Tracey Goessel

Although both a physician and an entrepreneur, Tracey Goessel’s true passion is silent film history. In 2015 her biography of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., The First King of Hollywood, was dubbed by The New York Times to be “a buoyant handspring of a book … one of the most delightful Hollywood biographies to slide down the mast in years.” In addition, she founded the nonprofit Film Preservation Society (FPS), (www.filmpreservationsociety.org) which has recovered and restored several silent films formerly thought to be lost or unavailable for viewing, including Fairbanks’ Mr. Fixit, The Good Bad Man, The Halfbreed, Too Many Kisses and Double Trouble. FPS funded the software that enables the Library of Congress to scan original paper prints of silent films from the first decade of the 1900s, and currently the goal is to restore all ~450 D.W. Griffith Biograph films that were made between 1908 and 1913.