My Movie Career Ends
In summer 1980 I moved to New York City to make it in the movies. My ambitions were modest. My uncle, then an official in the motion picture photographers' union, said I might be able to get casual "permit" work on feature films. This seemed slightly nepotistic, but I had no objection, as I'd been a typesetter for three years and my eyes and fingers were bored.
But getting into pictures was easier said than done. It was a very hot summer, and I didn't have a place to live of my own. From my sister's one-room apartment I pestered union officers by telephone until I got the chance to get on sets and observe what other people did. I took trains out to the Astoria Studios and hung around silently on the periphery of busy, crowded productions, careful not to trip over electrical cables. Hardly anyone knew who I was or what I was doing there, but everyone knew enough not to ask who sent me. After a few days I knew enough not to make an fool of myself on the set, but I felt dumb begging busy people for a moment of attention. And none of this resulted in any paid work.
My movie career had ended before it began. Instead, I got another typesetting job, working midnight to eight, then eight in the evening to four in the morning (the worst shift imaginable), then noon to eight, finally nine to six. Meanwhile, my friends were making movies and documentary films. Some of them, including my roommates Pierce Rafferty and Margaret Crimmins, were actually getting to work with archival footage, as they finished their movie The Atomic Cafe.
Atomic Cafe (directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty) premiered in spring 1982 and was as big a hit as independently produced documentaries ever get to be. I was envious of my roommates' freedom to make movies (even though they had just gone through five years of hell) but I liked the film a lot. One reason it was so unusual, and so likable, was that it wove a matrix of unseen and unusual film segments into a synthesis that bore little resemblance to other documentaries.
Before Atomic Cafe, almost all historical documentary films followed highly structured scripts. Their makers commissioned a narration, hired a stentorian voice of authority, and sent someone out to find stock shots that fitted the script. Typically, an editor cut the shots to size and assembled a movie that, though it might have been an internally consistent work, actually used a controlling, rigid soundtrack to limit the unpredictable potential of the pictures. Although many documentary filmmakers came out of the traditions of documentary photography, where images were respected not just for their shifting and plural meanings but also for their moral authority, it seemed that most of their movies sacrificed image to sound.
Also, most documentaries seemed to use exactly the same kinds of images. They all resembled that great TV series with which I had been obsessed as a child: The Twentieth Century with Walter Cronkite. Everything was newsreels, newsreels, newsreels, with a heavy dose of Signal Corps combat footage thrown in. Where were the rich, untapped veins of home movies, advertising, training, educational and industrial films, outtakes, and all the bastard genres? And where was all the color? Why was the past all in black and white?
Atomic Cafe changed all that. One day, it will be recognized as the first feature to elevate ephemeral film to primetime status. Although it relied heavily on newsreels and the vast Department of Defense archives, it gave equal weight to training films, government and industrial propaganda, forgotten Civil Defense movies and local TV news footage. This mix was intercut into a film that treated historical "truth" as fancifully as the Cold War propagandists had invoked right and wrong. Just as important, the researchers (especially Pierce Rafferty) had considered no genre, no style of film to be beneath their attention. That's one of the reasons it took five years to make that movie: they had to look at everything.
I Escape from the Graphic Arts Industry
I harp on Atomic Cafe because it made possible my exit from typesetting. One of the reasons it became a hit was that 1982 was a bit year for the nuclear disarmament movement. All over the world there were marches, rallies and meetings. Public consciousness was raised, and the long process of producing the movie seemed to have culminated at exactly the right moment. Observing this, the TV producer Norman Lear offered Pierce Rafferty and Obie Benz funding to make an Atomic Cafe-like film on sexuality in the twentieth century. Heavy Petting was to be an all-archival film. Its budget was generous if not stratospheric, and its production schedule inadequate.
I was hired as director of research. Although I was fascinated with archival film and knew a little about it, I had never done archival film research before. Pierce and Obie hired specialists to go through the major collections; Pierce did the newsreels, which he loved, by himself, fast-forwarding through all the surviving Universal Newsreels from 1929 through 1967, 104 per year. Later, with another researcher, he traveled to the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and viewed hundreds of old soft-core porn films known as "smokers."
I took to my little room, a windowless sheetrock bedroom carved out of the middle of Pierce and Margaret's loft. Inside was my platform bed I'd bought at the Greek furniture mill outlet, a wall of steel shelving filled with books, and a heavy-duty rolling table made out of particleboard that looked like mahogany, on top of which was my prized IBM Selectric typewriter. I'd bought this machine to write a reference book on two-way radio frequencies, which I finished just before Heavy Petting began, backing off my red chair every night to fall into bed when I couldn't type any longer. Armed with photocopies of old educational film reference books and Library of Congress copyright catalogs, I began my survey of the "bastard genres": educational, industrial and advertising film.
