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Names: various
Ages: over 80
Occupations: film studios
Last Seen: Hollywood, CA
Bee-otched For: destroying the past---
Last weekend at the 84th Academy Awards, silence was golden.
The Artist was the big winner during this weekend's Oscars, winning five awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The film was a fictional, yet somewhat true telling about a popular silent film star of the 1920's whose career nosedived when talkies came around in 1929. I personally saw the movie on Saturday and it was one of the best films I've seen all year.
The movie didn't do bad for a film that has never been in the top 10 movie charts, at least here in America. But, it's proof that people still want to see a film with artistic intentions over 3D effects and digital sound. Without a doubt, The Artist's victory is a tremendous slap in the face to the Hollywood studios for more reasons than one.
(Bear in mind, The Artist was distributed by The Weinstein Company, who also distributed last year's big Oscar triumph, The King's Speech.)
So, what was another part of The Artist's big slap in the face to Hollywood? Well, it's because the major studios in Tinseltown did something decades ago that have forever angered and saddened critics and movie buffs alike: intentionally destroying their silent movies.
From the time motion pictures began in the 1890s to 1927, all movies had no sound and no vocal dialogue. There was no real way to present movies with sound. Actors had to mime and mug at the screen to get their point across with the aid of title cards taking time out of the action. However, in 1927, Warner Bros. purchased a small company called Vitaphone and made a movie with the device they created called The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson. Audiences were crazy over watching moving images talk and sing for the very first time, and the movie was a massive box office triumph. Soon, rival studios had to make talkies of their own, and one studio, Fox, even came out with their own sound system called the Movietone which used sound on film over Warner and Vitaphone's sound on disc process. Fox's system proved to be the best method and became the standard at all other Hollywood studios.
In 1929, the studios all announced that they would all go all-talking and silents would end up a thing of the past. While they were cranking out new hits left and right, their silent classics ended up sitting in their vaults to disintegrate into a sea of nitrate rot. The studios saw no value in keeping their films, so they did everything from throw them into bonfires to recycling them to create new films for their silver content to even throwing them into the Pacific.
Of course, back in the olden days, the only way one could watch a movie was at the local movie house. However, when TV, cable, video and even the internet starting showing signs of life, the studios knew that if any movie had to be saved, it was all of them. But when the decision was made, it was too late. As of right now, it's believed that only 20% of all silent movies ever made still exist, and roughly half of all movies made before 1950 - the final year nitrate film was made - are gone for good.
The sad thing is that many of the studios we all know and love today - Paramount, Universal, Warners, Disney, Columbia, MGM and Fox - were all around during the silent era and they all have lost films. As a matter of fact, Paramount made some 1,200 silents and only 250 of those have survived. Even the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, 1927's Wings was lost for many years until a print was found in France in the 1960's. In the 1950's, Paramount sold most of their film library to MCA (now part of NBCUniversal), but kept their silents because neither found any value in them. However, in the late 1950's, somebody at Paramount made a duplicate negative ofWings - which was starting to rapidly deteriorate - and recently, the company even restored that negative using advanced computer technology for a DVD and Blu-Ray release.
The studios' neglect of their past translated to pure stupidity. In 1937, a massive vault fire at Fox's storage facility in New Jersey wiped out their entire library, including almost all of Theda Bara's movies. Sadly, Bara is almost forgotten by many people because she was a contract player at Fox and made all of her movies there. Only 120 films made by Fox survive prior to their 1935 merger with 20th Century Pictures.
However, it was another vault fire, this time at MGM in 1967 that wiped out most of their silents and even some of their early talkies - among them the only lost Three Stooges short Hello, Pop! from 1933 - that basically told Hollywood that it's time to save the past. Over the years, MGM and their predecessors have saved virtually everything, including short subjects that didn't seem to have a lot of modern appeal. The total cost of saving these films has totaled over $40 million, and the work is still going on as technology progresses.
Sadly, what's gone is gone, although there's still hope. Back in the olden days, a film would start playing in the bigger cities, and then move to the smaller towns and finally to overseas where prints of these movies would stay in their vaults. Thankfully, many of these lost films have been rediscovered over the years, including Wings and another long-lost Paramount classic, 1922's Beyond the Rocks starring Rudolph "The Sheik" Valentino and another silent starlet, Gloria Swanson. (You can watch how that film was restored here. No offense, but the woman narrating the piece sounds like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog). A successful search in a New Zealand archive found many long-lost flicks, including the 1927 John Ford-directed Upstream.
Thankfully, I'm happy that the studios in Hollywood have done their best to fix the wrongs of their ancestors, but the damage is done. Will we ever see a complete copy of 1927's The Way of All Flesh, whose Oscar-winning performance from Emil Jannings is the only Oscar-winning film to be lost? How about Lon Chaney's London After Midnight (1927) or The Miracle Man (1919)? The only answer is to check your attic. Who knows? You might even find 1914's Her Friend The Bandit, the only lost Charlie Chapin movie.
Just don't open the canisters with a match,
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