Monday May 23, 2005

Deterioration of America's filmstock FILM HISTORIANS FIGURE THAT 90% OF ALL THE SILENT MOVIES EVER MADE AND HALF OF THE SOUND PICTURES MADE BEFORE 1950 NO LONGER EXIST IN COMPLETE FORM.

Ken Weissman, Head of film preservation, Library of Congress...
"The thing that disappoints me the most and the thing I'm most concerned about is the fact that star wars needed to be restored. This is a film that I saw when it first came out in 1977, ok and 20 years later it had to be restored because of the fact that it hadn't been properly maintained, in that 20 year interim. What exists now is star wars a new hope, which is a different movie. It has different effects in it, it has different footage, because some of the original scenes were lost, as far as the quality and they couldn't maintain them, couldn't bring them back, so alternate cuts were used. Thankfully, george lucas had those in his own private collection, and those were better maintained than what the studio had maintained on those, so, you could legitimately make the argument that star wars no longer exists." ( May 23 2005, 03:43:00 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]