For almost a month, I sat in this little room typing and sorting film titles, producers and synopses, watching the whole perverse panorama of ephemeral film stretch out before me. I discovered that hundreds of thousands of these films had been made, perhaps ten times as many as feature films. No topic was trivial enough to have escaped the speculative eyes of educational film producers; there were films on every imaginable subject, region, historical epoch, biological species, and brand of human behavior. Even after thirteen years the titles still read like poetry to me: Parade of Invertebrates; How to Say No: Moral Maturity; Things Expand When Heated; Good Grooming for Girls; When You Are a Pedestrian.
Perhaps a greater discovery was the world of industrial and advertising films. I learned that almost every corporation one could think of had made films to promote itself and its products. Many of these films were long ‹ thirty, forty, even sixty minutes. The majority were color. The grandiosity of their conceptions often mirrored their high production values. These films, especially, seemed as if they would be the most fun to watch. I wanted to see them all.
I learned of trade associations whose names I had never before heard, specialized organizations organized to promote the most special of interests: the Tea Council of the U.S.A., the Men's Tie Foundation (which later became the Neckwear Association), the Manufactured Housing Institute. Later, I would telephone one of my favorite, the Evaporated Milk Association, and hear a gruff man on the line answer, "Evaporated Milk." Trade associations were responsible for sponsoring many thousands of films, and must have boosted the fortunes of postwar film producers. Their films made frequent use of the "where would we be without" narrative device, in which an unsuspecting citizenry learns how our economy and society really cannot function without the free exchange and easy availability of, say, widgets.
Constructing filmographies (and thus, careers) for many unknown independent filmmakers, I mentally traced the trajectories of their lives. It seemed as if many of them were World War II veterans who learned their cinematographic skills while in the service, returned home to try their luck at being their own boss, and started a "mom and pop" production company. Some, it seemed, were great at what they did; others, from the film descriptions alone, appeared to be naive artists to the core. These especially fascinated me. (I am still looking for some of these titles, like Charm and Personality Equals Character, produced by Warren's Motion Pictures of Dayton, Ohio and Million Dollar Castle, produced by Galbreath Studios, Fort Wayne, Ind.)
In order to track down some of the more obscure titles, I constructed a complicated cross-referenced notebook allowing me to see all films associated with a specific source. This gave me an overview of each producer's work and each distributor's offerings. Then I began to call around in hopes of finding some of these materials.
It wasn't easy, as I quickly found. Most of the production companies were out of business, and those distributors that still existed had weeded their libraries of this stuff a long time ago. If I had wanted sixties- and seventies-style tracts on values clarification, conflict resolution and intergroup understanding, all accompanied by twangy no-name guitar sounds, they'd easily have been able to help me. As it turned out, I was lucky enough to find a few schools who still had some old stuff in dead storage and a few lucky people who'd salvaged discarded films from school systems and media centers.
We collected hundreds of films and a great deal of raw footage for Heavy Petting. But, as it often happens in the world of feature filmmaking, the film "went into turnaround" nine months after it began. I went downtown and registered for unemployment. All of the material went into storage and sat for four and five years, later to be retrieved by Obie Benz who, with a new crew, completed what turned out to be a very different kind of film.
Flooded With Film
But by that time I had started collecting. Little piles of films started to aggregate under the overhanging platform of my bed. This was substandard storage in hot weather, as the temperature in my little room rose into the high eighties. I concentrated on social guidance and psychological material, with excursions into the wonderful world of health and safety films. Most of my films came from other collectors with more mainstream interests, who'd sell me their unwanted short films at low prices. Others came from looking through film collecting periodicals like The Big Reel.
On a whim, I rented a little office on Crosby St., just on the border between Soho and Chinatown, so as to have a place to work outside my bedroom. It quickly became a place to stash films. Perhaps because empty space wants to be filled, I started to acquire larger and larger collections. One of the first and best was a media center collection formerly maintained by a school in New England. Its librarian, Richard W. Morton, was a true visionary who had collected educational, industrial, advertising, newsreel and propaganda film from all over. In his collection could be found the whole range of human history, culture and endeavor, and I am still finding surprises there today. Acquiring this collection meant that I suddenly had about four thousand cans of film.
