October 26, 2022 • 38 mins
For a relatively brief period of time, silent films rocked the world of entertainment. However, these nitrate- and acetate-based films proved both fragile -- and downright dangerous. In the first part of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max dive into the strange story of how so many silent films ended up lost forever.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our number
one super producer, Mr Max Williams. There we go. Yeah,
he's looking looking like a real snack today. Uh. Also,
I'm being god I sounded it was. It's like a
(00:50):
cartoon where where all of a sudden, Max just looks
like a roasted chicken kind of lovering, you know, down
But then I'm not quite sure am I hungry or
am I horny? Unclear? Unclear? In the original cartoon? Yeah,
mutually exclusive. Yeah, so I've been your knowl We are
(01:10):
exploring something that's been a personal passion for all three
of us, uh separately, way before we ever stumbled into podcasting,
and that is missing media. Lost media. We're in an
age where there's more just media in general than ever
before throughout the entirety of human history. It is getting
a little bit ridiculous. But along the way, a lot
(01:35):
of things have gotten lost. This is part of a
continuing series. Our research associate, doctor Zach is also really
excited about this. One night over slipped down a doctor appeared,
but This is no normal doctor. Who's there. It's Zach
Zach the doctor named Zach, and he's here to fill
(02:01):
your scraps knowledge. Pet is cat teaching history books and stuff. Oh,
let's go with other things. Yeah, that'll work, Zack, And
(02:23):
I think we begin it in a way that everybody
can identify with. Actually I almost texted you about a
related question off air, No, but I didn't want to
bother you over the weekend. You ever get the thing
where you're like, I kind of remember that song or
there's a scene in a movie that I remembered. I
really want to figure out the name of it, but dad,
gumme it. I've searched everywhere. My Google food is pretty
(02:45):
good and I still can't find this. Well. First of all,
for me, sometimes those are false memories. Uh, And I
think you know, the Mandela effect is strong with many
of us. Where my girlfriend once was like, we were
talking about the movie Headwig and the Angry and she
described I'd this scene and I was like, that sounds awesome,
but that wasn't in that movie. She goes, oh, no,
it was. No, it definitely was, and we we had
(03:07):
to like watch it together. You know, it's no that
must have been a special edition or something, because I
was definitely in there. And you know, a friend of
the show, the creator of that of that movie, John
Cameron Mitchell, mentioned it to him. Is like, no, it
never happened. But to your point, then yes, there certainly
are things that either I hit the cutting room floor
and aren't archived past a certain point, or maybe you
(03:29):
caught it in a DVD version that was never reissued
again and now you can't find that particular copy anymore.
You recommended a movie to me a for spooky season,
which I love, the Tale of Two Sisters. Not streaming
anywhere anymore nowhere, it's tough. I've got the I've got
the DVD if you want. It's not too late. We
(03:51):
still got a little Halloween time. Yeah, so I'll bring
that over. Fabulous, fabulous, scary and genuinely scary movie. You
guys want movie. I really wish I could find a
copy of what shas Am. I know Shazam is a
real movie, and I want to see it. I think
you mean, I think you mean Kaboom, she zoom that
(04:15):
SHA's am. It is a real movie. I remember watching
that in Detroit as a kid with my brother. Is
that the one where the Genie is the annoying house
guest with Phil Hartman. Well, so there is, because because
I was with sin Bad that movie really exists. I
I know it doesn't. Checkout Gaslighting the world right now?
(04:40):
The world is gaslighting meat. No, Max, it's not. Gaslighting
is the thing you made up because you're crazy and scene.
I literally have a gaslight anthem poster right behind me.
So check out check out our stuff. They don't want
you to know episode all about the Mandela effect, but
you see this conversation. The three of us are pretty
(05:02):
good friends, and even we don't agree on things like this.
That's one of the most fascinating and infuriating things about
what we call lost media. The dry definition is it's
anything that was once made for public broadcasts but it
no longer exists, or urban legends of media that may
(05:23):
have existed at one point. And we had we had
a great conversation in our pitch meeting about this for
a while. Our pitch meetings are great. I think one
day we can record those if we ever need an episode,
But uh, a lot, we'll need to censor a lot. Yeah, yeah,
because I come in high else, Yeah, so uh so
(05:45):
let's see, um one example is uh fairly recent, right,
the sci fi series Doctor Who. Like to be clear,
we're not talking about old broadsheets and news sprint that disappeared.
We're not necessarily just talking about like lost no levels,
Doctor Who was on TV. Yeah, and you know, I
mean archiving certainly is a very very important UM discipline
(06:11):
and an art unto itself, you know, just to make
sure to preserve you know, historical things, historical media obviously,
all those kinds of things very very important. But when
you have things that are in their very nature ephemeral,
like certain types of film for example, or whatever it
might be that can degrade over time, if you don't
jump right on that and make archiving like a huge
(06:33):
part of your process, you will end up with lost things.
There are nineties seven lost episodes of Doctor Who, and
I'm not sure, you know, oftentimes this can be be
the result of shoddy you know, archiving. It could be
a fire. You know, this is before we had digital
backups and server farms and you know, cloud storage and
(06:54):
all of that stuff. So if you if the building
was lost, then so so was the media. Um So,
if you've seen these ninety seven episodes of Doctor Who
like when they aired. Uh, then then you are among
the chosen few that will have to reserve replaying of
these episodes to your literal memory. Yeah, exactly, you know,
(07:15):
and this can happen also with content that has been banned.
We're gonna talk a lot about stuff in the global West,
but make no mistake in eras of repressive governments or
authoritarian regimes. Lost media was erased on purpose pretty constantly.
So there they are accidents, just human error, and then
(07:38):
there are purposeful attempts to erase something from history. And
you know, a lot of a lot of people would say, well, hey, guys,
that sounds weird because we're in the digital age. Everything
is up in the cloud, man, But not quite because
for a long time the cloud didn't exist. So let's
look maybe this time, let's look at early film history. Right,
(08:03):
those are the some of the most common pieces of
lost media. There's one in particular. Oh it's the vampire movie.
What it We'll get to it London at midnight, something
like that. There's a there's a vampire movie or a
creepy movie that I've been I've been trying to find
for years because I just couldn't accept that the last
copies were destroyed. But maybe we talk a little bit
(08:25):
about the era of silent films in particular, you know,
like um nos ferrato, all all those sorts of things.
But absolutely, I mean, you know, the era of silent
films uh span from about nineteen twelve to nineteen twenty nine,
and these were wildly popular to the point where they
(08:45):
were just being churned out. We're talking about, you know,
thousands of these films being produced within a relatively short
span of time, within you know, around around fifteen years.
We are talking in the neighborhood of eleven thousand silent
feature or films. But for reasons that that will become
apparent pretty soon, only about four per cent of those
(09:09):
eleven thousand films remain today, and many of them come
from a single studio, Metro Goldwyn mayor MGM, you may
know them as the Lion One. We're going to get
into why that is. There are a couple of reasons
in the first and I think one of the more
interesting ones is the nature of of of media itself,
(09:30):
the nature of what's the stuff that the film exists on.
It is a physical uh, material. And while it represents
an incredible, you know, leap in human technology to be
able to capture moving pictures on literally a piece of
like sellotape looking stuff, it's a pretty imperfect medium, at
(09:52):
least the early forms of what we call film. Yeah,
nitrate film stock was the hottest thing in town. Unfortunately,
it was often literally the hottest thing because nitrate revolutionized filmmaking,
(10:13):
but it had one big disadvantage in the world of
material sciences. It is cartoonishly flammable. This stuff is so
flammable that it can burn underwater. So it's like mean nitrate.
