American Cinematographer - November 2001 - 90

Key figures from MGM, Paramount
Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal
Studios, Walt Disney Co. and Warner

Art

Bros, discuss the

perilous past,
profitable present and foreseeable
future of moving-image preservation
in Hollywood.
Interviews

Edited

ing their nitrate originals onto
safety stock.

years
old, major
American studios have been

acetate-based

making

proliferating in American homes,

community discovered that acetatebased stock developed its own
problems over time, namely
pronounced color fading and "vine¬
gar syndrome," a decay named for

that most studios realized their cellu¬

its odor

loid

by the Rochester Institute of
Technology's Image Permanence

100

Although film is more than

concerted effort to
it for less than 20. It

a

preserve
wasn't until the late 1980s, when
VCRs and movie channels began

assets

might have lives beyond

theatrical release
lives

-

and lucrative

that. Over the

subsequent 10
years, the seven studios with sizable
libraries
MGM, Paramount, Sony
Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal
Studios, Walt Disney Co. and Warner
Bros.
established asset-protection
programs to provide for the inspec¬
tion, preservation and restoration of
at

-

-

their films.
Concern about their libraries

had

prompted studios to take

action before, in the 1960s

some

and 1970s.

The cellulose nitrate base

common

film elements made

prior to 1951
proved to be not only flammable
when projected in certain condi¬
tions, but also spontaneously
combustible
when
improperly
to

had

stored, and after a rash of nitrate fires
in the late 1940s studios

86 November 2001

by Bob Fisher and Rachael K. Bosley
by Rachael K. Bosley

began copy¬

In the late

1980s, the film

(see AC June '96). Research

Institute

showed, however, that

low-temperature, low-humidity
storage could retard and most likely
prevent both problems. By the early
1990s, studios had built and rented
such storage

facilities not only in
also in the East and
Midwest; by keeping elements such
as
original negatives, interpositives
(IPs), internegatives (INs), and
separation masters (black-andwhite records of the yellow, cyan
and magenta layers of a color
image) geographically separated,
they hope to ensure that a single
fire, flood or earthquake won't
cause a film to disappear.
New technologies have alter¬
nately aided and complicated the
preservation effort. Some innova¬
Los Angeles, but

tions, such

as

Kodak's Color Reversal

Intermediate (CRI) stock, have come
back to haunt the studios that
embraced them. CRI, which earned
Kodak

an

Academy Award for

Scientific and Technical Achievement
in 1968, was touted
element from which

protection
prints could be
made, eliminating the need for an IP
(the element from which prints and
duplicate negatives are typically
made). The stock was widely used
throughout the 1970s, particularly in
the production of opticals, but it
proved to be highly problematic.
"Although its life depends a bit on
how it was processed, CRI is proba¬
bly the most unstable film stock ever
developed," observes Paul Rutan Jr.,
co-founder of Triage Motion Picture
as a

Services, a film-restoration lab in Los

Angeles. "The fixer doesn't fix, and
the film keeps developing. CRIs are
one

of the
A

Academy

reasons

we're in business."

more

recent

Sci-Tech

Award

winner, the
Technology's
A-D (acid detector) strip, looks like it
will yield happier results. A diagnos¬
Rochester Institute of

tic tool that facilitates the detection

of

acetate

decay before deterioration

Mucseratom.

bGASDateScoeaibnmvrCyifrr,
phot

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American Cinematographer - November 2001

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