By the end of 1983, I had become a collector on a fairly large scale. My office suddenly sprouted several banks of reinforced industrial steel shelving. In the aisles between the shelves rested high piles of cans stacked according to size. I started a card index of my holdings and tried to document producer, sponsor, distributor, date, synopsis, runtime, etc., but couldn't keep up with the pace of my acquisitions. I discovered that films are heavy (composed of plastic and silver) and need to be kept cool and dry. I also learned that collecting moving image material in quantity is, above all, a deeply physical process; the material is heavy, moves in truckloads, and tends to sit in inertial piles unless near-superhuman efforts are made to catalog, document, and shelve it. Once it is shelved it then needs to be unshelved and viewed if it is ever to be of use to anyone.
And so the issue of access to my collection began to arise. On the last day of 1983, a friend who worked as researcher for a weekly comedy TV show asked me whether I had certain images in my collection. She came over and I projected some films for her. (In those days, the only way I was able to view film was by projecting it.) We ended up transferring some films to videotape, but none were used on the show. I charged no license fee, but I was suddenly open for business.
Going commercial was not my idea. I wasn't the first film collector to go into the stock footage business; pioneers like John E. Allen in the middle of the century had broken a path long before. In 1979, Patrick Montgomery, a producer of documentary films, had started Archive Film Productions (now Archive Films) and made footage from his growing collection available to other people for a price. I was first given the idea by Rick Scheckman, then as now film coordinator for David Letterman's TV show, who told me that people would pay for access to my collection. This seemed a brilliant insight to me and was very exciting. I reasoned that I could buy a film for fifteen dollars and, provided that it was in the public domain, charge someone hundreds or thousands to use a clip from that very same film. Naturally, the flaw in my reasoning was that I wasn't collecting films with the exclusive purpose of selling clips. I was frantically collecting anything and everything I considered to be in the ephemeral film genre, regardless of whether or not the images in a film held any promise of potential profit down the line. I was collecting much too much film to construct a serious business; my inventory was far too huge to be profitable.
In 1983 I worked on an HBO documentary about the history of standup comedy (The Great Stand-Ups, produced by Bob Weide and Stuart Smiley), and learned more about film research and the stock footage business. In 1984 I did a few small stock footage jobs and actually made a little money. I remember selling footage of cropdusting planes spraying 2,4-D on fields to a documentary filmmaker; scenes of 1950s teens making out to ABC's 20/20; and a scene of civilians listening to the radio during World War II to a documentary on the American homefront. Each sale was good for a few hundred dollars. I continued to work as a film researcher. My biggest job was for the Okinawa Historical Film Society, a group of nationalist-minded Okinawans (some of whose names I am seeing in the newspaper these days in connection with the controversy over U.S. military bases on the island) who wanted to collect all the footage of World War II's Battle of Okinawa to show to islanders as part of an effort to reconstruct the deeply-felt and, in many ways, unfinished story of the war. We went to Washington together; I found them some films and they showed in Okinawa, winning great acclaim in the local press. There was talk that I might sometime travel to Okinawa and introduce the films to audiences there. I felt that my role in the whole project was being vastly overemphasized. But then the Society began to experience difficulties, for reasons I never understood, and there were no more calls from Okinawa.
I also took on the job of researching and writing Monitor America, another book on two-way radio frequencies. This gig paid reasonably well and I was able to support the expansion of my collection into two new areas: sponsored films and preprint materials.
As I mentioned above, sponsored films revealed the fascinating worlds of consumerism, marketing and consumption. Perhaps more than any other evidence, they revealed how synthetic we Americans are -- how so many of our desires, habits and activities are stimulated, sometimes even ruled, by marketing messages emanating through the mass media. These films -- made to sell, advertise, promote, convince, and fuel limitless consumer aspirations -- were generally slicker than their educational counterparts, and delightful to watch. There were new discoveries to be made every day in my collection, and I had great fun.
Bob Summers, an archivist at John E. Allen, Inc., a large private collection in New Jersey, helped me to realize the importance of collecting preprint materials. Up to this point I had mostly collected release prints -- film prints made to be projected before an audience. Sometimes, especially in the case of older or rarer films, release prints were the best existing material. In other cases, the negatives, A&B rolls or printing elements (which are some of the materials that archivists collectively call "preprint" elements) were still out there somewhere. Having access to preprint materials meant that one had access to materials of better quality than release prints, and in lucky cases, perhaps even the original materials that ran through the camera as the picture was being shot. Since it isn't likely there will ever be funding available to preserve ephemeral films, the next best thing archives can do is to collect preprint elements for these films. If they can be found, it means that future generations won't have to rely on worn, damaged, color-faded, or otherwise degraded release prints as the best existing copies of films.
