Beginning in the 1930s the Texas-born filmmaker Melton Barker spent nearly four decades scurrying across America with a script and a camera, methodically making and remaking the same two-reel film. This might seem like a story of creative obsession — a compulsive monomaniac so intent on achieving aesthetic perfection that he became subsumed by his work — but Barker, one of at least several itinerant filmmakers working in the first half of the 20th century, was more huckster than auteur.

His life’s work — “The Kidnappers Foil,” a hokey short about a band of kids who outsmart two dozing criminals, then perform a series of song-and-dance routines — preyed upon the loving delusions of small-town mothers and fathers. Equipment in tow, Barker would roll into town, offering starry-eyed parents a chance to see their children, billed collectively as the Local Gang, ham it up on a big screen — for a fee.

Barker’s work might not have been compelled by zeal (it was probably pretty mercenary), but Caroline Frick, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, has been researching Barker and “The Kidnappers Foil” for nearly a decade, and her labors are tireless and impassioned. Ms. Frick first encountered an edition of the movie at an archival conference; she was familiar with children’s short-subject films from working in the film preservation department at Warner Brothers.

Once she realized that “The Kidnappers Foil” wasn’t a one-off, that there probably were dozens of iterations, she was mesmerized and began tracking Barker’s routes around the country. “The more I kept looking, the more I kept finding, to the point where I got out a U.S. map at my apartment, and I started to put out thumbtacks across all the different cities he visited,” she recalled.