Coastline Children's Film Festival: Duck Soup & Three Ages with Dr. Larry Schanker

Sunday, Mar. 15 | 4:00pm ET (3:00pm CT)

Coastline Children’s Film Festival returns to The Acorn presenting Duck Soup and Three Ages with live improvisational piano music by Dr. Larry Schanker.

Free to attend! Tickets are encouraged, but not required.

Reserved seats are available with a $20 tax-deductible donation to The Acorn, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

Duck Soup 1927 USA 21 min with Laurel & Hardy

Seeking refuge from a contingent of forest rangers engaged in the recruitment of vagrants for firefighting duties, Laurel and Hardy seek sanctuary within an uninhabited mansion. Exploiting the absence of the owner, who is on vacation, and the absence of household staff, Hardy assumes the role of the proprietor, proffering the property for rent to an English couple. Engaging Laurel in the ruse, he enlists him to impersonate a maid. However, their attempt at subterfuge is foiled when the rightful owner unexpectedly returns, exposing their deception to the prospective tenants. Subsequently, Laurel and Hardy are compelled to evade capture once more, but are ultimately apprehended by the forest rangers and compelled to participate in firefighting efforts to mitigate wildfires.

Three Ages with Buster Keaton 64 min

Three Ages is a 1923 American feature-length silent comedy film starring comedian Buster Keaton. The first feature Keaton wrote, directed, produced, and starred in, Keaton structured the film like three inter-cut short films. While Keaton was a proven success in the short film medium, he had yet to prove himself as a feature-length star. It has been alleged that, had the project flopped, the film would have been broken into three short films, although this has been disputed by film historians who note that neither Keaton nor his associates made this claim in their lifetimes. The structure also worked as a parody of D W Griffith 1916 film Intolerance.

Larry Schanker:

Larry Schanker has been writing music for theatre, film, dance and the concert hall for almost 35 years. Most recently, he was guest soloist for the world premiere of his Concerto for Jazz Piano, performed by the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra at the Mendel Center in Benton Harbor, MI. Dr. Schanker’s theatrical underscoring runs the gamut from Shakespeare to Chekhov, to comedy at the Second City in Chicago. He wrote the music for the Goodman Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol for fifteen years, performing the score live for nine of those years. He has applied the same techniques to the accompaniment of silent film, most recently at Indiana University Cinema, where he accompanied a 1920 Hamlet, and at Notre Dame, where he was commissioned to write a score for piano and harp for the 1924 version of Peter Pan, which premiered in the summer of 2010 and was reprised for the 2012 CCFF film festival. At the Citadel Dance Center in Benton Harbor, MI, Dr. Schanker has composed music for ballet, jazz, and modern dance. Most recently, the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra (SMSO) collaborated with Dr. Schanker to create a unique composition that brought the SMSO together in concert with the drumlines of Benton Harbor High School and the Boys & Girls Club of Benton Harbor.

Dr. Schanker holds a Bachelor of Music and a Masters in Composition from Northwestern University, where he studied with Lynden DeYoung and Alan Stout, and a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Chicago, where he studied with John Eaton and Shulamit Ran. His other passion is Montessori education, and he has been teaching at Brookview Montessori School in Benton Harbor for the past 22 years, where he designed a composition-based music program. He now serves as Brookview’s Executive Director. Larry lives in Saint Joseph, Michigan.

About Coastline Children’s Film Festival:

The mission of the Coastline Children’s Film Festival is to offer quality, independent films and animation to kids of all ages to Berrien County. Presenting them to families and the community on the big screen creates a shared, theatrical experience. CCFF’s anchor event is a 10-day, annual March film festival presented at locations throughout SW Michigan and NW Indiana. Additional indoor and outdoor screenings throughout the summer and Halloween round out the year.

In addition, CCFF sees educational opportunities as central to its mission. Alongside the screening of features, documentaries, and short programs, festival participants have the opportunity to learn about the history of cinema and the craft of filmmaking through hands-on workshops and filmmaker presentations.

RESERVED SEATING DONATION option includes a $20 tax-deductible donation to The Acorn and guarantees you a seat with optimal sightlines. $20 Donation per ticket holder in your group.

All ticket purchases are non-refundable, non-exchangeable. 

The Acorn is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.