John Bengtson had an unusual fascination with fire escapes. Also telephone poles. And chimneys.
For more than 30 years, he captured images of them from silent films and then matched them with archival photos, aerial maps and postcards to pinpoint where Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd performed their slapstick shenanigans.
In identifying hundreds of locations in Hollywood, San Francisco and New York that those geniuses of silent comedy used in movies like “The Kid” (1921), “Cops” (1922) and “Safety Last!” (1923), Mr. Bengtson inadvertently uncovered a visual record of vanished cityscapes.
“When you watch a silent movie,” he said, “you’re not only being entertained by the story, but you’re experiencing time travel.”
To film historians, Mr. Bengtson’s contributions were revelatory.
“He was inspired by the ways in which films opened up an understanding of the spaces that we move through every day without even really thinking about it,” Charles Wolfe, a professor emeritus of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an interview. “It was a form of navigation to him.”
Mr. Bengtson died on Jan. 29 at his home in Pleasant Hill, Calif., his family said. He was 68 and had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
A lawyer by day, Mr. Bengtson used his spare time to become the Sherlock Holmes of silent films.
Before Google Earth and other digital tools came along, his methods were charmingly low-tech. One vital resource was maps created by fire insurance companies, which listed the construction materials of buildings, helping identify streets and structures whose appearance had changed over time. Because the selection of movie locations in the silent era was often a fluid and scantily documented process, knowing decades later what a roof awning had been made of carried as much weight as a DNA sample in a murder case.
Mr. Bengtson recognized that his fixation on such details could seem peculiar.
“People might get the sense of a kook,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. “Some people do crossword puzzles. Some people veg out in front of the TV.”
And some people — well, Mr. Bengtson — spend a considerable amount of time transforming silent films into maps of the past.
His most remarkable revelation centered on a T-shaped alley in Hollywood, between Cahuenga Boulevard and Cosmo Street. Triangulating frame-by-frame stills with his go-to research materials, Mr. Bengtson discovered that the alley had been used in more than a dozen films in the early 1920s, including Keaton’s “Cops,” Chaplin’s “The Kid” and Lloyd’s “Safety Last!”
The location’s ubiquity made sense to Mr. Bengtson. At the time, Hollywood was mostly a neighborhood of open fields and vacant lots. Because the alley was close to the filmmakers’ studios, they could go there for quick urban shots instead of lugging their equipment to downtown Los Angeles.
“I can absolutely guarantee you that there is no place anywhere that has three of the biggest stars and three of their most important movies in one spot,” Mr. Bengtson told Atlas Obscura, a travel website, in 2021, the year a commemorative plaque he advocated for was placed at the alley. “This is absolutely two or three strata above anything else I’ve ever found.”
Mr. Bengtson disseminated his findings — stunt locations; broadcast antennas that still stand; the corner where Keaton was once bitten by a dog — on his blog, Silent Locations; in three books, “Silent Echoes” (2000), “Silent Traces” (2006) and “Silent Visions” (2011); in commentary for the Criterion Channel; and on walking tours around Hollywood.
“He basically had a map in his head,” Kim Cooper, the co-founder of Esotouric, a Los Angeles company that Mr. Bengtson worked for, said in an interview. “He was giddy. He was effervescent. He was charming. You were just in his world and went back in time with him.”
John David Bengtson was born on Nov. 17, 1957, in Bakersfield, Calif. His father, Carl Bengtson, was a geologist for Chevron. His mother, Edla (Johnson) Bengtson, taught music.
Growing up, John was infatuated by silent comedies that aired on public television. He spent his allowance on old 8-millimeter films and, in high school, he made a five-minute film called “The Pool,” a love story starring his classmates.
In the early 1970s, while still in high school, John traveled by train to Berkeley for silent film screenings at the Pacific Film Archive and at a Keaton festival. Smitten by the city’s artsy vibe, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley.
After graduating in 1979 with a degree in finance, he stayed for his M.B.A., finishing in 1981. He then studied law at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1983. He soon opened a law office in San Francisco, focusing mostly on business matters and contracts.
In 1995, while watching a Keaton box set on Laserdisc, Mr. Bengtson recognized a steep street in San Francisco during a chase scene in “Day Dreams” (1922). He hit pause, set up a camera on a tripod, took a photo and then drove to the spot: Lombard Street, whose famous curves were added after the film was made.
“That kind of blew me away, because I realized there’s actually some history going on,” Mr. Bengtson told Atlas Obscura. “It’s not just the same place then and now.”
Mr. Bengtson’s marriages to Mary Alice Uniack and Kristin Anderson ended in divorce. He is survived by Arden and Linden Bengtson, his daughters with his first wife; and a brother, Bruce Bengtson.
In cataloging the scenic scaffolding of silent films, Mr. Bengtson rejoiced in trespassing on the past.
“When I discover a ‘new’ location, I’m privy to a fact that at one time only the star and the crew members knew,” he told the The Book Club of California Quarterly in 2020. “One hundred years later, I invite myself into their select group — I share in their once exclusive community of knowledge.”
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