When I hear nitrate, I think of like nitro glycerin,
which is also very unstable. I know it's not the
same thing, but you know, obviously there's there must be
(10:35):
some route to the two. Yeah, the this stuff eventually
ends up being discontinued by Kodak in ninety two, and
you have to be so careful with the preservation of it.
Humanity has learned the hard way to uh, how to
properly handle this stuff. As a matter of fact, if
(10:56):
you ask the Library of Congress right now, they'll tell
you that less than one percent of American silent films
survived today. Uh, and only like half of the one
shot before survive at all, because even if it doesn't
catch on fire, the film will degrade over time. Yeah.
By the way, nitro cellulost which is just one of
(11:17):
the primary materials and uh nitrate prints is referred to
as gun cotton. Um. It is the first replacement propellant
for gunpowder essentially, So I mean we're literally talking about
very very combustible stuff. Uh. And then you're right, then
the deterioration. I think there was an advancement in film stock,
(11:38):
but even the next level kind of version of what
what they updated it to still had its own problems.
Something called vinegar syndrome. Cellulose acetate film will start to
get really brittle, and you can tell when this degradation
is occurring because it smells like vinegar. So if you
(11:59):
walk into a film archive and you're like, WHOA, who's
cleaning with vinegar? No, that means the films in trouble.
There is a really cool label. I guess you could
call it reissue company that actually specialized in preserving kind
of schlocky horror and exploitation movies, like you know, things
like Amityville, horror and blood Delirium, Wolf of the Moon
(12:22):
like titles like that, the Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman,
and it's called vinegar syndrome. Then they specialized in, you know,
restoring these kind of like you know, sixties and seventies
and eighties kind of you know, chlucky horror and trash films,
but really really need company if you want to check
out some weird sci fi and kind of uh, very
(12:43):
bespoke b movies. So people are on a mission, right.
There was an attempt to replace cellulose nitrate film with
cellulose acetate, but it came with its own vinegar themed problems.
No matter what you do, after a certain point, you
can't save this stuff. So there was a ticking clock
and by the nineteen eighties experts were saying, look, the
(13:06):
majority of nitrate film will have decomposed by two thousand,
the year two thousand if we don't do something. So
they started copying it. They deep freeze it. Uh. And
what they're doing when they're deep freezing this, by the way,
they're not solving the problem. They're kicking the can or
kicking the film canister a little bit further down the
road to get some time to figure out how to
(13:30):
how to save these stories. You know, it's interesting about
that the idea of deep freezing it that is also
a term has kind of been co opted into data um,
you know, archiving or whatever. So when you like have
a massive data banker, like an archive of whatever it
might be, let's say a companies, you know, video files
or the production company, if you put it into deep freeze,
(13:52):
I think it's kind of like it compresses it a
little bit. It makes it a little smaller, and then
you can like put it off site in a different place.
But you can't directly access said in the same way.
You have to like faw physical media in order to
access that. I think it just occurred to me. That's
like that's where that comes from. Yeah, yeah, that that's
a huge thing. You'll hear that all the time. We
hear it over in podcast land. But material science aside.
(14:17):
It is fascinating, It is dangerous. Love your nitrate, but
love it carefully because it could quickly become an explosive romance. Uh.
As much as we love that stuff, we have to
acknowledge another problem with silent film and why so much
of it is lost. This stuff was everywhere. Right. Uh,
this was a relatively short era of time, as you described, Noel,
(14:41):
but it was a very prolific time for studios, and
they didn't have any compunction about killing their darlings, you
know what I mean. It was rare for a studio
to say we're going to save this silent film for posterity. Instead,
they would say, we can't get any more money from
this thing, throw it out. We we don't have enough
(15:02):
room in our in our film library. And then of
course think about it, your studio head in the air
of silent film, and then talkis come out. Now you
can hear, you know, the stars of the silver screen.
And this means from a financial perspective that these these
studio folks say, well, we don't need this, you know,
(15:24):
why would we will keep one? I guess if we
ever have a museum. But sometimes sometimes it requires a
bit of hindsights even appreciate a past version of a
thing that that then was improved upon. Right, It's like,
you know, for the beam counters and and maybe even
the you know, the theatergoers, it's like, yeah, God, throw
(15:45):
all the silent films in the trash, because that was
antiquated and now we have something that's like next level.
But then enough time passes and you kind of realize, oh, wow,
that represented you know, a time and place, and we'll
never be able to get that back again. And so
you know, that's when archiving becomes really important. And archivists,
i think, tended to look at these kinds of things
(16:06):
through a different lens than consumers, traditional consumers of media
or the folks you know with their hands on the
purse strings. Yeah, the purse holders, the puppet masters of
the purse. We're also looking at cellulois nitrate films in particular,
and they're saying, hey, these things are made with silver.
(16:27):
Why don't we just melt it down and we can
save a little on the back end, uh, you know,
from our silver budget. So so Samuel Goldwyn of the
film students we were describing, the infamous Samuel Goldwen. Uh,
he was asked once upon a time about the destruction
of sets on the studio back lot he had taken over.
(16:49):
The Museum of Modern Art Film Library contacted him and
he said, look, you have to realize I cannot rest
on the low ls of the past and cannot release
trade issuans instead of current pictures, so they were mainly
focused just on current releases. And I think you make
a good point about the benefit of hindsight because they
(17:10):
their response would have been, you know, we're not a library,
we're not a museum, We're a working motion picture studio.
We want what's hot maybe, and they had a point. Yeah,
And I mean, you know, we've obviously got processes now
to submit things to the Library of Congress for archiving,
you know, in in the National Archives and all of
(17:31):
that stuff. But you know that requires effort, that requires forethought.
You know, that requires someone caring enough to to do
the thing. And it's abmitute. And when you're just kind
of go go go, uh money, money, money and all
that stuff like you are in old Hollywood, those things
can can literally, you know, fall by the wayside. But
you know, despite Mr Goldwin's you know, maybe proclivity for
(17:53):
smashing sets, as as we had mentioned or alluded to
the top of the show, it was the MGM Studio,
the Metro Goldwyn Mayor Studios that uh that did have
some forethought and decided, you know what, we think this
is worth doing and we're going to you know, make
an effort to preserve, uh, these films that wouldn't be
(18:14):
until decades later. So at this point, you know, the
Goldwin is sort of out of the picture, and we've
got some new, you know, more thoughtful folks in charge.
Perhaps no, because I jump in here for things. I
got something on that point in COmON Coston, so you
guys know, to all the ridiculous historians in this room
with us right now. I was on in Portland recently,
(18:35):
and in Portland I went and checked out two to
separate places. One was Movie Badness, in another place was
next Level Arcade. I think since you got photos of
this stuff. But what I found interesting with both those
places they weren't classified as like a for profit. They
were all nonprofit museums. Because that's like, it's these people
who had the dedication to be like, we have to
(18:56):
treat this as a museum, like well, obviously we want
people to come, like rent the movies or play the
arcade machines, because what's the point of just having that
you can't use them. But these are just independent people.
And it's a really tricky thing because to the point
that Golden was making, is there responsibility to save it?
