One of the few sage pieces of advice that I have been able to offer to others is, when giving a talk, to make sure you know how many words get spoken in a minute. A 20-minute talk is going to be 3,000 words (assuming that you are reading from a script). It works, trust me.
It was a lesson drilled into me through bitter experience. In 1999 I gave a talk on the pioneering days of the Anglo-American film producer Charles Urban at the Visual Delights conference in Sheffield. I can’t remember how long the slot was that I had been given, but was probably 30 minutes, and I came with a 11,000-word script lifted almost word-for-word from my thesis. Halfway through my time slot, with a thick wad of pages still to go, I speeded up my delivery to the point of pure incomprehensibility, accepted defeat and gave up with two-thirds of my talk undelivered, offering profuse apologies to the audience.
I learned my lesson. A version of the talk, at half the length, appeared in print as ‘“That Slick Salesman in the Silk Hat”: Charles Urban Arrives in Britain’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds.), Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century (Flicks Books, 2000). Some of this essay then made its way into the book based on my thesis, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 (University of Exeter Press, 2013). However, owing the pressure of space, I had to cut much of what I had written about Urban’s upbringing in Cincinnati, his early time as a book agent, his work as a salesman for typewriters, phonographs and then Kinetoscope film viewers, and his development of the Bioscope film projector, before he was sent to Britain in 1897 to energise the European business of Edison agents Maguire and Baucus, going on to enjoy a roller-coaster career as a producer with a passionate belief in the the value of the non-fiction film. It was all good stuff, or so I thought, but most of it had to go.
My lasting regret has been that a crucial part of the thesis and the development of the character (I always saw Urban in part as a fictional character, specifically the lead role in a five-act tragedy) was now lost. It was the quasi-religious calling that Urban seemed to have when he started out as a salesman that was important – what he saw in the selling of books, typewriters and phonographs, the belief he had in his calling, would help form his particular vision of cinema. But as well as the draft version of my thesis (200,000 words, as opposed to the 100,000 words that made it into the book), I still had the original Visual Delights talk. I came across it the other day and thought that, though I was mad ever to think that it would work as a talk, that it was still interesting to read, and worth making available.
So, twenty-seven years on, I’ve published it on this site.
I’ve added footnotes to the talk from the draft thesis, which has pushed the word length to 14,000, so probably only the specialist is going to seek it out. Or maybe the curious will be interested in how the American son of German immigrants overcame an abusive childhood, and the adolescent loss of an eye, to ride the wave of growing American exceptionalism in the period following the Civil War, energised by the actual and symbolic power of electricity. Urban was an exceptional person, whose enthusiasm and self-belief helped shaped the emergent film world film industry in several ways, from his hugely influential Bioscope projector, to his advocacy of the non-fiction film, to his genius in developing and promoting colour film. He was also a stylish person – the silk hat is important. He knew that to sell successfully that you had to do so through yourself. But enough of the preamble. Why not download and find out more?
Links:
- For an overview of Charles Urban’s achievements see my 2013 blog post Charles Urban
- There is more on Charles Urban on his website, which I manage (in urgent need of an upgrade, which I hope will happen later this year)