So I started to collect preprint materials, mostly from production companies that had gone out of business and managed to hold onto their originals. I quickly learned this was not as simple as it seemed. Take, for instance, a thirty-minute 16mm color film. In the form of a release print, this film fits on one reel about twelve inches in diameter and one inch thick, the entire thing weighing perhaps five pounds. Now, the preprint materials for this same film will vary depending on how it was produced, but for many typical films in my collection, there will be six reels of picture (A&B rolls for each of parts 1, 2, and 3), one to three reels of negative soundtrack, and in some cases six reels of "picture masks" and maybe even a reel for titles. For some films, we might have outtakes and unused material, and even foreign-language soundtracks. So the thirty-minute color film that fits on one reel and weighs five pounds suddenly turns into perhaps seventeen or eighteen reels of film; a weighty proposition. Despite this, we have continued to collect original and preprint materials and will continue to do so.
I spent a lot of time in 1984-85 trucking material from all over the country into New York. This had the effect of maxing out my credit cards, most of which I had acquired during my industrious, well-paid days of typesetting. I visited many collectors in the Midwest who had collected (and, often without knowing it, acted to preserve) the masterworks of many producers from the "Rustbelt" states. I prevailed on the managers of a large film lab in mid-America to keep their unclaimed material and many of their own productions from going into the Dumpster. This was very exciting work, and I am still convinced of its importance; I'd still be doing it right now if I had the time. But I was rapidly getting into debt. Where would the money come from to keep this train going?
What I was doing was very much outside the stream of conventional moving image archives practice. On the one hand, I was collecting materials most other archives didn't collect. Ephemeral films fell outside the field of interest of most archives, the only exception being the excellent American Archives of the Factual Film, located at Iowa State University in Ames. But Ames only collected release prints, and at that time was woefully understaffed and underfunded. (For the past several years it's been undergoing a renaissance under the direction of Glenn McMullen, who's been an enthusiastic and tireless advocate of the value of collecting ephemeral film.) On the other hand, my methods of acquiring film were unorthodox compared to more established archives. I'd do anything short of theft to acquire films or keep them from being thrown away. After my Heavy Petting experience, I realized that just saving the material came first; once its survival was assured, then we could figure out who, if anyone, owned rights and how it could or could not be used.
I was also evolving towards a clearer understanding of where I sat with regard to the profit vs. nonprofit world. Most North American archival institutions are nonprofit organizations, funded by parent entities such as universities or government, grants, and contributions. I couldn't see going in this direction; I didn't want to be another outstretched hand in an already competitive world, competing for scarce resources. Also, I felt that there really might be some money in this business, if I could ever get a stock footage library going.
In those days I wrote some letters to companies like MTV, trying to offer them access to the collection. I asked friends for names of people to whom I might talk. Suddenly, around the end of 1984, things started to get wild. Anne Sweeney, now head of Disney/ABC cable television, but then an acquisitions manager at Nickelodeon, came to me seeking a vast quantity of humorous materials for a show called Turkey Television. The value of the contract we negotiated was equal to around a year's salary in the typesetting business. At the same time, Alex Weil, a partner in Charlex, came to Pierce Rafferty (who was starting to sell stock footage from the Atomic Cafe outtakes and from a stock footage library he had bought) and me for imagery to be used in 9012 Live, a concert special directed by Steven Soderbergh for the band Yes. Alex's idea was quite intriguing: to build a kind of fantasy world within a model spaceship, a world populated by moving stock images representing lost times and places. The final result was a landmark in its time, and one of the first and most successful attempts to use decontextualized archival images for their visual and artistic value. So there was some money, which I spent instantly on more film.
Pierce Rafferty, Margaret Crimmins and I then thought about making a movie together using our respective collections as an image base. We transferred a bunch of footage to one-inch videotape, which was at that time the highest broadcast quality. This was a promising idea, not so much the film itself as the idea of assembling an archive with the primary purpose of producing new work. All of us had always valued production over contemplation, and the idea of putting the collection immediately to new uses was attractive. As 1985 wore on, however, we got increasingly distracted by footage sales and the outside demands on our collections, and the project foundered.
"14th and Meat"
I incorporated Prelinger Associates, Inc. in the summer of 1985. At the same time I moved into a room on West 14th St. in New York's meat market district, close to the Hudson River, and left my crowded Crosby Street digs behind. This was an epic move, especially because the elevator in the new building was being reconstructed as we moved in and somewhere around three truckloads of film, paper and shelving had to be brought up four flights of stairs. Pierce and Margaret's company was already in the building and we moved into adjoining rooms.
