Movies

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – While Scarlett O'Hara stayed cool at home, Dorothy Gale took a year out to go skipping down a digital yellow brick road in a Hollywood film lab.

DAVID DUPREY/The Associated Press

Film positive from the classic Gone With the Wind

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.

Photos by DAVID DUPREY/The Associated Press

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.

"I really hope that 500 years from now people can still look at this because it's wonderful stuff," Deborah Stoiber, vault manager at Eastman's Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, said during an inspection of one of 12 dark vaults kept refrigerated year-round at 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent humidity.

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 Lumière 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.

On the shelves are 6,600 titles, or 22,836 reels – the oldest surviving negatives or prints dating to the dawn of moving pictures in 1893.

Each vault is rigged with sprinklers and blowout doors.

"Nitrate burns at 16,000-to-17,000 feet per second, dynamite at 24,000-to-25,000 feet," Mr. Loughney said. "It has that disturbing quality of producing its own oxygen, so you can't put it out with water. If properly stored and handled, then it's no more dangerous that any other kind of hazardous substance, like gasoline."

Nitrate film was heavily recycled for its high silver content. But the main reason some 90 percent of U.S. holdings has vanished is neglect. In severe cases of exposure to heat, damp and temperature swings, scenes become obscured by a psychedelic collage of bubbles, swirls and flashes of light.

Library of Congress vaults contain half of the estimated 300 million feet of nitrate film in U.S. storage. The Film & Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, is next with about 80 million feet. There are 28 million feet at Eastman.

Gently unwinding the cyan negative of Gone With the Wind through her fingers – the Technicolor system required scenes to be recorded simultaneously in yellow, cyan and magenta – Ms. Stoiber pointed out an original splice in which Rhett – on his knees – proposes to Scarlett, whose second husband has just died.

"See this warping, how it curls a little?" Mr. Loughney interjected. "That's an early, early stage of deterioration" in a celebrated 69-year-old movie "not very well stored in the first 50 years of its life."

One unavoidable trade-off that shortens a popular film's life expectancy is when its corporate owner, encountering the latest technology, borrows it back for reformatting. Wizard of Oz returned in March after undergoing a special-edition DVD makeover, just as Gone With the Wind did from 2002 to 2004.

Ben Dobbin,

The Associated Press

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