and you got involved with the groups that were already ongoing and they already had a history. They had already a long history a couple of decades. You've obviously had an opportunity to look at Ann Arbor over a period of time, and it's changed a lot. So I'm curious both about what you discovered when you were writing your book -- just general thoughts that you might have about how the culture has changed. About how the art culture has changed, how the student involvement has changed or evolved, or maybe diminished over the years. What are your thoughts about where we are and where we started?
• [00:11:58] FRANK UHLE: [LAUGHTER]. When I wrote my book, my wife prepped me for questions. She was like, okay, here's ten questions people are going to ask you if you do a podcast. That was one of the questions [LAUGHTER] that I could never answer. When you're on the ground as a student, you know more about what the other students are doing and things. Even though I work at the U of M and am involved in, like, AV support there, which is the outgrowth of being a projectionist, it's just so hard to say. I guess I try to have faith that there's weird undercurrents of stuff happening. I just don't feel like I'm qualified to fully judge because, there's probably some kids in a dorm room doing something totally digitally that is really offbeat and weird that I just...it's hard to say because again, the film societies filled a need. There were three TV channels or whatever at the time. There were very few movies on television. There was no cable movie channels. There was no streaming. You couldn't rent a DVD or a VHS tape. You had to show a movie in an auditorium, someone had to rent it, hire the auditorium, hire the projectionist, and luckily for U of M in Ann Arbor, that opportunity existed, and there were these gatekeepers. It attracted people, like moths to a flame, to want to do that stuff. Then, as new opportunities to screen films, video, home video, and cable movie channels, the audience for attending movies in person dwindled. It's hard to say. There's still things that will bring out people that they know, Oh, this is a one-of-a-kind screening. But I don't want to sound cynical and say, Everything's dead. I don't think that's true. There's definitely like little bursts of energy, like Ypsi has a cool film festival, the Iffy Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival's going strong. There's lots of music things that pop up here and there. I was just at a wonderful performance yesterday at Oz Music by Frank Pahl and some friends that was just phenomenal and a pass-the-hat thing. I don't know.
• [00:14:19] AMY CANTU: So it's still going on, it's just maybe not quite as...on the surface or...?
• [00:14:25] FRANK UHLE: That's probably what it is. It's weird. The nature of our current society. Trust me, I don't want to get philosophical, but on the one hand, there's all this high -- everyone's trying to push through on the Internet and get clicks and clicks. But then there's a whole undercurrent of things that three people know about, and people are doing weird stuff, and it's hard to know if that low-level stuff will be discovered, decades from now, and idolized or... I don't know, I'm terrible at analyzing that.
• [00:15:00] AMY CANTU: I get it. I get it. And there's so much talk about... Ann Arbor is so expensive now. It's hard for artists to thrive here. Things have maybe moved out into neighboring communities, and that sort of thing. Talk a little bit more about your book. What are a few things -- I'm sure you've been asked this before, but I'd love to hear it --that surprised you that you uncovered. Some of the big "Whoa, I didn't know this history..."
• [00:15:31] FRANK UHLE: There were so many things. I was just looking through the book yesterday, actually, just because I hadn't looked at it in a while, and some friends were over, and they were looking at it. Some of the stuff about the gay people that were oppressed, I didn't realize, you know, U or M didn't have its own police force until the 70s, 80s? In the 60s and earlier, the Ann Arbor police would walk through the buildings and go into the men's rooms and arrest people, and all these terrible things were happening. Even in 1980, a lot of the people in the film societies, the more prominent creative people, were gay and -- gay males -- and many of them were harassed and were arrested, including professors, and I had known about one of those incidents, but gosh, the more I delved into it, that was a real shocker to me. Again, how that interacted with the film societies in some way, they were a refuge for people that were different and wanted to find a place for themselves, could express themselves, and be creative. That was one thing. Then, I guess, just a lot of the creative spark. Our group, as I said earlier, was a little bit on the low-key side, but some of these people were really just hardcore about...we're on the same level as, like, New York or someplace and showing films. Gerry Fialka, who I mentioned, he wanted to show, this Frank Capra TV show that had never been shown. It had been produced and that aired. He calls his manager, and it's like, I want to...we're going to show that and we get it. He gets a deal to rent this, three quarter inch video tape, and it comes out here. Then, of course, we don't have a projector in 1975 to show video. The guy Peter Wilde, again, one of the gay men, who was in this part of the story, and was arrested, was able to find a black and white video projector that they used for boxing matches. They did this whole thing. Again, it was just... there was a Wild West vibe about it of like, You know what? We're going to just do it and not look back, and I just love that. I thought that was very inspiring to think about how people in Ann Arbor on often a threadbare budget, would go to whatever length it took to get the movie Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol, you had... Only one person, Ondine, who was in the movie, had a copy that anyone could screen, and you had to fly him in, and we did. Cinema II did twice. There were things like that that were just amusing anecdotes.
