Courtesy of Gloria Swanson Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Austin and Milestone Film. "Beyond the Rocks," starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, will kick off the Three Rivers Film Festival tomorrow. Click photo for larger image.

You'd think blacksmiths, typewriter repairmen and maybe even asbestos installers would be more in demand than silent-film accompanists. But you'd be wrong. That endangered keyboard species, relegated to the Department of Obsolete Occupations long ago, is becoming not so obsolete any more.

How many people nowadays can sit down at a piano or organ for two hours in the dark, improvising and synchronizing music to match the action of a movie they may or may not have seen before?

"More than you'd think," says Philip Carli, who is one of them. "There's even a training program for silent-film accompanists in Italy now. A lot of people are getting into it because silents are becoming so much more accessible."

Archival discoveries and restorations, plus DVD transfer and commercial release, are responsible for that, along with a renewal of interest among younger generations of film fans and an increasing number of public screenings, such as the one that brings Carli to the Byham Theater tomorrow night to kick off the Three Rivers Film Festival.

The 24th festival, being presented by Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Dollar Bank, will feature more than 40 films through Nov. 17.

"Beyond the Rocks" (1922) is the exotic melodrama Carli will be accompanying. It stars Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino -- Hollywood's greatest male and female sensations of the era -- in their only picture together. For 75 years it was thought to have been lost, with nothing but a one-minute fragment surviving, until it miraculously materialized in toto, hidden in the rusty film cans of a Dutch collector's estate -- decayed but reparable, now fully restored.

Inquiring minds want to know -- and are boggled to find out -- how many times Carli typically watches a film before tickling the ivories to it in public with an audience.

"A lot of times I'm thrown in cold at the last minute," says Philip Carli. Click photo for larger image.

"If I see it even once, I'm lucky," he replies. "A lot of times I'm thrown in cold at the last minute."

Indeed, demonstrating the point, Carli will improvise his "Beyond the Rocks" accompaniment here for the first time -- without yet having seen it in its entirety. But something in his voice says (silently) he relishes that challenge, and anyone who has heard him can attest that he rises to it. Some film accompanists draw attention to themselves by playing flashily, using the medium as a novelty gimmick to further their solo careers and employing musical effects that are at odds with the time and style of the art. Carli, to the contrary, is a minimalist with an understated, unobtrusive approach.

"I feel I should serve the film," he says. "I'm the added, not the main, attraction. It's not 'my' vehicle. I'm trying to make the film more accessible and enrich the experience."

The 42-year-old Carli's lifelong affection for early cinema began at age 5, encouraged by his educator-parents in Carlsbad, Calif. Disneyland showed silent films in those days, and he went. The local library had one (and only one) that you could borrow, and he did: "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." At 14, having watched it countless times, "I thought maybe I could play this at my junior high," he says -- and found out that he could.

Fifty original scores and hundreds of performances later, Carli is much in demand throughout North America, Europe and recently Japan, whose highly polished silent films were mostly lost to earthquakes and World War II. In Tokyo, he accompanied Cecil B. De Mille's "The Cheat" -- of great interest there for the performance of Sessue Hayakawa in a notoriously racist villain's role.

"Beyond the Rocks" is similarly notorious as a bodice-ripper with an outlandish plot: Swanson plays Theodora, an upper-crust American who marries an ancient British millionaire as a financial favor to her father, while simultaneously falling in love with Valentino as Lord Hector Bracondale. Temptation is (largely) resisted. Fidelity is (pretty much) sustained. For convoluted reasons you don't want to know, everybody ends up in the Sahara and gets entangled in a sand-dune civil war there. Which of them will survive to live happily -- and more important, virtuously -- thereafter?

"Rocks" director Sam Wood was a prolific MGM company man who made many good films ("Goodbye, Mr. Chips," "Our Town," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "King's Row," the Marx Brothers' "Night at the Opera" and "Day at the Races") and just as many bad ones. Wood's unsung status today relates less to his movies than to his far-right politics, which were hazardous to the health of many Hollywood careers. He was president of something called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and his 1947 testimony at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings helped fuel the myth of Communist infiltration in the film industry. The great Groucho, in a humorless moment, went so far as to call him a fascist.

"Beyond the Rocks," in any case, if not exactly the missing masterpiece we'd hoped for, is a fascinating example of double-star vehicles before the advent of talkies. Since an appalling 90 percent of all photoplays made before 1927 are lost, it constitutes a precious new piece of the silent-film historical puzzle.

Pre-dialogue motion pictures, of course, were never "silent." They were always accompanied by music, descending in grandeur from full orchestra in New York City to mighty Wurlitzer in Pittsburgh to humble piano in Wichita. For smaller venues, "cue sheets" of the main themes were provided to exhibitors as a convenience for local musicians of wildly different or dubious talents. Many of those cue sheets survive, but you won't find Carli using them. He prefers improvisational spontaneity to the preordained pushing of musical-emotional buttons.

Among Carli's favorites (and "signature" improvisations) are Lon Chaney's "Unholy Three," F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" and Lillian Gish's "Orphans of the Storm" -- the last of which prompts a particularly powerful memory of an occupational hazard that accompanies accompaniests:

"Orphans" is three hours long. By the time he reached its intermission, nature was calling -- loudly. But as he was about to jump up for the men's room, the master of ceremonies and the audience decided they liked the film so much they'd skip the break and continue the screening uninterrupted.

"The tension in my performance," he recalls, "increased 30 fold toward the end of that film."

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Tickets for the opening event are $10 general admission; most festival films will be $7. For more information, go to www.pghfilmmakers.org or www.3rff.com or call 412-681-5449.