ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) - While Scarlett O’Hara stayed cool at home, Dorothy Gale took a year out to go skipping down a digital yellow brick road in a Hollywood film lab.
The recently reunited Technicolor duo could well be spending much of the rest of the millennium killing time with Lassie, Annie Oakley, Tarzan and a canned colony of heroes and villains from the silent-film era.
Thousands of pre-1951 movies captured on volatile nitrate film are kept in frigid, low-humidity vaults in a modest cinder-block building owned by the George Eastman House museum on the piney outskirts of Rochester. Cold storage saves them from rotting away within a lifetime or, worse, burning up.
In most cases, these are original camera negatives from the first half century of motion pictures, classics such as “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind,” the silent era’s top-grossing “Big Parade,” Lon Chaney in “The Phantom of the Opera” and Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 version of “The Ten Commandments.”
While even the best-kept vintage reels are starting to buckle with age, a beloved movie’s master negative is a sacred object that would cost untold millions to replace.
Much of that value lies in its power to produce the finest-quality copies, be it on 35mm film, Blu-ray DVD or some dazzling format that pops up in, say, the early 26th century.
“I really hope that 500 years from now people can still look at this because it’s wonderful stuff,” says Deborah Stoiber, vault manager at Eastman’s Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, during an inspection of one of 12 dark vaults kept refrigerated year-round at 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent humidity.
The magical way in which a chilly, dry setting retards shrinking, fading or “nitric melt” inevitably raises concern about the long-term survival of other vulnerable pieces of the world’s film heritage, from safety-based acetate stock adopted in the 1950s to television recordings to flimsy digital-video cassettes.
“Nitrate is turning out to be a historically durable medium that, if stored properly, rivals paper — and well-made paper — as a storage medium for image and sound,” says Patrick Loughney, motion-picture curator at Eastman, the world’s oldest museum of photography and film.
Its out-of-the-way bunker is one of just a handful of nitrate repositories run by major film archives around the country. It isn’t listed in phone books or open to the public. Nor does the plain, single-story building draw the eye on a road where the occasional home is backed by woods or farmland.
On the shelves are 6,600 titles, or 22,836 reels — the oldest surviving negatives or prints dating to the dawn of moving pictures in 1893. The Rochester Institute of Technology’s Image Permanence Institute estimates that climate control can preserve films still in pristine shape for another 800 to 900 years.
Considering how a nitrate fire blinded Alfredo, the projectionist in “Cinema Paradiso,” each vault is rigged with sprinklers and blowout doors.
“Nitrate burns at 16,000 to 17,000 feet per second, dynamite at 24,000 to 25,000 feet,” Mr. Loughney says. “It has that disturbing quality of producing its own oxygen, so you can’t put it out with water. If properly stored and handled, then it’s no more dangerous than any other kind of hazardous substance, like gasoline.”
That knowledge came the hard way. Made primarily from sulfuric acid and cotton, nitrocellulose was blamed for disastrous warehouse and theater fires, chiefly in the two decades after Rochester-based Eastman Kodak Co. adapted it from flexible roll film the company had pioneered in 1889.
Nitrate film was heavily recycled for its high silver content. However, the main reason about 90 percent of U.S. holdings have vanished is neglect. In severe cases of exposure to heat, damp and temperature swings, scenes become obscured by a psychedelic collage of bubbles, swirls and flashes of light.
The Library of Congress vaults contain half of the estimated 300 million feet of nitrate film in U.S. storage. The Film & Television Archive at the University of California at Los Angeles is next with about 80 million feet.
Among Eastman’s 28 million feet are Mr. DeMille’s silent-film collection, an early Lumiere film featuring monks walking up a hill in Indochina in 1894 and Greta Garbo in “Flesh and the Devil,” made in 1926. Miss Stoiber’s personal favorite is “When Flowerland Awakens in Japan,” a stenciled short film from 1912.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s ’Wizard of Oz’ or an obscure newsreel that’s incomplete and unidentified, they’re all treated the same way — as a historic artifact,” Miss Stoiber says.
A California native who keeps a winter coat at the office, Miss Stoiber gets through examining the entire collection every few years. One telltale sign that a film is starting to decompose: “It smells like wet dog.”
The chilled-vault solution began gaining traction among film custodians in the 1970s, and storage centers have sprouted in the past 20 years, most recently at UCLA and the Library of Congress.
One unavoidable trade-off that shortens a popular film’s life expectancy is when its corporate owner, encountering the latest technology, borrows it for reformatting. “The Wizard of Oz” returned in March after undergoing a special-edition DVD makeover, just as “Gone With the Wind” did from 2002 to 2004.
Interest in nitrate films has ballooned of late “because in the age of video, the DVD and the Internet, a corporate liability that was expensive to store got converted back into a corporate asset,” Mr. Loughney says.
“When I started my career 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that films like this would never be recovered,” Mr. Loughney says.
“We have a lot of films that won’t be got to in my lifetime, but that’s OK,” he adds. “We keep them alive for another 50 years before somebody else raises the money. The most effective preservation strategy is cold storage because it buys you time.”
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