• [00:18:31] AMY CANTU: It's funny that you mentioned earlier, not only were people going out of their way, and it was hugely exciting and cutting edge and Wild West. But, like you had mentioned earlier, there was also this intellectual expectation that you couldn't get into a film society unless you passed muster.
• [00:18:49] FRANK UHLE: That's true.
• [00:18:50] AMY CANTU: I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that, but not you, maybe?
• [00:18:56] FRANK UHLE: I guess what I learned was that, it kept changing. Someone would pop up and go away. But there were usually about a half dozen, and they were all different. There was one that we looked down called Mediatrics, which was for mainstream students. I think they probably took anybody who came into the student activities buildings, like, Hey, let's show movies! Which was cool. They would show the latest hit movies, mostly. Then Cinema Guild they looked at me and they were like, you don't have any knowledge about -- Who's Ingmar Bergman? I never heard of him. And they're like, Get out of here! That was the vibe I got. I can remember 45 years ago or more thinking, man...
• [00:19:43] AMY CANTU: They're tough!
• [00:19:45] FRANK UHLE: Your husband got in, but he had a lot more experience with film.
• [00:19:50] AMY CANTU: Barely got in, though.
• [00:19:54] FRANK UHLE: That's funny.
• [00:19:54] AMY CANTU: I think they had to vote twice.
• [00:19:55] FRANK UHLE: Oh, my God. Anyhow, but yeah, there was a group that was very political and our group wasn't. I'm sure if some of the people that wanted to change the world showed up, we would have been, Eh, we think you guys are going -- we don't want to get all political here or whatever. We just want to show weird movies and stuff.
• [00:20:15] AMY CANTU: Let me ask you just about a few people -- character sketches -- people that feature prominently in your book. Can you talk about Hugh Cohen?
• [00:20:24] FRANK UHLE: My dear, dear friend Hugh Cohen, yes, who passed away just about a year and a half ago now. He was just one of those people that... I didn't get to know him as well until his later years, but he was a guy who was born in 1930 and came to U of M in the 50s, joined Cinema Guild at the end of the 50s as a grad student, and he had this spine. He was just a short guy, but he just had a backbone. He wouldn't back down. Famously, in 1967, Cinema Guild, they voted, I mean, another member, Ed Weber suggested they show this movie, Flaming Creatures, which had all kinds of bad stigmas already. People have been arrested and convicted of obscenity for Jonas Mekas, the famous film programmer in New York, and Ed Weber was like, let's show it. Hugh Cohen was the point guy, and when they showed it, the local vice squad, Lieutenant Staudenmaier, showed up, and effectively, "Give me the film" and went up to the projection booth. Hugh was the lead defendant in the trial that resulted. He told me how people would back away from him and like, "Good luck!" or whatever. But he was always that stand-up person. As time went on, he got his PhD in 1970, he became the professor who taught the Intro to Film class. He taught for 40 odd years until his mid 80s, this very complicated class where he would stand up in the front -- I was the projectionist for the last few years, with a yellow legal pad with cues written. At first it was 16 millimeter films and 35 millimeter slides, and eventually became DVDs, and he couldn't really use a computer, so we just digitized the slides and put them all in a row, and he could go through them and find the right one he wanted. But he might show 10 seconds of a clip, and "This is what rack focus is like." You're in focus, and then suddenly the thing on the table is in focus, and he would show that ten-second clip. The class continues today, but it was called the Art of Film. If you took that class, and I've talked to many people who did, it was like an intro to a foreign language. You literally, by the end of that class, you had a new language that you understood of the techniques of making movies and all the little subtle aspects of picking the right lens for the right scene and doing things with the soundtrack. The way he explained