United States: Reels of film and the Hollywood stars who fill them share one common enemy: aging. While actors can resort to surgery or fillers to maintain a youthful appearance, film faces a more unforgiving fate, eventually breaking down into its original, prosaic ingredients.
“Film base is actually wood pulp and acetic acid in its simplest form,” says Tim Knapp of California-based film preservation specialists Pro-Tek Vaults.
“Acetic acid over time produces what is called ‘vinegar syndrome,’ which degrades the base of the film… and prevents it from being used.” No film star wants to end up like that.
Movie-making has undergone several evolutions as directors sought to immortalize their leading men and women. At the start of the 20th century, pioneers like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were captured on nitrate film, a medium capable of capturing deep blacks, infinite shades, and sharp lines.
However, studios quickly noticed a significant drawback: nitrate is highly flammable. Projection rooms had to be fireproofed to avoid the kind of blazes that killed dozens of cinema-goers in the 1920s.
Even when not in use, nitrate film was not safe. With a relatively low flashpoint, it could ignite if the room it was stored in became too hot. Huge fires at film storage sites in 1914 incinerated much of America’s early cinematic history.
The introduction of acetate film in the 1950s was a cause for celebration among movie executives and cinemas alike. This new material allowed directors to capture images in lifelike resolution without the danger of it catching fire.
The problem is that it doesn’t age well and can turn into an unusable reel of plastic that reeks of vinegar in as little as 15 years if not properly cared for. For a movie company that has spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on a film, that’s bad news.
“Keeping film in the proper environment ensures its longevity,” said Doug Sylvester, CEO of Pro-Tek Vaults. “That allows you to have a pristine, often original copy that can be used to make additional prints and digital copies over time.”
TV and movie companies are increasingly looking to their back catalogues for sources of revenue, whether through licensing clips for commercials, reformatted re-releases, or wholesale resale of titles to a streaming service.
While many movies and TV shows are now recorded digitally, some top-flight directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino still insist on using film, whose 12K resolution still trumps even the best digital reproduction. Old and new films alike must be stored with utmost care and tight security.
Around a million reels of Hollywood history sit coiled in metal cans in top-secret, temperature- and humidity-controlled units in Burbank and Thousand Oaks, just outside Los Angeles.
Huge moveable shelves are filled floor to ceiling with tens of thousands of hours of movie magic, alongside legendary television shows, footage from presidential libraries, and music videos. Closed circuit cameras watch over the approximately 1.5 billion feet (almost half a million kilometers) of film to ensure that no one makes off with the original negatives from an Oscar winner.
Sylvester’s company is cagey about what titles they have in their care, but promotional posters from films including the original “West Side Story,” “Back to the Future II,” and Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” cover the walls. Sylvester said his customers are “very particular about mentioning the titles that we hold.”
“But I can say that there are some classics. If you were to look at the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest films of all time, you would see many of those here in our inventory.”
The company is also involved in cataloging and digitizing material that production houses might not even be aware they have in their own storage units.
This has included a project with record label Universal Music Group that unearthed never-before-seen footage of a Guns N’ Roses concert, as well as restoring classic videos from the likes of Johnny Cash, Bon Jovi, and The Cranberries.
Sylvester says uncovering hidden gems like these and then working to keep them safe is a rewarding task. “It’s part of our cultural history, and [we] love to play a part in preserving it for the future.”
