Movie makers band together on Oscar night to preserve film history.
By Kim Devore/Entertainment Writer
If the pundits are on the money, locals Brian Grazer and Jeffrey Katzenberg will soon be basking in the glory of multiple Oscar wins for their film “A Beautiful Mind.” Music Man Sting could take home a golden statue for his nominated song “Until,” and director Robert Altman could walk away a winner with “Gosford Park.”
But while many Hollywood heavyweights are celebrating movies on Sunday night, others are working to save them.
Every year, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation sponsors a lavish bash in Beverly Hills to help preserve America’s irreplaceable collection of celluloid history.
The famed director describes his mission as a race against time, saying, “The passage of days, years, decades and now centuries threatens the survival of our past achievements.”
Statistics support his position.
According to film experts, chemical decomposition has wiped out most of America’s silent movies. They estimate that a full 90 percent of those early works have been reduced to a foul-smelling pink mush. The same holds true for all feature films made before 1950. Roughly half have vanished as their nitrate stock disintegrates into dust. Color films that were produced after 1950 face a different kind of danger and are prone to irreversible fading.
The Library of Congress has taken steps to restore and preserve time-honored classics such as “Gone with the Wind” and “The Godfather,” but there are thousands of titles and only a limited amount of resources to save them.
That is why Scorsese called on some of the world’s most respected filmmakers to join him in forming the Film Foundation. His board of directors reads like a who’s who of Hollywood and includes Altman, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Sydney Pollack, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
In the past decade, the foundation has raised badly needed cash to help archives like the Library of Congress and the Eastman House preserve classics such as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Metropolis.”
While many important films, documentaries and newsreels have disappeared, others have been brought back to life and awareness is growing.
“Ten years ago, film preservation was the function of achieves and academics,” says Scorsese. “It’s gratifying to now see the studios working in partnership with the archives and allocating resources to in-house film preservation departments.”
So as the Oscars get underway, Scorsese and his Film Foundation will already have something to celebrate-the knowledge that precious moving images will be more than a faded memory and the likes of Bogie, Brando and Bacall will live on for future generations.