The meat market was crowded by day with trucks delivering sides of beef, baby lamb carcasses, suckling pigs, huge slabs of unsliced American cheese, and chickens by the ton; at the same time other trucks took away cut-up ("city dressed") meat, provisions and fat trimmed from dead cattle. There was a pungent smell to which I am now immune. But winds from the river nearby swept through the neighborhood and, except for the morning hours, there was an uncluttered, timeless feel to the district. I liked it, and have stayed here for almost eleven years. By night the neighborhood changed into a kind of late-20th-century red light district, populated by transgender sex workers and their largely suburban clientele. I've sometimes heard this area described as "14th and Meat."
My friends and next-door neighbors (at that time, my roommates as well) called their company Petrified Films. We worked on all stock footage jobs together and split out license fees according to whose material was used. Petrified held a great still photo collection, and we used its images for four great promotional postcards which doubled our business activities within a year. Nancy Anderson was the first worker I employed; later came David Loesch and then L.K. Aubrey. At the very end of my stock footage selling days Anne Maguire, Eileen Clancy and Marcy Kenyon Riedel worked with me as well.
Both of us held lots of imagery originally created for advertising and sponsored films, much of it in color. As word of our collections grew and more producers used our material, old color footage began to seep into television documentaries, commercials and corporate presentations. The days of old scratchy black-and-white footage as the prime denotator of "historicity" ended, and I like to think that we played a major role in this development. I went a bit crazy about collecting Kodachrome footage and brought in millions of feet of it, much of which I have still to transfer to videotape and view.
In 1986 I met Keller Easterling, an architect and historian of town planning and landscapes. She was interested in the history of planned communities in America, and I had a number of films relating to this and other related issues. When we started looking at them, it seemed that there was a great deal of material, and we thought about putting them together into a kind of anthology for the use of architects, scholars, teachers, and planners. We spent a great deal of time looking at this material and thinking about how to contextualize it, and I began to learn more about the history of housing, land use and landscape in the country, an area that has fascinated me since childhood.
We flirted briefly with the idea of making a conventional documentary film or TV program, but were unwilling to make the kind of compromises that such a project would demand, and came back to the idea of an anthology. Shaping the real project would wait, though, until after my first discs with Voyager.
Though the two stock footage companies were busy and productive at 14th St., I began to get a bit discontented with selling clips for clips' sake. I wanted people to look at these marvelous films for themselves, not in an edited, decontextualized way. I talked to people about this a little, and they said I should start showing them publicly. But at that time I wasn't in touch with the people who could help make that happen.
First Steps with Voyager
I had read about Voyager in 1985 or 1986, because their first laserdisc Citizen Kane received a lot of press. Naturally, I wanted to work with them, but I couldn't really formulate exactly what I wanted to do. I was still thinking like a stock footage huckster rather than a producer or presenter, let alone a real archivist. But I was introduced to Bob Stein in 1986 by a friend who is no longer alive, Lyn Blumenthal, partner (with Kate Horsfield) in the Video Data Bank. We ate dinner at the Ting Fu Garden and talked. Later that year, I flew to Los Angeles for reasons I no longer remember, bringing along a tape of some clips from my archives, and it was then that I screened the tape for Bob, whose reaction was enthusiastic.
To New Horizons and You Can't Get There From Here were initially conceived as laserdiscs, but first issued in VHS format. (Both have been combined with new commentary into the Ephemeral Films CD-ROM.) The idea was to present a selection of film clips that was at once entertaining and instructive, that collectively said something about our recent history. I picked the clips, showed them to Bob Stein, received his opinionated feedback, and roughed out a sequence. Each one-hour program contained nineteen self-contained segments ranging in length from forty-five seconds to an entire ten-minute film. The greatest difficulty, from my point of view, was constructing a kind of "invisible narrative" about the progress of American social and cultural life through the middle part of the twentieth century, a narrative shaped by the selection, arrangement and excerpting of the film clips. We explored various arrangements of clips, and finally found that a straight chronological arrangement of clips worked best, though the real strength of the compilation rested in the clips rather than the arrangement. Bob and I collaborated on the offline edit together in two days and then an online edit in two nights. Unused to the fine points of online editing, we let a few glitches go by, but were rescued by Maria Groumbos (now Maria Palazzola), who is the combined creative and technical eye behind most of the excellent film-to-tape transfers for the Criterion videodiscs. The discs had a homemade, informal feel about them which I liked; Bob printed the title cards on a laser printer at the Voyager office, which was then also the Voyager residence, and we combined the type with freezeframes taken from each film clip.
