Anoka player piano restorer shows silent films accompanied by 108-year-old photoplayer

For the past year, Nate Otto has been re-creating a moviegoing experience that was last experienced 100 years ago.

He’s been screening classic silent movies to as many people who can fit into his Anoka workshop, accompanied by a soundtrack provided by a 108-year-old photoplayer.

Described as an “automatic mechanical orchestra,” the photoplayer is an acoustic, Frankensteinian music machine combining a player piano, pipe organ and percussion instruments.

It was an automated one-man band that provided a live film score and sound effects for movies in the early 20th century. Photoplayers became obsolete with the arrival of talking films. Only a few dozen working models exist today. Few people alive have seen one in action.

Otto is changing that by setting up an informal micro-theater in his workshop and offering “Not-So-Silent Movies!” The result is a combination of sight and sound not experienced by an audience for more than a century.

Otto is a craftsman with an unusual niche business, Rum River Restoration, which restores vintage player pianos.

About 20 people squeezed into his workshop recently to watch a silent 1928 Mickey Mouse animated short, “Plane Crazy,” followed by a 19-minute, two-reel comedy from 1920 called “One Week” starring silent film great Buster Keaton.The soundtrack was provided by Otto’s American Photo Player Co. Style 15 “Fotoplayer.”

Though the player piano was doing most of the work, Otto was busy operating the automated music machine, changing piano rolls nearly two dozen times like a pre-electronic DJ. He punctuated every pratfall and gag with a boom from a bass drum, a rattle from a snare drum or the crash of cymbals. He set the organ function on the instrument to tremolo for the sad bits. He used different elements of the piano to create sound effects ranging from an airplane motor to rainfall.

Much of the music he used came from piano rolls made especially as mood music for films, like a piano roll labeled “Speed: Hurry-Chase” made by the Film Music Co. of Los Angeles for chase scenes. Another movie piano roll is labeled “Lament: Dramatic-Tragic-Pathetic-Strong-Sentimental-Serious,” designed for poignant tear-jerking scenes. “Drunk Souse Spree” is music composed for debauched drinking scenes.

“What I like about this is pushing the limits of this machine,” said Otto, 34. “The changes, all the effects, that’s on me.”

The performance had an effect on its audience, too.

“I couldn’t stop smiling. I thought it was so full of joy,” said Melissa Bergstrom, who came to see the Sept. 7 show.

“It’s kind of like taking a time machine back to the 1920s,” said her husband, Sam Bergstrom.

Otto bought his photoplayer in 2020 from a Chicago collector. Though it cost $12,000, it wasn’t functional.

It took three years for Otto to restore the instrument to factory condition. He completed the work just in time to give his first performance last September at a St. Paul convention of the Music Box Society International, an organization of fans of automated musical machines.

Since then, Otto has accompanied movies in about 30 different performances before small audiences at his shop. He has more performances scheduled in October and December. The shows are free, though he does accept freewill donations.

“When I bought this thing, I never thought I’d be performing on it,” he said.

Otto said he may be selling his photoplayer to a California film museum. He thinks it’s currently worth about $88,000. But he said he will use the money to help finance the restoration of a bigger photoplayer that he currently owns and possibly create a dedicated space for performances in the Twin Cities. He also plans to buy an even bigger photoplayer, one that’s in pieces now.

He admits that would be “the project of a lifetime,” but, once in working order, it would literally have all the bells (cow bell, doorbell, sleigh bell) and whistles (locomotive whistle, bird whistle), in addition to making the sounds of gunshots, wind, waves, fire, horse hooves, auto horns, fire gongs, telegraph keys and more.

“I want to share this because it’s such an endangered species and I love performing on it,” Otto said. “Having this collective experience is really unique. It’s a live performance and a movie at the same time.”