Who knows, but it's like, I feel like saving this
(19:17):
stuff is super important, and so is it, uh, like people,
the fans of the stuff, is it our responsibility to
save it or is it partially responsibility of the people.
And I don't know the answer to that, but I
found that really cool that when I was out there,
and like it's one of those things. Also, it's like,
how do we get more places like that because physical
media is going away obviously, like arcades, as you guys know,
(19:38):
are basically non existent nowadays. And so it's like watching
this stuff because it's so easy, because it's the mainstream stuff,
if it will survive because it's no but the smaller
stuff won't. So that's that's my five cents. And then
the question becomes too, is like just because it's old,
is it a value? Like does it what where? What
(19:59):
is it represent in the kind of continuum of culture?
Like you know, if you're a museum curator, you don't
put everything ever that existed in in the history of
art or civilization in the museum. That would be impossible,
but you pick and choose and kind of paint a picture.
So it's like you know exactly and curating that that
applies to film that applies applies to There's a really
(20:21):
awesome pinball museum in Asheville, And I bet you they
have some sort of nonprofit status too, because they've got,
you know, placards on everything that like tells you about
the manufacturing of it, when it was made, you know
during what period, and you know what it kind of
sprung from and what was inspired by and stuff like that.
I love all this stuff. But yeah, yeah, and and
and then I mean, do you think it's up to
(20:44):
individuals like us, the people that actually kind of are enthusiasts,
or is the nature of commerce such that it's gonna
just kind of stamp that stuff out if it isn't
making anybody a buck, and it's just gonna be up
to people crowdsource this stuff. And is it eventually going
to be an uphill bad to the plant if people
are just going to kind of give up. It's up
to the passionate, you know what I mean ultimately, And
(21:05):
I know that sounds a little ted talky, but it's
very much true. Like I I love the pinball museums.
You guys are both named in my head their museums.
I also like places like the Neon Museum out in Vegas.
I love people who are incredibly passionate about very specific things.
If you know everything about Neon, lunch is on me
bro uh and I want to learn all all the
(21:27):
weird facts. But that's why we that's why we do
the stuff we do on Ridiculous History and the many
other shows were involved with. It's it is up to
in many cases, it's up to the really driven people
who are head over heels in love with the particular
art form or medium and don't need to make a
ton of money off of it, genuinely, you know what
(21:49):
I mean. It's kind of like how you know the
best bookstores you run into are the little family shops
where it's clearly somebody who just started a room to
house all their books that they couldn't fit in their house.
You know, their cats there, you know, they hang out,
they don't care if Yeah. So those people I think
(22:11):
are really the future of preservation. And when they team
up into nonprofits and foundations and issue grants, they can
do some truly wonderful things. They can fight against lost media. Unfortunately,
society just didn't get there in time because the odds
were stacked against silent film. I'm glad you mentioned grant
because that really is that's an important piece. When you
(22:33):
have an endowment, you know from let's say it whole
Hollywood kind of executive and there fin their state they leave,
you know, an endowment for a very specific purpose, which
is archived. That's usually what it takes because there isn't
the whole hell of a lot of money to be made.
Even if you're like a passionate collector, you're only gonna
buy that that blu ray of of of you know,
(22:55):
Night of the Leapists, the one time you and you're
you know, fifty other you know, nerd brethren or whatever.
These are not like big hot ticket you know, flying
off the shelves, uh, selling like hotcakes kind of situations,
like I said, the kind of stuff vinegar syndrome selves
or or maybe there's an actor that's such a big
deal that they hold some sway as to maybe the
(23:18):
films that they're in start to get paid a little
bit more attention to and treat it with a little
bit more reverence other than just you know, a lot
of those old silent films, they're like character actors that
didn't really become quote unquote celebrities. But then you have
someone like Mary Pickford. Yeah, Mary Pickford, Okay. Mary Pickford's
(23:42):
films survived a lot of them because of her own initiative.
She was proactive. She did this. The studio didn't do
this for her. She would send the films that she
started to the Library of Congress, and she didn't send
other films, mainly the ones that she started. And she
wrote this letter to them in and she said, I
(24:06):
wish to say to you how happy I am that
my pictures will be housed in the Library of Congress,
and how greatly I appreciate the honor conferred upon me
by a wish to have them there. And this goes
back to the idea of international film archives, US archives
all curating their collection. They had to make the call, right.
(24:27):
Curation is really um at At a very basic level,
curation is the act of building a narrative right in
a specific story about some part of history or science
or you know, if there's a frying pan museum, it's like,
what are the most influential pivotal moments in frying pan history?
(24:49):
And there's nothing wrong with that, but that means that,
like you said earlier, you can't have everything in the
museum because then it's just the Museum of Everything. Yeah,
it's just impossible. Uh speaking of everything, I got this
is more of a thing to talk about suthing I
want you to know. But there's an incredible new documentary
(25:09):
on Netflix about the idea of infinity, and it has
really gotten me thinking about, like what is everything? What
is the nature of everything? And how is there a
finite amount of like stuff in the universe. When you
say the Museum of Everything, that's what I think of.
It's like a museum that's just like fractals that just
kind of just infinitely dumps into a black hole and
(25:30):
never really stops. Um. I wanted to add to that.
Mary Pickford was one of the original founders of the
Motion Picture Academy. Her endowments and philanthropy created numerous Hollywood
institutions kind of like around the idea of preserving the
culture and uh history and physical medium of of old Hollywood. Yeah. Yeah,
(25:53):
and the Museum of Everything really reminds me of this
excellent story about a library by Board Hayes. And in
this library, the story is really weird. It's just a
description of this endless library I want to go to there,
as Liz Lemon would say on thirty Rock. But barring
the world of fiction right now, humanity still has a
(26:13):
lot of constraints. And that's why things like the Motion
Picture Academy and things like these film archives played such
a role in preserving what we do have from this era.
And this is where we have to talk more about MGM,
because they really stand out when it comes to preservation.
(26:34):
They ponied up money, their own money from from the corporation,
and they preserved a hundred and thirteen silent films. Uh
that's that's a pretty significant chunk of silent film overall.
And uh, it wasn't just the films made by MGM.
They they preserved some of the films of their ancestor
(26:56):
companies and they started giving them to what was it
George Eastman House at first, correct, which is you know,
I think one of the Eastman being co founder of Kodak,
so again skin in the game, you know, in terms
of like the actual physical medium. So it's interesting that
this is the George Eastman House is one of the
largest archives and museums and collections of photographic history. Um so,
(27:20):
but this is they were already doing something along these lines.
In the thirties, they were giving prints or negatives for
these films, you know, to be archives. But it wasn't
until the sixties that they started a duplication program, which
is a big deal because when you make a duplicate,
you're starting that decay process from zero. Yeah, you're resetting
(27:43):
the clock on on that. Uh that that that slowly
degrading piece of of of ephemeral and once and shout
out to Ephemeral one of our favorite podcasts. Yeah, nice way, Max,
well done. Uh so the uh and and Alex and
Trevor is so the the process here makes a lot
(28:03):
of sense. They're doing their best to accurately reproduce a film,
make a duplicate of it in a less finicky medium.