it, he honed it over these years was so just magnificent. You really understood it. It wasn't like he just mentioned it and, in passing, he showed specific examples that you could really grasp. Again, like I mentioned, John Sloss, he was in that class, and it just was one of the things that really brought him into the world of film. When he came back here 20 years after he graduated, he was a producer on Super Size Me, and he was screening at the Michigan Theater, and he came, and again, we kept in touch. He said, I really want to see Hugh Cohen. A couple of hours later, I saw Hugh Cohen, he comes and goes, I hear John Sloss wants to see me. Who is he? I can't remember him at all. He must have been one of my students. I explained, and John Sloss had worked with... Who's the guy who made the American friend? Wim Wenders. Anyway, he had worked with Wim Wenders, and there was a movie, there was a book about the American Friend that was like a page-by-page coffee table book with all these photos that was out of print and very hard to find, but Hugh owned it, and somehow he heard John Sloss needed a copy, so he gave him his personal copy. That just meant so much to, again, a guy who went on from Hugh's class in the film societies to become a guy who can cut deals. I talked to him a few months ago. He was like, "I'm going over to France with Link. Linklater, we're making this movie. It's all going to be in French." I was like, Dang. He's the producer on it. But that's the impact Hugh had that people... And when we did this little memorial event to him last year, so many people earlier this year had a passionate feeling about his loss, the impact he had made on their lives. One guy flew in, a young guy. I was talking to Scott on the phone. I thought he was like 40, and he shows up and he looks like he's like 15. He had just been recently graduated, but Hugh would welcome into his office hours and talk about film, and go out to dinner with him at Knight's and stuff. That's just the way he was. He was a passionate guy.
• [00:25:29] AMY CANTU: Now, we haven't talked yet about the film festivals. Obviously, you had mentioned earlier the long-running Ann Arbor Film Festival, which has a great history. There was also the 8 Millimeter. You actually were involved in some of those. Did you made some films too or...? [LAUGHTER] Were they any good?
• [00:25:54] FRANK UHLE: I made 8-millimeter films when I was in high school for fun. I convinced my parents to let me buy an eight-millimeter camera at Sears, I think it was.
• [00:26:02] AMY CANTU: But you didn't want to become a filmmaker?
• [00:26:05] FRANK UHLE: Not really. We did do this thing where Mr. Sloss and I took my camera, and we put a cartridge in. I hadn't used it for several years. We taped the trigger with tape and played cutch with it, and it was all trippy. Then the cartridge ran out, and that was the film. I was really picky, and I really wanted to enter something in the 8 mm film festival. But I looked at it, I was like, it's not up to my standard.
• [00:26:32] AMY CANTU: It's not up to your standard. [LAUTHER]
• [00:26:34] FRANK UHLE: Then now that thing is lost. I don't know what happened to it.
• [00:26:37] AMY CANTU: That's funny.
• [00:26:38] FRANK UHLE: No. I wasn't that serious about it, but, no, I was a projectionist. Starting in '85, I got to be involved with Ann Arbor Film Festival because the guy, Peter Wilde, who had been the projectionist for close to 20 years, had left town. He turned it over to Scott Clark, who was a Michigan Theater Technical Director, and they always would have two projectionists. They would get a person from U of M and the person from the Michigan together. After Peter Wilde had been gone for a couple of years, I guess there was one interim person, maybe, and then they asked me to do it. I got involved, and it was all 16 millimeter, and it was cool. That was a big fun thing to do. For me, every year, still do it. Then the 8-mm Film Festival had been off-site in a couple of places, and Dan Gunning, who's still around town, was projecting it. Then it came into Angel Hall, and they insisted we have a U of M staff person projected. I actually projected that for a couple of years.
