Vaults protecting pre-1951 movies
The recently reunited Technicolor duo could well be spending much of the rest of the millennium killing time with Lassie, Annie Oakley, Tarzan and a canned colony of heroes and villains from the silent-film era.
Thousands of pre-1951 movies captured on volatile nitrate film are kept in frigid, low-humidity vaults in a modest cinderblock building owned by the George Eastman House museum on the piney outskirts of Rochester. Cold storage saves them from rotting away within a lifetime or, worse yet, burning up.
In most cases, these are original camera negatives from the first half-century of motion pictures, classics such as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind," the silent era's top-grossing "Big Parade," Lon Chaney in "The Phantom of the Opera" and Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 version of "The Ten Commandments."
While even the best-kept vintage reels are starting to buckle with age, a beloved movie's master negative is a sacred object that would cost untold millions to replace.
Much of that value lies in its power to produce the finest-quality copies, be it on 35mm film, Blu-ray DVD or some dazzling format that pops up in, say, the early 26th century.
On the shelves of this climate-controlled celluloid nursing home are prized Technicolor films such as "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Little Women"; silent gems starring Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo; a Lumiere brothers' chronicle of President McKinley's inauguration parade in 1897; and "Olympia," a Nazi propaganda feature on the 1936 Berlin Olympics shot by Adolf Hitler's filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl.
The magical way in which a chilly, dry setting retards shrinking, fading or "nitric melt" inevitably raises concern about the long-term survival of other vulnerable pieces of the world's film heritage, from safety-based acetate stock adopted in the 1950s to television recordings to flimsy digital-video cassettes.
"Nitrate is turning out to be a historically durable medium that, if stored properly, rivals paper — and well-made paper — as a storage medium for image and sound," said Patrick Loughney, motion-picture curator at Eastman, the world's oldest museum of photography and film.
Its out-of-the-way bunker is one of just a handful of nitrate repositories run by major film archives around the country. It isn't listed in phone books or open to the public. Nor does the plain, single-story building draw the eye on a road where the occasional home is backed by woods or farmland.
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