'Silents Please' series, 35mm with live music to start on Sunday, May 12 in Somerville, Mass.

I'm ramping up to do music for several silent film series this summer, and I'm particularly excited about the one above.

First, the films are all great. Second, we're using only 35mm prints for this series. And finally, there's the venue: the Somerville is a terrific theater for movies of all eras, with a management and staff committed to the highest standards of presentation.

Yes, they installed digital projection to continue to run new first-run flicks. But they kept their high-end 35mm systems in place in order to continue to present actual film.

And that's what we'll be doing this summer and fall, in a monthly series that the Somerville is calling "Silents Please." We're getting prints from collectors and vaults and libraries and putting them in the care of head projectionist David Kornfeld, who knows how to coax the very best image out of anything on film, new or old.

In the next few weeks, I'll be posting a more material on these films and the music I'm preparing. But for now, I just wanted to post the above image because it's so darned impressive. Note that each of the dates is a Sunday, and that all screenings will start at 1 p.m. For more info (and to get tickets for the first show, which is on Mother's Day), go to the Somerville's Web site at www.somervilletheatreonline.com.

Hey, for this Mother's Day, give her endless images of a bare-chested Douglas Fairbanks!