When the laserdiscs were finished I used to play them at half-speed or quarter-speed, idly watching these familiar films slip by in slow, fluid motion. I loved how every splice, scratch and speck of dust had been recorded for posterity. Somehow the films (most of which had overbearing soundtracks and seemed designed to shut out all shades of meaning except the one its sponsors intended) acquired a new openness and even a poetic feeling when viewed this way. I also watched them at extreme high speed, fascinated with what this way of watching revealed about the film's broad structure; it was like looking at the earth from the air, conscious of its larger patterns and arrangements. (Citizen Kane, the first Voyager videodisc, had an undocumented chapter ‹ the whole movie seen at 25 times speed; this functioned just that way.)
These two compilations put a great deal of previously invisible ephemeral film material out into the world, and have entertained thousands of people. (They've also enriched my competitors, who freely lift near-broadcast-quality video off the laserdisc editions, enabled by the fact that most of the material on the discs is in the public domain.) Collaborating on these discs made it possible for me to see myself as more than simply a stock footage salesman. For the cover copy, Bob invented the term "media archaeologist," and I began to try to grow into that identity.
We got lots of publicity for these discs and tapes, and I started to get screening gigs around the country. It was often frightening to address crowds of people, hardest in New York where so many faces were familiar.
One of the most memorable shows I put on happened in San Francisco at the Castro Theater in the fall of 1988. I'd been invited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale of Re/Search to do a safety film show there, which I called "Films of Menace and Jeopardy." (A similar program appears on Our Secret Century, disc 4, bearing the same title.) I arrived in California the morning of the show and had a relaxed afternoon. By the time I got to the theater, well-tanked on coffee, I was surprised to see a line stretching around the corner. San Francisco is full of anarchists and critically minded people, many of whom I expected might be attracted to the subject matter of the show. Its premise (fixed forever into plastic on the Menace and Jeopardy CD-ROM) was that safety films were only incidentally about safety, that they expressed many unspeakable truths about our society, and that their narrative process subverted their educational value, since viewers sat waiting in eager anticipation for the accident to happen.
I put on an early and late screening/performance at the Castro. Attendance was around 900 people. Each show opened with a recital on the theater's giant organ. The program was composed of films that contained little or no explicit mayhem or injury but plenty of psychologically unsettling material, and I wondered how the audience would react to the films. I had brought along one gory eye safety film that I didn't put in the program, thinking I'd ask the audience to vote on whether they wanted to see it. Their response to the first few films was wild and gratifying, but the first show ended early because someone called in a bomb scare. The second show was even more intense, and the vote in favor of viewing It's Up to You, the story of unfortunate Eddie Briggs who forgets to wear his safety glasses, was nearly unanimous. As the first few closeups of a huge red eye began to fill the screen, though, the auditorium began to empty out. Only the diehards stayed.
In the lobby, I was accosted by a man whose hand lacked all of its original fingers. I was worried that he'd be offended at what I worried might be seen as an offhanded approach to life, death and injury. In fact he told me that he'd had an industrial accident a few years back and lost some fingers, and that this evening was the first time he'd been able to relax and laugh about his accident and his disability. I realized then that no matter how much a film program is planned and structured in advance, it only achieves completion in the minds of its audience, and its results are unpredictable.
The True Story of Footage 89
Concurrently, I was busy getting myself in the hole again with a new project. Since the Prelinger library was known for its quirkiness and for its hospitality on the telephone, I began to get frequent questions from all over the world, all related to "where can I find footage on...". I was very free, perhaps too free, with my time and attention, and wondered how I could make a business out of providing advice. I decided to make a book listing film and video sources in North America, figuring that I'd list about 600 sources and describe them. Then, I thought, I could respond to a research question by taking an order for a copy of the book. This wasn't a new idea. It had first been proposed some years back by David Thaxton, an eminent film researcher and scholar in Washington, but the project was considered too difficult and expensive to pursue. Other people had made annotated lists of archives, including Tony Slide and Leonard Maltin in various books. Bonnie Rowan had already published the first edition of her excellent guide to film and media resources in the nation's capital. But no one had been fool enough to take on the whole country.
Beginning in mid-1986, with the help of former Nickelodeon employee Kate Ross, I began to collect information on known and prospective film and video archives. By early 1987 more people were working. The financing for this project all came from sales of stock footage and the kindness of workers who consented to work for deferred pay. In summer 1987 Celeste Hoffnar (now Celeste Ries), fresh from working on ABC's quixotic archival show Our World, started corralling the loose ends of this messy project, and ended up filling the role of coeditor on the book. From the beginning, Celeste maintained that what I was tentatively calling Footage 88 would actually end up being called Footage 89, and predicted furthermore that I'd set the price at $89.00. She was right in both cases.
