Then you would have a story about a kid who grows up on Long Island in the 1970s with a passion for movies and music, but who realizes he lacks the talent to create either. He goes to the District and masters the folkways of the Hill, all the while yearning for a way to indulge his passion.
He finds one. He designs a way to finance the rescue of American movie history.
“You never know what’s in the next box, around the next corner, when so much has been lost,” Schwartz says. “There’s the thrill of finding that, and the question: What else can we find?”
In the early 1990s Schwartz, then a lawyer in the U.S. Copyright Office, maneuvered among competing interests (studios, directors, House committee chairmen, federal agencies), drafted legislation, helped turn doomed Congressional “studies” into action plans — and, in 1997, filed incorporation papers for a strange new bureaucratic hybrid: the National Film Preservation Foundation, affiliated with the Library of Congress yet chartered to raise private donations for its work.
The foundation now receives $530,000 a year through the library’s budget — all of which must go to preservation — and matches that in other fundraising.
“Eric helped connect the dots that kept the legislation alive and moved [the foundation] to a home at the library where it took root and flourished,” says Pat Loughney, chief of the library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, which houses the largest collection of American films and does more preservation than any other archive. “The foundation is doing work we can’t do, essential work, not only supporting the work we do at the library but at archives around the country.”
Sometimes, a quintessentially Washington solution is effective: In 14 years, the foundation has helped preserve 1,820 fragile, old nitrate films that had deteriorated in archives in all 50 states or had been misplaced in foreign repositories. The titles range from the lost John Ford silent film “Upstream” (1927) to all manner of fictional and factual celluloid curiosities bearing witness to what America was like once upon a time: “Bristol, Tennessee, Newsboy Soapbox Derby” (circa 1955), “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” (1894), “How the Cowboy Makes His Lariat” (1917), “Hemingway Home Movies” (circa 1955), “Children Who Labor” (1912) and “Growing Baby Beef in Montana” (1933-34).
And yet, what’s preserved is a fraction of what once existed. Only about 20 percent of American features from the silent era survive; about half of American features before 1950 remain.
Loading...
Comments