These are just some of the special features, extended footage and deleted scenes in the collection of moving images and memorable keepsakes of the festival. It has been ongoing since March 13, with screenings including newsreels, documentaries and silent and foreign films that are free to the public at the Billy Wilder Theater.
“Consider this: 50 percent of cinematic film strips are lost, completely gone,” UCLA Film and Television Archive Director Jan-Christopher Horak said. “By 1958, 80 percent of television film was lost before the invention of the video tape.”
The festival highlights a two-year process of restoration and retrieval of various moving image projects, showcasing an array of technical skills employed by the archivists and curators at the Archive.
“Some films are incomplete, (have) lost scenes over the years where the projection has cut off,” Horak said. “You find out if anything is missing using a tool of resources, checking with collections, distributors and studios. There is a lot of detective work.”
A past screening from the festival was “Johnny Cash Presents The Everly Brothers Show,” a compilation of seven Everly Brothers variety shows that aired on television as a three-month stint in 1970. The restored program was created after television archivist Dan Einstein saw the tapes on shelf in the Archive’s vault.
“We had no idea where these tapes came from, we just have them,” Einstein said. “The thing that got the project going was that the people at Sony decided to see if anything could be done with those tapes.”
With the original master tapes lost, the process of transferring from an obsolete videotape into a higher quality digital format took Einstein and his team almost a year.
UCLA’s archive boasts a collection rivaled only by the Library of Congress, including a collection of moving images of screen and make-up tests, home movies, newsreels, and many behind-the-scenes features of Hollywood during the early and mid-20th century.
Senior Newsreel Preservationist Blaine Bartell will be screening this collection on Friday in a program called “Behind the Scenes in Hollywood.”
“It’s interesting for me to see what the streets look like, the old cars, and identifying different neighborhoods where different kinds of actions took place, and some of the raw material where you see how people react in a more human situation,” Bartell said.
In one showing of the program, Bartell described a moment where a kid is playing and sets fire to a loaded gun. “(The kid) turns out to be the son of Mae Marsh, a movie star that was in “˜(The) Birth of a Nation,'” he said. “That’s not the kind of thing a movie star is predicted (as) doing these days ““ a mother who is not paying attention to their kid.”
Bartell explained that “Behind the Scenes” is a testament to the transformation of Hollywood through time. “When we have home movies on the set of the Mary Pickford film “˜Little Annie Rooney,’ there are two cameras filming scenes: one was filming for a domestic (release) and the other camera filming for a foreign (release). We don’t do that anymore.”
Upcoming screenings for the festival will also feature rare marginalized films such as LGBT and Chicano-based films “Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives,” and “Run, Tecato, Run.” Along with these films is the festival’s sole foreign film from Sri Lanka, “Gamperaliya” ““ the Archive possesses the only existing copy.
Horak plans to expand the Festival of Preservation this summer with the festival’s first ever national tour, wanting to “brand the Archive as a national institution,” he said.
Bartell stressed that the uniqueness of the old contents is the ultimate draw of the festival.
“You never know what you’re going to see when you pull a roll out of a film can that hasn’t been looked at for 60 or 70 years; it can be a real surprise,” said Bartell.