• [00:27:44] AMY CANTU: I'm curious, as long as we're talking about your work as a projectionist. I'm curious about how the technology has changed over the years. You've seen it firsthand. You've seen it since 1983, did you say?
• [00:27:58] FRANK UHLE: Yeah.
• [00:27:58] AMY CANTU: Can you talk about it?
• [00:27:59] FRANK UHLE: I can talk about that. That's what I have an answer for. It's completely changed. In a lot of ways, totally makes sense that it would become digital. The cost of shipping the films is negligible or just pushed over the Internet. And the experience, I don't think, is that different. Some people make a big to do about... It's not celluloid, or whatever... But the experience of sitting in a theater and watching a film, it's pretty reasonable, about the same. But the job of the projectionist is, I guess, less engaging. When you were changing reels, if it's 35 millimeter, every 20 minutes, or 60 millimeter, maybe every 40 minutes, you got to make sure the thing stays in focus. The projectors sometimes would have a little -- the belt would break and you'd be turning the takeup reel to make sure the thing would run. You were more alert and more aware. Now you get the thing queued up, and you press go, and then it ends.
• [00:29:08] AMY CANTU: It used to be a little more stressful then, right? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:29:11] FRANK UHLE: Yeah. I guess I'm more of a hand -- maybe that's why I went to art school; I like doing things with my hands. You're rewinding the film. You're checking the splices. You're threading the projector. There's a lot of more satisfying manual labor involvement with the thing. Your skills are being used. Now, it's not that hard. You have to have the background knowledge, so if something goes wrong, you can leap in and suss out what happened, which you still need a skilled person, but it's not quite the same, not at all the same, of having to actually make sure it's threaded properly and the pictures framed properly on the screen, all the little subtle parts.
• [00:30:00] AMY CANTU: Can you tell us: What is the worst experience -- that you had -- with a film that you were projecting going badly?
• [00:30:09] FRANK UHLE: There's a few. One of the fun things about, in the early days, the Peter Wilde days, I call them, was -- because the campus films would show year-round, but they would drop off in the summer. He got working in professional booths. In particular, there were several drive-ins around here. He would get the drive-in summer gigs. At the point he left town, the drive-in gigs were available. I was asked to work at the drive-in. I worked for two summers at the University Drive-In, which is now, I don't know, it's changed its name. It's called Cinemark now. It was Rave, it was Showcase. In any event, whatever it's called now. But it was 1,000 car or so drive-in out there.
• [00:30:58] AMY CANTU: That's pretty big.
• [00:30:59] FRANK UHLE: On Carpenter Road. It was a really big drive-in. It was very rundown. It was the last couple of years. The Butterfield Theater chain owned it. They were putting no money into upkeep at all. Anyway, I was showing this movie, and it was an Eddie Murphy movie, and I think it was 48 Hours or Trading Places, one of those movies. Because we would show a new movie, and then there'd be a second feature that was like last year's movie. I think this was the last year's movie. You show the primary movie, you show the last year's movie, and then you show the primary movie again, like three in a row, usually. But, somehow, it's really loud in the production. It's got carbon arc lamps which there's a huge exhaust fan. You have this big knife switch that ignites the lamp, very dramatic. You can't really hear the sound very well. There's a little tiny speaker in this rack, and the music or the sound of the dialogue is in the background. I'm running the movie. I start at the reel, and I'm running the movie. After a minute or two, I'm like, I don't hear any audio from the film. I go over to look at the sound head of the projector, which has got a little glass window on it. You can see the little exciter bulb in the film going through. It's just black. There's no light, and I'm like Oh, did the bulb go out? It's dark in the booth. I open the door and just film comes cascading out. What had happened was the film goes through the sound rollers and goes down onto a take-up reel, and somehow a splice had snapped, and the film had gotten snagged, and it was just filling up the inside of the sound thing. It was like accordioning. The film was getting accordioned in all these weird patterns, and it completely filled this thing for a minute. I opened it, and it came out. Anyhow, I had to fix it. The funny part of the story is the manager of the drive-in was an off-duty Ypsilanti police officer, as I recall. I think he was trying to save money. I was like, Look, they got to ship us a new copy of reel three of this movie. He was like, Nobody will notice. And I was like, Yeah, but the integrity of the film... Again, it was the second feature. It was last year's Eddie Murphy movie. They're like, Who cares? But anyhow, so I just cut like this minute-long chunk of literally just like accordion film, like a few hundred feet of film out. The funny part was, it was a scene, and this is a classic 80s film trope where there's some deals going down, and it all takes place in a parking garage. There's a car pulls into the parking garage someone opens a trunk. Eddie Murphy, opens a briefcase full of $100 bills. You know those scenes. They're like, in every movie like that. Basically, I think, as I recall, it shows the car going into the parking garage and then just going out of the parking garage. The whole dope deal is missing from the film now. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:34:01] AMY CANTU: Were you sweating? How long did it take you to fix that?
