Library of Congress reopens just in time for Summer Movies on the Lawn metroweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from metroweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Do you miss the old tradition of “Screen on the Green” down on the National Mall?
You can still enjoy outdoor movies as the Library of Congress hosts its fourth annual “Summer Movies on the Lawn,” a weekly series that kicks off Thursday evening.
“This is very exciting, especially after the past 15 months,” Chief Communications Officer Roswell Encina told WTOP. “You can’t beat it. We started this four years ago. You see the sun setting behind the Capitol. … It can’t be any more Washington D.C. than that. You get to sit with your family and friends with a blanket and a nice little picnic and watch a movie.
The climatic pie fight from “Battle of the Century,” with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in the middle of the action. Hal Roach Studios.
“The Battle of the Century,” Laurel and Hardy’s 1927 silent short film, famed for its epic pie-in-the-face fight sequence, quickly disappeared after its theatrical release.
The 20-minute, two-reel bit of comic relief in the latter days of the Roaring Twenties got left behind in the rush to talkies, as did most silent films. The last known surviving copy of its famed second reel was considered lost for good by the 1960s. It seemed to be a flickering bit of entertainment lost to time, disintegrating film stock and a too-late appreciation of an outdated art form. Slate magazine once described the missing second reel, containing most of the pie-fight sequence, as “one of the most deeply mourned lost treasures in film history.”