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
Cover
American Cinematographer - November 2001
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