• [00:34:05] FRANK UHLE: The problem with the drive-in was the people in the audience were not aware that there was a projectionist. They were just honking their horns. There was one time on the 4th of July where something happened, and they had some bottle rockets. They were shelling the booth with rockets. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:34:24] FRANK UHLE: But I will tell one story about the drive-in that was a good thing. My friend Art Stefan, who ran the Ann Arbor Silent Film Society, people would call him and say, There's some films for sale out here in Tecumseh, and there's a barn and some barn with bales of hay. There were reels of film hiding underneath it. He went out there, and he bought, I think, 13 complete 35 millimeter feature films for a buck a reel or two bucks a reel, and left a whole bunch of stuff behind, which God knows what that was. But it was just when the drive-in was closing. The night after it was supposed to close, my friend Dan Moray, who was one of the projectionists, was like, "Hey, let's go show a bunch of Art's movies, have some fun!" And I was like, But the guy who is the manager is a police officer and the screen faces I-94! Someone's going to figure out that something's wrong because the drive-in is supposed to be closed. He's like, No. He goes, I'll take full responsibility. So I'm like, alright. So I invite half a dozen of my friends out, and my friend, Art, and we bring these reels of film. We had this guy, Harry Beanball, who was a projectionist, who was really crazy. He was like, "I'll be the projectionist," I'm like, cool. We were walking around the drive-in drinking beer, it was a perfect 75 degrees, sunny day, and the night air was cool. It was just perfect. He's putting all these crazy films up, and there's Elvis movies. There was John Wayne and the Green Beret, and there was Tora Tora, a late 60s version of the Pearl Harbor invasion attack. Anyway, we're just having a blast out there, and Dan Moray, who said he would take responsibility, never showed up, of course. Other random people kept pulling in. Like, people would see movies, and they go, and then there's no one selling tickets. We're like ok, and they come and park their car, and they're watching, and here's Elvis. All of a sudden it cuts to John Wayne with a flamethrower or something. It was wacky. Anyway, that was hilarious, but yeah, the drive in, that was a terrific experience.
• [00:36:29] AMY CANTU: Sad that those are gone. Those are great stories. Thank you.
• [00:36:35] FRANK UHLE: Thank you.
• [00:36:35] AMY CANTU: Frank, can you talk a little bit more about the pieces of music history that you've written?