And then once they got that preservation process down, they
take the nitrate master copy and they donated to the
Eastman Museum, which is legit it's the oldest museum ever
(28:24):
dedicated to photography. And right around like the sixties is
a big year for this in the In the a
FI American Film Institute is funded by the National Endowment
of the Arts, and they start placing other nitrate collections
with archives. Again, this is not really the stuff you
can keep at home, folks, right you you need a
(28:47):
dedicated spot for your horde of nitrate. So the Library
of Congress gets prints from Paramount Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers,
they get some Silent negatives and and they also get
a few features from Reversal. The Museum of Modern Art
gets the Fox Studio nitrate prints, and then they spread
out to these other archives. And honestly, it's good to
(29:10):
decentralize this right, to have it in multiple archives, because,
like humans learned with the Library of Alexandria, keep all
your all your bits of media in one place, you
might regret it later. But I had an existential computer
meltdown crisis of epic proportions the other week, which you'll remember.
I had to skip out on recording because I thought
(29:31):
that my hard drive that I have like you know,
music projects, podcast back up all of the things on
had failed. And I realized it was something else that
I was able to fix. But the feeling of of
having potentially lost this just like years of work, you know,
of my life, uh, really kicked me into a reality
(29:51):
mode and I immediately invested in like a subscription online
um cloud backup service called carbon Nite, and we are
not sponsored by them. By it literally you know, you
can restore your stuff from the cloud. And also I
ordered a second drive that I'm going to have mirrored
to my original drive because that feeling is one of
the worst. Can you imagine if you were the person
(30:12):
that maybe was responsible for overseeing that that library of
Alexandria and then to watch it go up in flames.
I can't even handle the three novels I lost, Like
Mitch Hedberg, I just I have no option now but
to convince myself they weren't that good because I'm not
rewriting them. Or you can lie to yourself, like how
all y'all are lying about how Shazam is not a movie.
(30:33):
Come on, look at the link. Look at the link
I put in. Read that whole link. I read that
whole link. That's what I was doing when I was
quiet earlier in this episode. And yeah, you guys are
just gas lighting me. Look, we're gonna you know what
we should do. It's not that you can stay to
convinced me. Here's a more healthy way to do this.
Let's bracket the conversation out of respect for our friendship
(30:53):
and preserve our broship like it's nitrate film and instead,
let's reach out to sind Bad and see if he'll
just may hizam or if you prefer make another one. Okay, Uh,
what's he doing sim Bad right to us? We can't
wait to hear from you. Uh. We want to bring
this to reality. So these archives they're kind of fighting there,
(31:14):
fighting the good war against entropy, and they get films
from individual collectors, you know, a states of cinephiles, small
companies overseas archives, and they're trying to get titles that
would have been lost or at the very least not
available in the States. But they don't have like a
common rubric, right, they don't have a uniform code of
(31:38):
what to do. So they have different policies for collecting stuff.
They have different parent organizations, they have different financial woes.
And the five major U S archives that emerge now
that they all have different processes and they constitute the
national collection, it's difficult to say which archive has the
(32:02):
most titles or especially when it comes to silent film,
just because they were all going about the game so differently.
We know that again, foundations play a role. There's a
lot of philanthropy in this, right. This is not this
is not one of those charitable causes that people typically
(32:22):
donate a couple of bucks to write. It's not MPR,
it's not a Sarah McLaughlin pet drive, you know. This
is this is something where if you heard about it
for the first time, you would say, don't we have
people for that. Don't we have folks already doing that?
Why do they need money from us? But thankfully a
(32:43):
lot of a lot of pretty well healed film buffs
who played a big role in this, not just actors
like Pickford, but folks like David Woodley Packard, Yes, David
Woodley Packer and heir to the that printer fortune, Hewlett Packer,
Hewlett Packer, I mean, you know, and then they like
laptops too, but I think today they're mainly known for
their their combo printer, scanner fax machines. Um. But yeah,
(33:07):
he has air to that mass of fortune. And through
the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and then the pack
of Humanities Institute, he was responsible for a wealth of
of of archive of of archival activities. Also the Packard
Campus for Audio Conservation UM, which was built by the
p h I for the Library of Congress started you know,
(33:32):
opened its stores in two thousand and eight. With it
is really the height of of archival storage facilities to
make sure that all kinds of medium media could be preserved.
Because we think about these nitrate films right um, certain
conditions are going to you know, speed up or slow
down that breakdown. Yeah. Absolutely, And there's there's another transformation
(33:57):
that occurs in the world of archiving in the nineteen
eighties thanks to the efforts of one Sir J. Paul
Getty Jr. And that's a little bit of a tease
for an episode we have coming very soon. We can't
give you more info than that. We're gonna focus on
the good stuff right now. The film archiving so h
(34:18):
old JPG Jr. Funds a conservation center and new nitrate
vaults for the National Film and Television Archive over there
in the UK and in the US, more wealthy philanthropists
are donating additional funds for infrastructure, particularly folks like Celeste
Bartos or the Meyer Foundation, the Academy Foundation. There again,
(34:42):
they're fighting the good fight and they're getting films that
are American films from other countries this is truly a
global international effort. I think the largest collection of exported
American films came from a place called the now World,
the film Movie Archive in the Czech Republic. I do
(35:04):
not none of us speak that language natively. Uh. The
foreign films are huge resource because they often have missing material,
right Like, if a segment of a film has decayed,
you can get another copy from someplace halfway across the
world and they might have that sequence. So of the
(35:26):
three thousand, three d and eleven US silent feature films
that survive in any form, even not completely, eight eight
six of those were entirely found overseas. Pretty neat stuff,
and I think it speaks highly of what US film
nerds can do when we're motivated. Oh yeah, I mean,
(35:46):
I think we've always sort of seen a bit more
appreciation for the art of cinema abroad, you know what
I mean. Like Hollywood certainly is you know, ground zero
for big blockbuster movies and all that stuff, and it's
big business there, and you know, but I do feel like,
you know, companies like Studio Canal, for example, which I
believe is based in France, there is just a little
(36:08):
bit more reverence for film as an art form abroad
in some ways than there is right here in America.
I mean, look at you know, what they give out
oscars for. I mean they're usually, you know, they're fine.
I'm not trying to you know, crap all the oscars entirely,
but it just seems like, you know, it's a little
more broad here. It's a little more designed to kind
(36:29):
of be an award show with like trotting out celebrities
and stuff, whereas you know, can and like the palm
drawer and things like that, like those are just they
are really truly looking for something very unique and like
very you know, cutting edge, and it's like, you know,
moving the art form in different directions. So that all
makes sense to me. Yeah, And you know, this is
(36:49):
not to say that the battle has been one or
that everything went smoothly. It wasn't all trumpets and angel
farts in the fight to save Silent Film. And we're
gonna pause it there because this is how we know
we're onto something with this series, folks. Lost Media has
already become a two parter. The first part of this
(37:10):
is already a two parter. We're doing a one A
one B thing, right, here and I couldn't be happier
about it. No, oh same. I have a problem with
what happens if we lose part one of this series
and it just jumps into part two. That's all people
ever here. We can never find it again. It's a mystery.
Will be perfect indeed so until we return with Part two.