We were doing an incredible research job, but I was broke. I had taken on far too much to do anything properly; it was as if I was compensating for a lifetime of slack. Paydays at Prelinger Associates, Inc. were frequently delayed or nonexistent, and my financial arrangements with employees were a hodgepodge of diverse agreements that were, more often than not, honored in the breach. I was nervous, because the paid staff on the book totalled 36 people (only nine or ten full-time), only a few of whom had agreed to work on a deferred basis. We survived through ad sales, stock footage license fees, and loans from generous friends.
One morning I arrived at work, broke as always. "M," one of my old Okinawan friends was waiting to see me. We went for coffee at the Old Country Kitchen on the corner. He was here to apologize. "We had differences in our group," he told me. "The project suffered, and could not continue. I am here to apologize to you." I shook my head and indicated that no apology was necessary. "M" continued as if I had not said anything. "We are very sorry that we could not work with you as we had promised, and apologize that we were not able to bring you to the island of Okinawa as we said. With our apology we would like to give you this." In his hand was a gift of two thousand dollars in cash. My refusal went unheeded, and the money stayed in my pocket all of ten minutes before it went for back payroll. (In return, I gave "M" David Kahn's classic book The Codebreakers, which fascinated him because he was in the States reading old code messages, hoping to find where ships had been torpedoed during World War II. Basically, "M" was hunting for gold.)
Besides staffing, the other reason this book was costing a lot of money to research was the elusiveness of the sources. Many of the archives, collections and companies we sought to list in the book had never been publicized before; they had no mechanism or people to deal with requests for their holdings, and oftentimes had never described the moving image materials in their collection. Although we had started off the project by sending out about 6,000 questionnaires, only a few were returned and we were forced to do most of the research on the telephone. It took over 10,000 phone calls to get the information necessary to write the 1,750 articles in Footage 89 and Footage 91.
When we appeared to be about three months away from sending the book off to the printer, I advertised a few places and sent out some order forms to stock footage customers and independent filmmakers, hoping to sell prepublication copies at $75.00. The response was overwhelming; we got about 800 orders for a book that didn't even exist yet. Very quickly, however, we encountered a big problem: the book was far from ready to publish. There were many holes in its internal structure: collections that absolutely had to be listed weren't yet researched; the entries were written in an inconsistent style; and the subject index (which I had originally thought would take a month or so to put together) was shaping into a major project of its own. Tom Damrauer plugged away for a year just working on the index, which when finished ran 180 pages and included 36,000 entries.
So not only was the book getting larger (I had ordered paper for a 600-page book, and ultimately had to increase our order to allow for a 900-page book) but there was still a great deal of work to be done. In between fielding calls from frustrated purchasers (eighteen out of eight hundred ultimately requested their money back), Celeste and I sat together at our one computer with a hard disk drive (lent graciously by Branda Miller) and rewrote the book. It was a hot spring and summer 1989 in the office, and it was often difficult for me to stay awake. Nonetheless the book was finally finished and emerged in August 1989.
Making Footage 89 took its toll. I left the stock footage business in March 1989 because I wasn't able to pay my librarians and do the book at the same time, and Pierce et al. over at Petrified Films began to represent it commercially. It was also difficult to have an open-ended project hanging over me for such a long time, 30 months in all, and I felt pretty burned out by fall 1989. But in the seven years that it has been out, it's helped thousands of people find footage for their projects, raised the level of consciousness in the media industry regarding archives and stock footage, and put many small collections on the map for the first time. In addition, the book contained preliminary research applicable to almost any archivally based investigation, and has saved many people much time. It's probably the most important thing I've ever done. In 1996, I sold the copyright to Second Line Search, who published a complete update in 1998.
Off to Suburbia
During this period Keller Easterling and I had continued to work on what we were now calling "the suburbia disc," and we'd spoken with Voyager about making this a laserdisc project. Things had progressed far enough that we even had a title: Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built. We had collected many interesting archival film sequences (most from my archives, some from government collections and other sources), and Kel had researched thousands of still images from government documents, real estate industry advertising and propaganda, publications of the highway lobby and trade magazines from the building industry. We wanted to do a laserdisc because much of the story of modern suburbia's origins seemed to reside in the still image sequences, and laserdisc offered the opportunity to mix stills and moving images.