• [00:36:42] FRANK UHLE: I haven't got anything at the moment I'm working on, but I just recently wrote that piece about Ollie McLaughlin, who is a person who I think Ann Arbor people really need to remember and celebrate more. He and his brother were born in the deep South, African American men. In fact, their dad, when they were born, their dad was 70, and when Ollie was born, his dad was 70. He had been born into slavery. He was born in 1855, so that is the lineage coming down, and his mom was born on a Choctaw Indian reservation. There were like 15, a whole bunch of kids. Anyhow, but his older brother, Maxie came to Ann Arbor in, I think the 30s, and then Ollie before he finished high school, came up here, and he went to Pioneer High School. Anyway, they liked jazz music, and they started realizing that they didn't want to drive all the way to Flint to see a concert, so they started booking concerts here, the two of them, and they would eventually put shows in like, Ann Arbor High School, like Dizzy Gillespie playing at Ann Arbor High School and they must I think they probably booked hundreds of shows. Unfortunately, the family records aren't complete. But anyhow, they started booking all these concerts, Charlie Parker or Count Basie, Duke Ellington, all these people. Ollie, the younger brother took off and started a radio show in 1953 that played jazz on what is now called WAAM, and it was just for an hour. Again, he had to hustle to get this airtime. He had to agree to sell the ads himself, and the show quickly became popular, and he started adding rock 'n' roll. Within a couple or three years, it was the most popular show locally. It was supposedly, they had this fan club he started just as a joke called Ollie's Scooby-Doo Club, and kids started showing up at the station, and you found this amazing picture from the Ann Arbor News of Ollie in the foreground with 10 kids behind and waiting to go in there and say, "I swear to be a member of the Scooby-Doo Club." That was cool enough, and then he starts putting out 45s -- and I collect 45 -- and he basically released Ann Arbor's first rock n roll records by...the artists weren't all from Ann Arbor because he was based here, but he would assign somebody he saw out in the field because he was always out DJing record hops and things he'd meet people, discover them. So yeah, he started putting out records. Again, he, with his brother concertbooker, becomes the most popular local DJ in the 50s. Then he starts these records, and they're low-level records. But then, one of the people who's lived in Burns Park, Max Crook, is like, Yeah I'm in this new band, this guy over in Battle Crook... " Ollie's like "I'll go over there"--to do a favor to this guy; he'd put a record out by this guy, Max Crook, in '59, the band called The White Bucks. And it turns out it's Del Shannon, of course, and so Ollie really has faith in him, but Del Shannon was really nervous in the studio. So they flew him to New York. He wouldn't record a good song, and then but Ollie kept encouraging him. Finally, he says, keep writing some songs, and he plays them on the phone, the beginning of "Runaway," and which turned into this incredible worldwide hit. But again, this local guy, African American guy, struggling with things like his wife was kicked out of her lodging, when the landlady, because she was light-skinned, the landlady was like well, you're passing; you're not a white person. This is the kind of stuff that happened in Ann Arbor in the 50s, and Ollie had to struggle to gain the confidence of people, too. But he was just an upbeat guy, and so here he is traveling the world with Del Shannon, and he starts recording Ann Arbor High School student named Deon Jackson, who has a top 10 hit in the US with Love Makes The World Go 'Round. So I guess that story was just so inspiring to me, and Ollie, his family moved to Detroit in 1970, and then he sadly died of a heart attack in 1984. I just feel like Ann Arbor has forgotten him.
• [00:41:04] AMY CANTU: Yeah, like...Why? So here's a question. I know that there was so much interest in the 60s with Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival and all of the performers that came through, and the kids and the young people of the day seemed to really embrace that culture and want to know more about it. But why was Ollie not remembered? What happened? Were the records? Obviously, when he was a DJ and then the Scooby-Doo Club and everything, there are people, like you had interviewed Dale -- you talked to Dale Leslie about that, and he remembered. Do you think it was that once he moved to Detroit and went on with a record business, that it just didn't really stay in Ann Arbor's memory?
• [00:42:01] FRANK UHLE: There's probably several factors, but he was certainly more focused on national success, so the bands, like the Stooges, MC5, and The Rationals played around here extensively, and Ollie's acts were already -- like Barbara Lewis, who grew up near South Lyon, was touring all around the country. The local presence wasn't perhaps...
• [00:42:23] AMY CANTU: He'd already kind of left.