Huge thanks to super producer Max Williams Alex Williams Hukomoss
(37:33):
theme and also the creator and uh the presenter of
and a curate tour of Ephemeral which we love very much,
which Max works on as well, and you'll hear more
about it in Part two, assuming both pieces of this
media survive in the meantime. Thanks to Jonathan Strickland, a
k a. The Quister, Thanks to Heves jeff Co, Christopher
(37:55):
Hasiotis uh and thanks to all. Thanks to all the
fellows cinephiles out there. This was a fun one. See
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our number
one super producer, Mr Max Williams. There we go. Yeah,
he's looking looking like a real snack today. Uh. Also,
I'm being god I sounded it was. It's like a
(00:50):
cartoon where where all of a sudden, Max just looks
like a roasted chicken kind of lovering, you know, down
But then I'm not quite sure am I hungry or
am I horny? Unclear? Unclear? In the original cartoon? Yeah,
mutually exclusive. Yeah, so I've been your knowl We are
(01:10):
exploring something that's been a personal passion for all three
of us, uh separately, way before we ever stumbled into podcasting,
and that is missing media. Lost media. We're in an
age where there's more just media in general than ever
before throughout the entirety of human history. It is getting
a little bit ridiculous. But along the way, a lot
(01:35):
of things have gotten lost. This is part of a
continuing series. Our research associate, doctor Zach is also really
excited about this. One night over slipped down a doctor appeared,
but This is no normal doctor. Who's there. It's Zach
Zach the doctor named Zach, and he's here to fill
(02:01):
your scraps knowledge. Pet is cat teaching history books and stuff. Oh,
let's go with other things. Yeah, that'll work, Zack, And
(02:23):
I think we begin it in a way that everybody
can identify with. Actually I almost texted you about a
related question off air, No, but I didn't want to
bother you over the weekend. You ever get the thing
where you're like, I kind of remember that song or
there's a scene in a movie that I remembered. I
really want to figure out the name of it, but dad,
gumme it. I've searched everywhere. My Google food is pretty
(02:45):
good and I still can't find this. Well. First of all,
for me, sometimes those are false memories. Uh, And I
think you know, the Mandela effect is strong with many
of us. Where my girlfriend once was like, we were
talking about the movie Headwig and the Angry and she
described I'd this scene and I was like, that sounds awesome,
but that wasn't in that movie. She goes, oh, no,
it was. No, it definitely was, and we we had
(03:07):
to like watch it together. You know, it's no that
must have been a special edition or something, because I
was definitely in there. And you know, a friend of
the show, the creator of that of that movie, John
Cameron Mitchell, mentioned it to him. Is like, no, it
never happened. But to your point, then yes, there certainly
are things that either I hit the cutting room floor
and aren't archived past a certain point, or maybe you
(03:29):
caught it in a DVD version that was never reissued
again and now you can't find that particular copy anymore.
You recommended a movie to me a for spooky season,
which I love, the Tale of Two Sisters. Not streaming
anywhere anymore nowhere, it's tough. I've got the I've got
the DVD if you want. It's not too late. We
(03:51):
still got a little Halloween time. Yeah, so I'll bring
that over. Fabulous, fabulous, scary and genuinely scary movie. You
guys want movie. I really wish I could find a
copy of what shas Am. I know Shazam is a
real movie, and I want to see it. I think
you mean, I think you mean Kaboom, she zoom that
(04:15):
SHA's am. It is a real movie. I remember watching
that in Detroit as a kid with my brother. Is
that the one where the Genie is the annoying house
guest with Phil Hartman. Well, so there is, because because
I was with sin Bad that movie really exists. I
I know it doesn't. Checkout Gaslighting the world right now?
(04:40):
The world is gaslighting meat. No, Max, it's not. Gaslighting
is the thing you made up because you're crazy and scene.
I literally have a gaslight anthem poster right behind me.
So check out check out our stuff. They don't want
you to know episode all about the Mandela effect, but
you see this conversation. The three of us are pretty
(05:02):
good friends, and even we don't agree on things like this.
That's one of the most fascinating and infuriating things about
what we call lost media. The dry definition is it's
anything that was once made for public broadcasts but it
no longer exists, or urban legends of media that may
(05:23):
have existed at one point. And we had we had
a great conversation in our pitch meeting about this for
a while. Our pitch meetings are great. I think one
day we can record those if we ever need an episode,
But uh, a lot, we'll need to censor a lot. Yeah, yeah,
because I come in high else, Yeah, so uh so
(05:45):
let's see, um one example is uh fairly recent, right,
the sci fi series Doctor Who. Like to be clear,
we're not talking about old broadsheets and news sprint that disappeared.
We're not necessarily just talking about like lost no levels,
Doctor Who was on TV. Yeah, and you know, I
mean archiving certainly is a very very important UM discipline
(06:11):
and an art unto itself, you know, just to make
sure to preserve you know, historical things, historical media obviously,
all those kinds of things very very important. But when
you have things that are in their very nature ephemeral,
like certain types of film for example, or whatever it
might be that can degrade over time, if you don't
jump right on that and make archiving like a huge
(06:33):
part of your process, you will end up with lost things.
There are nineties seven lost episodes of Doctor Who, and
I'm not sure, you know, oftentimes this can be be
the result of shoddy you know, archiving. It could be
a fire. You know, this is before we had digital
backups and server farms and you know, cloud storage and
(06:54):
all of that stuff. So if you if the building
was lost, then so so was the media. Um So,
if you've seen these ninety seven episodes of Doctor Who
like when they aired. Uh, then then you are among
the chosen few that will have to reserve replaying of
these episodes to your literal memory. Yeah, exactly, you know,
(07:15):
and this can happen also with content that has been banned.
We're gonna talk a lot about stuff in the global West,
but make no mistake in eras of repressive governments or
authoritarian regimes. Lost media was erased on purpose pretty constantly.
So there they are accidents, just human error, and then
(07:38):
there are purposeful attempts to erase something from history. And
you know, a lot of a lot of people would say, well, hey, guys,
that sounds weird because we're in the digital age. Everything
is up in the cloud, man, But not quite because
for a long time the cloud didn't exist. So let's
look maybe this time, let's look at early film history. Right,
(08:03):
those are the some of the most common pieces of
lost media. There's one in particular. Oh it's the vampire movie.
What it We'll get to it London at midnight, something
like that. There's a there's a vampire movie or a
creepy movie that I've been I've been trying to find
for years because I just couldn't accept that the last
copies were destroyed. But maybe we talk a little bit
(08:25):
about the era of silent films in particular, you know,
like um nos ferrato, all all those sorts of things.
But absolutely, I mean, you know, the era of silent
films uh span from about nineteen twelve to nineteen twenty nine,
and these were wildly popular to the point where they
(08:45):
were just being churned out. We're talking about, you know,
thousands of these films being produced within a relatively short
span of time, within you know, around around fifteen years.
We are talking in the neighborhood of eleven thousand silent
feature or films. But for reasons that that will become
apparent pretty soon, only about four per cent of those
(09:09):
eleven thousand films remain today, and many of them come
from a single studio, Metro Goldwyn mayor MGM, you may
know them as the Lion One. We're going to get
into why that is. There are a couple of reasons
in the first and I think one of the more
interesting ones is the nature of of of media itself,
(09:30):
the nature of what's the stuff that the film exists on.
It is a physical uh, material. And while it represents
an incredible, you know, leap in human technology to be
able to capture moving pictures on literally a piece of
like sellotape looking stuff, it's a pretty imperfect medium, at
(09:52):
least the early forms of what we call film. Yeah,
nitrate film stock was the hottest thing in town. Unfortunately,
it was often literally the hottest thing because nitrate revolutionized filmmaking,
(10:13):
but it had one big disadvantage in the world of
material sciences. It is cartoonishly flammable. This stuff is so
flammable that it can burn underwater. So it's like mean nitrate.