Call It Home looked at modern suburbia not as a post-World War II phenomenon but as an older phenomenon. We located the roots of the suburbia we know today in the New Deal, when the Federal government joined hands with the building, real estate and construction industries in an attempt to fight the Depression by building new homes. The disc explored the ideology of homeownership in America, the design and morphology of suburbia, the peculiar alliance between government and business that helped shape today's urban and suburban landscapes, relations between housing and consumerism, and many other issues. One of the things I like very much about the laserdisc is that moving sequences are interspersed with still-image chapters. After each chapter, the disc player stops and the viewer must decide which sequence he or she wishes to watch. It isn't a disc for couch potatoes, but it isn't all about pastel-colored suburban nostalgia either.
This was a difficult project because other than a small production advance from Voyager and a modest grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, we had little money and little time to make it happen. We worked evenings and weekends editing video and stills, and Kel worked hundreds of hours doing library research. Voyager sent Julia Jones, Kate Perotti and Mark Brems to New York and Washington to shoot somewhere around 4,000 still images with their special camera (around 2,800 still frames appear in the final version). I went to California for the online edit at Voyager, then in the building at Santa Monica Beach. It was an epic edit; the list contained something like 2,600 single-frame edits. The project wouldn't have been possible without extraordinary effort and commitment from Morgan Holly, Eric Saks, Julia Jones, Mark Brems and Michael Nash, among many others.
Call It Home was finished at the end of 1992, just after QuickTime movies on CD-ROM had started to appear. I think we started the project too early for it to be a CD, and finished too late for it to be anything other than a laserdisc. One day I hope we have the change to redo it for a CD. For me it was the expression of a lifelong interest in landscape, an interest which I took up again in Our Secret Century, on The Uncharted Landscape disc.
Deep in the Heart of Time Warner
In late 1989, as I was recovering from the birth pangs of Footage 89, I was offered consulting work (and later a staff position) working at a new startup, HBO's Comedy Channel. This seemed like an interesting break from making reference books and I was intrigued by the possibility of learning how a business worked when it was supported by adequate capital. And learn I did. I was hired essentially to help provide cheap programming for the channel, which at its start was available in so few homes that its ad sales and program acquisition budgets were minimal. So I put on a nicer shirt and started to go to work in midtown Manhattan.
This was a very different experience from working in the meat market. Although the people I worked with, from interns to management, were invariably friendly and supportive, there was something about making television that was often hard to swallow. This was commercial television, too, and basic, unscrambled cable, so there were all kinds of worries about what could and couldn't be aired. Not that I encountered censorship or worried about it; it was more an issue of being present at one of the "dumbing points" of late twentieth-century America.
I started a little archival department at the channel. Celeste, my co-editor for Footage 89, came to work with me, and we hired a bunch of people to produce little archival clips, collect footage, scout around for public domain films that we could add to our stock footage library, and more. After a while there were six or seven people in our unit, including Roadside America author Ken Smith, who later came to work for me in the archives and in 1999 published the key book on educational films, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films 1945-1970.
We also furnished footage to the shows on the Comedy Channel. Some of the footage was used skillfully and memorably, especially by the Higgins Boys and Gruber and by Best Brains, Inc. for Mystery Science Theater 3000. Most of the short industrial and educational films used on MST3K, films like The Last Clear Chance and The Home Economics Story, came from my own collection, licensed through HBO. A few key titles like Mr. B. Natural came from the library of Streamline Film Archives, now F.I.L.M. Archives.
At the end of 1990, the Comedy Channel merged with rival network HA! and most of the people with whom I'd worked lost their jobs. I stayed on and tried to get HBO interested in going into the business of collecting and providing archival content. Though I stayed there for four more years, three of them on a halftime basis, this business didn't develop, and in any case I now look at the archival content business through different eyes.
While I was at HBO my own company published an update to Footage 89, surprisingly entitled Footage 91. I wanted to keep the book active and up to date, and felt some obligation to the many readers who had waited to patiently for the first book to materialize. Consequently we sent the supplement free to existing customers and included it with new orders.
I continued to show films around the country, and learned more about ephemeral culture and how I saw it. Most of my shows were at universities, media art centers or museums, but I also did a few shows at comedy clubs like The Bottom Line in New York and Duck Soup in Boston. I'd show films and try to talk about what they meant from an ironic viewpoint. Both the New York and Boston shows went very well, and I felt carried away into another state of mind, somewhere between projection and actual performance. But the day after the Boston show, at Periwinkles in Providence, R.I., I was practically booed off the stage. I think the Rhode Island audience was expecting something quite different. I realized that I probably wasn't going to be a standup sensation.
Stay tuned for Part II of An Informal History of Prelinger Archives.
Revised January 4, 2001