• [00:42:28] FRANK UHLE: Yeah, people weren't as aware. I think that's part of it, and it's just there's a certain generation of people who grew up going to the Grande Ballroom and all that stuff, and to this day revere that whole experience as part of their lives. The Bob Seger and the Iggy and the MC5 people are super legendary, and there's the top 40 radio hit artists of like The Capitols' "Cool Jerk" and Barbara Lewis' "Hello Stranger" aren't...they're in a different silo of sorts.
• [00:43:07] AMY CANTU: That is interesting, though, that he was so prominent, and there really was nobody quite like him. He was a very singular success story for that period of time.
• [00:43:19] FRANK UHLE: Again, I think if you talked to Bob Seger or Iggy.
• [00:43:22] AMY CANTU: They'd all remember.
• [00:43:23] FRANK UHLE: They would be like, Oh, my God, and like Scott Morgan or the Rationals, of course, because they recorded one of the songs that Deon Jackson wrote one of their 45s.
• [00:43:34] AMY CANTU: I'm glad you uncovered it.
• [00:43:35] FRANK UHLE: It wasn't uncovered. In the UK, he's like a hero.
• [00:43:39] AMY CANTU: Isn't that crazy?
• [00:43:40] FRANK UHLE: In the dance floors of all these northern soul clubs, his records are regularly spun.
• [00:43:46] AMY CANTU: That's great. We've talked a lot about the past, and I know that I tried to get you to speculate on where we're going. But you know, I'm curious what your thoughts are about people's relationship with the small screen and how that has changed viewing movies, viewing film, viewing video. What are you seeing both in the classrooms where you're a projectionist still or where you're doing tech help? What are your thoughts about what the near and far future might be with that relationship with movies? It's less communal, that's a big deal, but what other thoughts do you have about that?
• [00:44:39] FRANK UHLE: I don't know that's the big deal, I would say what you just said. When I do see a movie where there's a good-sized audience, like at the Ann Arbor Film Festival or something, it's a different feeling. I just watched a movie last night. My wife was reading on the couch because she didn't want to see this 1933 pre-code movie called Search for Beauty. It was supposed to be a racy film. It was talky, wasn't that great. But seeing that on your bigger screen TV, it's ok, you know, but it would be different to see it in a theater. The experience... It is the way movies were presented when they made the films, they knew there would be an audience, or they expected there would be an audience.
• [00:45:30] AMY CANTU: They made it according.
• [00:45:31] FRANK UHLE: I think there's a different aesthetic, and the streaming series and stuff that everyone's watching, and we watch. I don't know. I feel like there's definitely, and it's not bad, but it's a little bit more fun to see it with an audience in a lot of cases, not maybe always, but um... I don't know, as you mentioned, the classes for years would insist that the students come to a screening and see it on a screen in a classroom. We would try to -- we still do -- set up masking around the image and try to screen it as if you're recreating that experience of seeing it in a movie theater, and which goes right back to the Cinema Guild and the Peter Wilde people who established that as a U of M tradition, if you will. But some of the classes are now saying, You can just watch it on your laptop or perhaps on your phone -- you know, hopefully not. I think we've crested the wave, and we're starting down the other side of the mountain where it's not as... There's fewer and fewer people that consider that learning about movies in the sense the way they were once a communal experience is diminishing. Sadly, like the local theaters, the Goodrich 16, is closed.
• [00:46:56] AMY CANTU: I know. What's going to happen with that?
• [00:46:59] FRANK UHLE: I don't know.
• [00:46:59] AMY CANTU: It's been closed for a long time.
• [00:47:01] FRANK UHLE: I'm sure the pandemic had a lot to do with that. But if you read some of the trade papers, which I don't regularly read, but the amount of audiences coming in, they'll be huge for a Barbie or something hit movie. But the percentages of people that just go out to see movies as an activity is declining. We'll go to a super big hit, but not regularly just go, Oh, let's go see a movie! Because they can watch it at home on a pretty big giant TV and stuff.
• [00:47:36] AMY CANTU: Have you ever watched a movie on your phone?
• [00:47:37] FRANK UHLE: No.
• [00:47:38] AMY CANTU: Never gonna...