When I hear nitrate, I think of like nitro glycerin,
which is also very unstable. I know it's not the
same thing, but you know, obviously there's there must be
(10:35):
some route to the two. Yeah, the this stuff eventually
ends up being discontinued by Kodak in ninety two, and
you have to be so careful with the preservation of it.
Humanity has learned the hard way to uh, how to
properly handle this stuff. As a matter of fact, if
(10:56):
you ask the Library of Congress right now, they'll tell
you that less than one percent of American silent films
survived today. Uh, and only like half of the one
shot before survive at all, because even if it doesn't
catch on fire, the film will degrade over time. Yeah.
By the way, nitro cellulost which is just one of
(11:17):
the primary materials and uh nitrate prints is referred to
as gun cotton. Um. It is the first replacement propellant
for gunpowder essentially, So I mean we're literally talking about
very very combustible stuff. Uh. And then you're right, then
the deterioration. I think there was an advancement in film stock,
(11:38):
but even the next level kind of version of what
what they updated it to still had its own problems.
Something called vinegar syndrome. Cellulose acetate film will start to
get really brittle, and you can tell when this degradation
is occurring because it smells like vinegar. So if you
(11:59):
walk into a film archive and you're like, WHOA, who's
cleaning with vinegar? No, that means the films in trouble.
There is a really cool label. I guess you could
call it reissue company that actually specialized in preserving kind
of schlocky horror and exploitation movies, like you know, things
like Amityville, horror and blood Delirium, Wolf of the Moon
(12:22):
like titles like that, the Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman,
and it's called vinegar syndrome. Then they specialized in, you know,
restoring these kind of like you know, sixties and seventies
and eighties kind of you know, chlucky horror and trash films,
but really really need company if you want to check
out some weird sci fi and kind of uh, very
(12:43):
bespoke b movies. So people are on a mission, right.
There was an attempt to replace cellulose nitrate film with
cellulose acetate, but it came with its own vinegar themed problems.
No matter what you do, after a certain point, you
can't save this stuff. So there was a ticking clock
and by the nineteen eighties experts were saying, look, the
(13:06):
majority of nitrate film will have decomposed by two thousand,
the year two thousand if we don't do something. So
they started copying it. They deep freeze it. Uh. And
what they're doing when they're deep freezing this, by the way,
they're not solving the problem. They're kicking the can or
kicking the film canister a little bit further down the
road to get some time to figure out how to
(13:30):
how to save these stories. You know, it's interesting about
that the idea of deep freezing it that is also
a term has kind of been co opted into data um,
you know, archiving or whatever. So when you like have
a massive data banker, like an archive of whatever it
might be, let's say a companies, you know, video files
or the production company, if you put it into deep freeze,
(13:52):
I think it's kind of like it compresses it a
little bit. It makes it a little smaller, and then
you can like put it off site in a different place.
But you can't directly access said in the same way.
You have to like faw physical media in order to
access that. I think it just occurred to me. That's
like that's where that comes from. Yeah, yeah, that that's
a huge thing. You'll hear that all the time. We
hear it over in podcast land. But material science aside.
(14:17):
It is fascinating, It is dangerous. Love your nitrate, but
love it carefully because it could quickly become an explosive romance. Uh.
As much as we love that stuff, we have to
acknowledge another problem with silent film and why so much
of it is lost. This stuff was everywhere. Right. Uh,
this was a relatively short era of time, as you described, Noel,
(14:41):
but it was a very prolific time for studios, and
they didn't have any compunction about killing their darlings, you
know what I mean. It was rare for a studio
to say we're going to save this silent film for posterity. Instead,
they would say, we can't get any more money from
this thing, throw it out. We we don't have enough
(15:02):
room in our in our film library. And then of
course think about it, your studio head in the air
of silent film, and then talkis come out. Now you
can hear, you know, the stars of the silver screen.
And this means from a financial perspective that these these
studio folks say, well, we don't need this, you know,
(15:24):
why would we will keep one? I guess if we
ever have a museum. But sometimes sometimes it requires a
bit of hindsights even appreciate a past version of a
thing that that then was improved upon. Right, It's like,
you know, for the beam counters and and maybe even
the you know, the theatergoers, it's like, yeah, God, throw
(15:45):
all the silent films in the trash, because that was
antiquated and now we have something that's like next level.
But then enough time passes and you kind of realize, oh, wow,
that represented you know, a time and place, and we'll
never be able to get that back again. And so
you know, that's when archiving becomes really important. And archivists,
i think, tended to look at these kinds of things
(16:06):
through a different lens than consumers, traditional consumers of media
or the folks you know with their hands on the
purse strings. Yeah, the purse holders, the puppet masters of
the purse. We're also looking at cellulois nitrate films in particular,
and they're saying, hey, these things are made with silver.
(16:27):
Why don't we just melt it down and we can
save a little on the back end, uh, you know,
from our silver budget. So so Samuel Goldwyn of the
film students we were describing, the infamous Samuel Goldwen. Uh,
he was asked once upon a time about the destruction
of sets on the studio back lot he had taken over.
(16:49):
The Museum of Modern Art Film Library contacted him and
he said, look, you have to realize I cannot rest
on the low ls of the past and cannot release
trade issuans instead of current pictures, so they were mainly
focused just on current releases. And I think you make
a good point about the benefit of hindsight because they
(17:10):
their response would have been, you know, we're not a library,
we're not a museum, We're a working motion picture studio.
We want what's hot maybe, and they had a point. Yeah,
And I mean, you know, we've obviously got processes now
to submit things to the Library of Congress for archiving,
you know, in in the National Archives and all of
(17:31):
that stuff. But you know that requires effort, that requires forethought.
You know, that requires someone caring enough to to do
the thing. And it's abmitute. And when you're just kind
of go go go, uh money, money, money and all
that stuff like you are in old Hollywood, those things
can can literally, you know, fall by the wayside. But
you know, despite Mr Goldwin's you know, maybe proclivity for
(17:53):
smashing sets, as as we had mentioned or alluded to
the top of the show, it was the MGM Studio,
the Metro Goldwyn Mayor Studios that uh that did have
some forethought and decided, you know what, we think this
is worth doing and we're going to you know, make
an effort to preserve, uh, these films that wouldn't be
(18:14):
until decades later. So at this point, you know, the
Goldwin is sort of out of the picture, and we've
got some new, you know, more thoughtful folks in charge.
Perhaps no, because I jump in here for things. I
got something on that point in COmON Coston, so you
guys know, to all the ridiculous historians in this room
with us right now. I was on in Portland recently,
(18:35):
and in Portland I went and checked out two to
separate places. One was Movie Badness, in another place was
next Level Arcade. I think since you got photos of
this stuff. But what I found interesting with both those
places they weren't classified as like a for profit. They
were all nonprofit museums. Because that's like, it's these people
who had the dedication to be like, we have to
(18:56):
treat this as a museum, like well, obviously we want
people to come, like rent the movies or play the
arcade machines, because what's the point of just having that
you can't use them. But these are just independent people.
And it's a really tricky thing because to the point
that Golden was making, is there responsibility to save it?
Who knows, but it's like, I feel like saving this
(19:17):
stuff is super important, and so is it, uh, like people,
the fans of the stuff, is it our responsibility to
save it or is it partially responsibility of the people.
