The Lazarus Libraries

Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from Andrew Egan, who is following his recent interest in film in a couple of new directions this time around. Check out what he found.

Today in Tedium: Among the many pieces of dubious “evidence” cited by conspiracy theorists that say the moon landing was faked is the fact that the tapes of the original transmission were erased over. Surely, if America had actually landed on the moon those recordings would be an invaluable part of human history and not treated so carelessly as to be erased on accident years later. But NASA isn’t a Hollywood studio accustomed to storing various media for posterity. And as we’ve noted here before, Hollywood studios lose their films all the time for a variety of reasons, with lack of storage space seemingly the most common. In one very interesting case, an entire cable channel disappeared for nearly 30 years before some clever writers ( cough ) tracked down the only known footage. Today’s Tedium looks at how we lose the things we once loved and what can happen when they return from the grave. — Andrew @ Tedium

A card for “We Americans,” a Universal Studios film believed lost due to neglect.

A devastating fire in a vault

With hindsight, it is completely understandable why we lost so many early films. The medium was so new and abstract at its inception that no one really knew what they were doing. Even brilliant performers and producers whose legacies resonate into modern day, like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, were guilty of short-sightedness with their own work. But due to the notoriety of these performers, much of their lost work has seen been rediscovered.

Lesser known but historically significant films often didn’t receive the same treatment. The LOC noted that it was common practice for movie studios to destroy the negatives of many silent films. One of the most notorious offenders in this regard was Universal. By 1948, the studio had either deliberately destroyed or neglected all of their silent film negatives, including one gem that’s believed to be lost forever.

We Americans was a 1928 silent film telling the interwoven tales of three immigrant families moving to the United States. The filmmaker had complete cooperation from the government and even documented the actual immigration and customs process at Ellis Island.

“It is a tragedy that Universal allowed their silent films to rot or burn,” wrote film historian Kevin Brownlow in his book Behind the Mask of Innocence, a book on the silent film era. “We Americans would today be of immense historical importance.”

One studio did realize the importance of preserving their film archive. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, better known as MGM (of roaring lion fame), began earnest efforts in the 1930s to preserve their movies. Because the film stock used during the silent era involved combustible nitrates, the studio wisely decided to house their dangerous archive in a concrete vault on their studio lot in Culver City, California. With minimal ventilation. And no sprinkler system. You can see where this is going.

London After Midnight, a film that was widely believed to have been lost in a 1965 MGM vault fire.

Information is scarce—little was reported about it at the time, in contrast to a 1967 set fire that was larger in scale—but a 1965 MGM vault fire reportedly killed one person and wiped out the studio’s entire silent film archive.

“Someone was killed in that explosion,” film executive Roger Mayer told film historian David Pierce of the saga in a 1997 article for the academic journal Film History. “Somebody was working on the film at the time and as far as anybody could tell, it was an electrical short of some sort igniting the film.”

For what it’s worth, studio executives don’t think a sprinkler system would have saved any of the archive due to the volatile nature of the nitrate film. And this is how, through accident and neglect, we’ve lost around 75 percent of films made before 1929.

(igorovsyannykov/Pixabay)

A lack of storage basically explains how we’ve lost things since the 1950s

During the 1970s, the British Broadcasting Corporation had a problem. In their mind, it was easily solved.

Through a combination of factors, the BBC found it’s vault overflowing with copies of things it couldn’t or wouldn’t air. (In some instances, the broadcast rights had expired, others were just old black and white movies or considered unprofitable or unsuitable for broadcast. The exact reason shifts from case to case. There’s also the issue with British actors union and a whole lot more. Detailing how the BBC handled its archive could be its own book.) So they started throwing things out or reusing materials for things they did want to keep.

The consequences of that decision were pretty widespread. At least enough to inspire MissingEpisodes.com (though its URL is definitely not MissingEpisodes.com), a website dedicated to detailing and finding lost British broadcasts. The site lists 92 British TV shows from the era that are missing episodes. Dedicated fans and collectors are often the ones to unearth copies of lost episodes, many of which were copies distributed to foreign broadcasters.

The same issues plaguing the BBC also hit NASA and a number of major film producers. As it turns out, no one was particularly good at preserving film until digital technology made film archives affordable and manageable. In America, TV shows and films made after 1970 largely remain intact. When an episode or film becomes “lost”, it’s usually a decision by the studio or producers to keep the end product out of circulation.

And this brings us to the strange cult status around a mediocre made-for-TV movie that aired once in 2001 before disappearing for a decade.

Why would Nickelodeon be afraid of a made-for-TV kids movie starring Frank Langella?

On Wednesday, August 11th, 2011, the internet did its magic.

On Reddit, a user posted a seemingly innocuous tidbit in the r/TodayILearned subreddit about a movie that aired just once on Nickelodeon in 2001. It was considered too scary for Nick’s core audience and shelved. No copies had ever been released and none had leaked to torrent or video sharing sites. Then a little over four and a half hours later, another user chimes in with a simple response, “I have a copy of Cry Baby Lane on VHS.”

The user wasn’t joking.

After going through the surprisingly complicated process of converting VHS to a digital format, interested millennials found themselves watching a lost memory.

By October, it was reported that the online interest in Cry Baby Lane had encouraged Nick and its owners at Viacom to resurrect the movie for broadcast on Halloween.

Eleven years and three days after airing, Cry Baby Lane finally got another shot at its intended audience. And the reviews?

Underwhelming to say the least. It’s a movie made for kids. In fact, many online wondered why Nick even bothered banning it in the first place. A rep for Nick said the movie was never formally banned, just forgotten. Online, most of the speculation on why has to due with the movie’s subject matter. The horror in the movie is focused on an ashamed father of conjoined twins. Eventually, he saws them apart. The larger plot actually resembles an episode of The Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror entries with Bart having had a long lost, and more evil, twin.

Nick airs Cry Baby Lane from time to time. With the mystique gone, many threads on Cry Baby Lane include warnings to others to save themselves the hour and watch something else. Versions online run at a little more than an hour. When Nick runs Cry Baby Lane, they run it in a two-hour time block that includes damn near 50 minutes of commercials. That’s an almost criminal ratio of content to advertising, which leads me to suspect that might have been the ultimate deciding factor. It just wasn’t good enough to keep kids’ attention for that amount of advertising. Plus, you know, Langella don’t come cheap.