• [00:47:39] FRANK UHLE: Thank God. I have watched clips.
• [00:47:42] AMY CANTU: There you go. What are you most proud of?
• [00:47:50] FRANK UHLE: I was going to say my book right there. No, I got a huge... Again, Ann Arbor District Library, Fifth Avenue Press, and the team of designers, Nate, I'm pronouncing his name Pocsi-Morrison. Pretty close. Amy Arendts and Amanda Szot -- they just knocked it out of the park.
• [00:48:11] AMY CANTU: Yes, beautiful.
• [00:48:12] FRANK UHLE: Tremendous job, and Elizabeth Demers over at U of M Press -- she's now at MSU Press -- was so supportive and said, "We've got to do this as a coffee table book." I really never thought it would turn out anything more than one of the Arcadia sepia tone cover books at best. I thought, it's going to be -- I'll have a web page where I talk about Ann Arbor film history. To have it come out in the way it did was just something I'm sure I'll never be able to recreate. It was just amazing.
• [00:48:43] AMY CANTU: I want to give you a lot of credit for your researching and your relentless pursuit of people to talk to, images to include, and bits of history that needed to be uncovered and really explored. It's really something. You did a great job.
• [00:49:03] FRANK UHLE: Thank you. I have to say I really enjoyed it, and I'm trying to find something else that I will spend six years doing and keep my little detective hat on for that long. It was fun, to just keep digging rabbit holes, often as not would turn up something like Wow, you know...
• [00:49:24] AMY CANTU: Yeah, that people... that have never been seen before.
• [00:49:27] FRANK UHLE: I just -- one little tidbit -- but... Hugh Cohen had probably, five or six years ago, handed me a pile of reel-to-reel videotapes. They said, "Frank Capra, February 1973," cause Frank Capra came here for Cinema Guild, and he was like...we taped his comments at the movies. A few weeks ago, a member of the Capra family was writing emails to all the U of M archives. Does anyone have any record of Frank Capra's visit here? They forwarded that to me, and so now, I'm actually, tomorrow morning, I'm going to take those tapes to a transfer studio in Detroit, and we're going to transfer them and see, hopefully, that there's good video on there of Frank Capra speaking over at Lorch Hall.
• [00:50:16] AMY CANTU: That's great.
• [00:50:17] FRANK UHLE: But yeah, so they're doing some book project relating to his -- I think they said they have an unpublished novel he wrote, and they're trying to add in some his public speaking. But so that continues on from the film society book. There's so many things like you said, images -- I found these photos. I really looked hard to find photos of Frank Capra. Nobody took a selfie. They weren't like, Hey, Frank, let's get a selfie.[LAUGHTER] Didn't happen in those days. None of the professors. You'd think that the film faculty would have a group photo. Nobody did that.
• [00:50:54] AMY CANTU: That is something.
• [00:50:55] FRANK UHLE: But I found that Daily published a blurry picture, and it said the guy's name, and I tracked... They didn't have the negatives at the Bentley, but I found him. He is now this guy, David Migola, is a New York Times writer, journalist. But he was like, I think I have those pictures somewhere, and he had his negatives, and he FedExed them to me.
• [00:51:15] AMY CANTU: That's great that you're getting that! I'd love to see that.
• [00:51:19] FRANK UHLE: They're cool pictures. They used four of them in the book.
• [00:51:23] AMY CANTU: Cool. Well, congratulations, Frank.
• [00:51:25] FRANK UHLE: Thank you.
• [00:51:26] AMY CANTU: It's been a wonderful life -- my little "Capra-corn" there for a moment. [LAUGHTER] Thanks for all that you've done for the bicentennial, and I hope that you can write more stuff for us because we're always interested in more.
• [00:51:39] FRANK UHLE: Cool. I'm sure something will pique my interest in the near future, and I'll get in touch with you.
• [00:51:46] AMY CANTU: Alright. Thank you, Frank.
• [00:51:47] FRANK UHLE: You're welcome.
• [00:51:52] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.