And I don't know the answer to that, but I
found that really cool that when I was out there,
and like it's one of those things. Also, it's like,
how do we get more places like that because physical
media is going away obviously, like arcades, as you guys know,
(19:38):
are basically non existent nowadays. And so it's like watching
this stuff because it's so easy, because it's the mainstream stuff,
if it will survive because it's no but the smaller
stuff won't. So that's that's my five cents. And then
the question becomes too, is like just because it's old,
is it a value? Like does it what where? What
(19:59):
is it represent in the kind of continuum of culture?
Like you know, if you're a museum curator, you don't
put everything ever that existed in in the history of
art or civilization in the museum. That would be impossible,
but you pick and choose and kind of paint a picture.
So it's like you know exactly and curating that that
applies to film that applies applies to There's a really
(20:21):
awesome pinball museum in Asheville, And I bet you they
have some sort of nonprofit status too, because they've got,
you know, placards on everything that like tells you about
the manufacturing of it, when it was made, you know
during what period, and you know what it kind of
sprung from and what was inspired by and stuff like that.
I love all this stuff. But yeah, yeah, and and
and then I mean, do you think it's up to
(20:44):
individuals like us, the people that actually kind of are enthusiasts,
or is the nature of commerce such that it's gonna
just kind of stamp that stuff out if it isn't
making anybody a buck, and it's just gonna be up
to people crowdsource this stuff. And is it eventually going
to be an uphill bad to the plant if people
are just going to kind of give up. It's up
to the passionate, you know what I mean ultimately, And
(21:05):
I know that sounds a little ted talky, but it's
very much true. Like I I love the pinball museums.
You guys are both named in my head their museums.
I also like places like the Neon Museum out in Vegas.
I love people who are incredibly passionate about very specific things.
If you know everything about Neon, lunch is on me
bro uh and I want to learn all all the
(21:27):
weird facts. But that's why we that's why we do
the stuff we do on Ridiculous History and the many
other shows were involved with. It's it is up to
in many cases, it's up to the really driven people
who are head over heels in love with the particular
art form or medium and don't need to make a
ton of money off of it, genuinely, you know what
(21:49):
I mean. It's kind of like how you know the
best bookstores you run into are the little family shops
where it's clearly somebody who just started a room to
house all their books that they couldn't fit in their house.
You know, their cats there, you know, they hang out,
they don't care if Yeah. So those people I think
(22:11):
are really the future of preservation. And when they team
up into nonprofits and foundations and issue grants, they can
do some truly wonderful things. They can fight against lost media. Unfortunately,
society just didn't get there in time because the odds
were stacked against silent film. I'm glad you mentioned grant
because that really is that's an important piece. When you
(22:33):
have an endowment, you know from let's say it whole
Hollywood kind of executive and there fin their state they leave,
you know, an endowment for a very specific purpose, which
is archived. That's usually what it takes because there isn't
the whole hell of a lot of money to be made.
Even if you're like a passionate collector, you're only gonna
buy that that blu ray of of of you know,
(22:55):
Night of the Leapists, the one time you and you're
you know, fifty other you know, nerd brethren or whatever.
These are not like big hot ticket you know, flying
off the shelves, uh, selling like hotcakes kind of situations,
like I said, the kind of stuff vinegar syndrome selves
or or maybe there's an actor that's such a big
deal that they hold some sway as to maybe the
(23:18):
films that they're in start to get paid a little
bit more attention to and treat it with a little
bit more reverence other than just you know, a lot
of those old silent films, they're like character actors that
didn't really become quote unquote celebrities. But then you have
someone like Mary Pickford. Yeah, Mary Pickford, Okay. Mary Pickford's
(23:42):
films survived a lot of them because of her own initiative.
She was proactive. She did this. The studio didn't do
this for her. She would send the films that she
started to the Library of Congress, and she didn't send
other films, mainly the ones that she started. And she
wrote this letter to them in and she said, I
(24:06):
wish to say to you how happy I am that
my pictures will be housed in the Library of Congress,
and how greatly I appreciate the honor conferred upon me
by a wish to have them there. And this goes
back to the idea of international film archives, US archives
all curating their collection. They had to make the call, right.
(24:27):
Curation is really um at At a very basic level,
curation is the act of building a narrative right in
a specific story about some part of history or science
or you know, if there's a frying pan museum, it's like,
what are the most influential pivotal moments in frying pan history?
(24:49):
And there's nothing wrong with that, but that means that,
like you said earlier, you can't have everything in the
museum because then it's just the Museum of Everything. Yeah,
it's just impossible. Uh speaking of everything, I got this
is more of a thing to talk about suthing I
want you to know. But there's an incredible new documentary
(25:09):
on Netflix about the idea of infinity, and it has
really gotten me thinking about, like what is everything? What
is the nature of everything? And how is there a
finite amount of like stuff in the universe. When you
say the Museum of Everything, that's what I think of.
It's like a museum that's just like fractals that just
kind of just infinitely dumps into a black hole and
(25:30):
never really stops. Um. I wanted to add to that.
Mary Pickford was one of the original founders of the
Motion Picture Academy. Her endowments and philanthropy created numerous Hollywood
institutions kind of like around the idea of preserving the
culture and uh history and physical medium of of old Hollywood. Yeah. Yeah,
(25:53):
and the Museum of Everything really reminds me of this
excellent story about a library by Board Hayes. And in
this library, the story is really weird. It's just a
description of this endless library I want to go to there,
as Liz Lemon would say on thirty Rock. But barring
the world of fiction right now, humanity still has a
(26:13):
lot of constraints. And that's why things like the Motion
Picture Academy and things like these film archives played such
a role in preserving what we do have from this era.
And this is where we have to talk more about MGM,
because they really stand out when it comes to preservation.
(26:34):
They ponied up money, their own money from from the corporation,
and they preserved a hundred and thirteen silent films. Uh
that's that's a pretty significant chunk of silent film overall.
And uh, it wasn't just the films made by MGM.
They they preserved some of the films of their ancestor
(26:56):
companies and they started giving them to what was it
George Eastman House at first, correct, which is you know,
I think one of the Eastman being co founder of Kodak,
so again skin in the game, you know, in terms
of like the actual physical medium. So it's interesting that
this is the George Eastman House is one of the
largest archives and museums and collections of photographic history. Um so,
(27:20):
but this is they were already doing something along these lines.
In the thirties, they were giving prints or negatives for
these films, you know, to be archives. But it wasn't
until the sixties that they started a duplication program, which
is a big deal because when you make a duplicate,
you're starting that decay process from zero. Yeah, you're resetting
(27:43):
the clock on on that. Uh that that that slowly
degrading piece of of of ephemeral and once and shout
out to Ephemeral one of our favorite podcasts. Yeah, nice way, Max,
well done. Uh so the uh and and Alex and
Trevor is so the the process here makes a lot
(28:03):
of sense. They're doing their best to accurately reproduce a film,
make a duplicate of it in a less finicky medium.
