Read this for unrelated reasons: http://web.archive.org/web/200802041358 … ilogy.html
I can't speak with an expertise about film preservation, but I can talk emotionally and not as a serious art historian. I would make this observation: In the last 20 years or so, I've been very heartened - I guess we all have - by the consciousness that has emerged about preservation.
We're suddenly realizing as the 20th century comes to a close, one of the greatest cultural legacies, especially American but around the world also, is our filmmaking, and that we need to be very serious about preservation and about the archival aspects of all of these things that we do. It isn't only film, it's also music. The horror stories are myriad about the great MGM library that had Doctor Zhivago original music and Singin' in the Rain original music and musicals from the '30s and '40s - all these scores and orchestra parts that people want to perform now were all destroyed in the fire after some real estate company took over the physical lab of the studio.
The American Film Institute and other interested people, their preservation sentiments are wonderful in film and I think they should extend to original scripts that people have their marginalia on, and the original scores and sketches and orchestra parts of all this material. Imagine our grandchildren fifty, a hundred years from now, the interest that they would find in being able to take the orchestra parts to Wizard of Oz and sit down and play the whole score.
That is something devoutly to be wished. I don't confuse popular arts with high art. That's another discussion not suitable for this kind of time. But, however you evaluate the popular art of American filmmaking, as a high, middle, low, wherever you place it in your mind, doesn't alter the fact that this preservation task is desperately needed. I'm just delighted that we're seeing in the recent period of years people being very conscious of it, especially young people.