And then once they got that preservation process down, they
take the nitrate master copy and they donated to the
Eastman Museum, which is legit it's the oldest museum ever
(28:24):
dedicated to photography. And right around like the sixties is
a big year for this in the In the a
FI American Film Institute is funded by the National Endowment
of the Arts, and they start placing other nitrate collections
with archives. Again, this is not really the stuff you
can keep at home, folks, right you you need a
(28:47):
dedicated spot for your horde of nitrate. So the Library
of Congress gets prints from Paramount Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers,
they get some Silent negatives and and they also get
a few features from Reversal. The Museum of Modern Art
gets the Fox Studio nitrate prints, and then they spread
out to these other archives. And honestly, it's good to
(29:10):
decentralize this right, to have it in multiple archives, because,
like humans learned with the Library of Alexandria, keep all
your all your bits of media in one place, you
might regret it later. But I had an existential computer
meltdown crisis of epic proportions the other week, which you'll remember.
I had to skip out on recording because I thought
(29:31):
that my hard drive that I have like you know,
music projects, podcast back up all of the things on
had failed. And I realized it was something else that
I was able to fix. But the feeling of of
having potentially lost this just like years of work, you know,
of my life, uh, really kicked me into a reality
(29:51):
mode and I immediately invested in like a subscription online
um cloud backup service called carbon Nite, and we are
not sponsored by them. By it literally you know, you
can restore your stuff from the cloud. And also I
ordered a second drive that I'm going to have mirrored
to my original drive because that feeling is one of
the worst. Can you imagine if you were the person
(30:12):
that maybe was responsible for overseeing that that library of
Alexandria and then to watch it go up in flames.
I can't even handle the three novels I lost, Like
Mitch Hedberg, I just I have no option now but
to convince myself they weren't that good because I'm not
rewriting them. Or you can lie to yourself, like how
all y'all are lying about how Shazam is not a movie.
(30:33):
Come on, look at the link. Look at the link
I put in. Read that whole link. I read that
whole link. That's what I was doing when I was
quiet earlier in this episode. And yeah, you guys are
just gas lighting me. Look, we're gonna you know what
we should do. It's not that you can stay to
convinced me. Here's a more healthy way to do this.
Let's bracket the conversation out of respect for our friendship
(30:53):
and preserve our broship like it's nitrate film and instead,
let's reach out to sind Bad and see if he'll
just may hizam or if you prefer make another one. Okay, Uh,
what's he doing sim Bad right to us? We can't
wait to hear from you. Uh. We want to bring
this to reality. So these archives they're kind of fighting there,
(31:14):
fighting the good war against entropy, and they get films
from individual collectors, you know, a states of cinephiles, small
companies overseas archives, and they're trying to get titles that
would have been lost or at the very least not
available in the States. But they don't have like a
common rubric, right, they don't have a uniform code of
(31:38):
what to do. So they have different policies for collecting stuff.
They have different parent organizations, they have different financial woes.
And the five major U S archives that emerge now
that they all have different processes and they constitute the
national collection, it's difficult to say which archive has the
(32:02):
most titles or especially when it comes to silent film,
just because they were all going about the game so differently.
We know that again, foundations play a role. There's a
lot of philanthropy in this, right. This is not this
is not one of those charitable causes that people typically
(32:22):
donate a couple of bucks to write. It's not MPR,
it's not a Sarah McLaughlin pet drive, you know. This
is this is something where if you heard about it
for the first time, you would say, don't we have
people for that. Don't we have folks already doing that?
Why do they need money from us? But thankfully a
(32:43):
lot of a lot of pretty well healed film buffs
who played a big role in this, not just actors
like Pickford, but folks like David Woodley Packard, Yes, David
Woodley Packer and heir to the that printer fortune, Hewlett Packer,
Hewlett Packer, I mean, you know, and then they like
laptops too, but I think today they're mainly known for
their their combo printer, scanner fax machines. Um. But yeah,
(33:07):
he has air to that mass of fortune. And through
the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and then the pack
of Humanities Institute, he was responsible for a wealth of
of of archive of of archival activities. Also the Packard
Campus for Audio Conservation UM, which was built by the
p h I for the Library of Congress started you know,
(33:32):
opened its stores in two thousand and eight. With it
is really the height of of archival storage facilities to
make sure that all kinds of medium media could be preserved.
Because we think about these nitrate films right um, certain
conditions are going to you know, speed up or slow
down that breakdown. Yeah. Absolutely, And there's there's another transformation
(33:57):
that occurs in the world of archiving in the nineteen
eighties thanks to the efforts of one Sir J. Paul
Getty Jr. And that's a little bit of a tease
for an episode we have coming very soon. We can't
give you more info than that. We're gonna focus on
the good stuff right now. The film archiving so h
(34:18):
old JPG Jr. Funds a conservation center and new nitrate
vaults for the National Film and Television Archive over there
in the UK and in the US, more wealthy philanthropists
are donating additional funds for infrastructure, particularly folks like Celeste
Bartos or the Meyer Foundation, the Academy Foundation. There again,
(34:42):
they're fighting the good fight and they're getting films that
are American films from other countries this is truly a
global international effort. I think the largest collection of exported
American films came from a place called the now World,
the film Movie Archive in the Czech Republic. I do
(35:04):
not none of us speak that language natively. Uh. The
foreign films are huge resource because they often have missing material,
right Like, if a segment of a film has decayed,
you can get another copy from someplace halfway across the
world and they might have that sequence. So of the
(35:26):
three thousand, three d and eleven US silent feature films
that survive in any form, even not completely, eight eight
six of those were entirely found overseas. Pretty neat stuff,
and I think it speaks highly of what US film
nerds can do when we're motivated. Oh yeah, I mean,
(35:46):
I think we've always sort of seen a bit more
appreciation for the art of cinema abroad, you know what
I mean. Like Hollywood certainly is you know, ground zero
for big blockbuster movies and all that stuff, and it's
big business there, and you know, but I do feel like,
you know, companies like Studio Canal, for example, which I
believe is based in France, there is just a little
(36:08):
bit more reverence for film as an art form abroad
in some ways than there is right here in America.
I mean, look at you know, what they give out
oscars for. I mean they're usually, you know, they're fine.
I'm not trying to you know, crap all the oscars entirely,
but it just seems like, you know, it's a little
more broad here. It's a little more designed to kind
(36:29):
of be an award show with like trotting out celebrities
and stuff, whereas you know, can and like the palm
drawer and things like that, like those are just they
are really truly looking for something very unique and like
very you know, cutting edge, and it's like, you know,
moving the art form in different directions. So that all
makes sense to me. Yeah, And you know, this is
(36:49):
not to say that the battle has been one or
that everything went smoothly. It wasn't all trumpets and angel
farts in the fight to save Silent Film. And we're
gonna pause it there because this is how we know
we're onto something with this series, folks. Lost Media has
already become a two parter. The first part of this
(37:10):
is already a two parter. We're doing a one A
one B thing, right, here and I couldn't be happier
about it. No, oh same. I have a problem with
what happens if we lose part one of this series
and it just jumps into part two. That's all people
ever here. We can never find it again. It's a mystery.
Will be perfect indeed so until we return with Part two.
Huge thanks to super producer Max Williams Alex Williams Hukomoss
(37:33):
theme and also the creator and uh the presenter of
and a curate tour of Ephemeral which we love very much,
which Max works on as well, and you'll hear more
about it in Part two, assuming both pieces of this
media survive in the meantime. Thanks to Jonathan Strickland, a
k a. The Quister, Thanks to Heves jeff Co, Christopher
(37:55):
Hasiotis uh and thanks to all. Thanks to all the
fellows cinephiles out there. This was a fun one. See
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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