Hollywood faces deteriorating digital film and television archives
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While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting movies and TV shows from their streaming devices has sparked a great deal of turmoil among creators, Hollywood’s digital era masters have a greater fear: the wholesale decline of feature films and spin-offs. Behind closed doors and non-disclosure agreements, the fragility of the archive is a constant topic, with professionals sweating the possibility that key files of contemporary popular culture may have already disappeared, destined to the same fate as so many silent films that have disappeared, Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature among them. , Mountain eagleAnd Oscar-winner Ernst Lubitsch the National.
This has been emphasized by initiatives such as the Martin Scorsese Film Foundation. “Preserving every art form is essential,” the industry icon says in a video on the organization’s website. For business, these are valuable studio assets – for example, MGM’s library (about 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 episodes of the series) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon – but there is a misconception that digital files are… Safe forever. In reality, files end up getting corrupted, data is transferred incorrectly, hard drives fail, formats change, and work simply disappears. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving service that works with studios and independent producers. “We find problems with every show or movie we try to maintain.” So, what exactly was he missing? “I could tell you stories, but I can’t, because of the secrecy.”
Industry professionals do not speak publicly about specific missing works, citing confidentiality issues. Therefore, only alarming rumors are circulating – along with rare, heart-stopping traditions that violate public consciousness. One infamous example: In 1998, a Pixar employee accidentally wrote a fatal command function, ordering the computer system to delete toy story 2, which was then almost complete. Fortunately, the supervising art director who was working from home (she had just had a baby) had a two-week-old backup file.
Experts point out that independent filmmakers, who work under constrained financial conditions, are most at risk of their art disappearing. “We have an entire era of cinema that is in grave danger of being lost,” says screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, a member of the board of directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation. His fellow board member, historian Leonard Maltin, suggests that this era could suffer the same fate that befell many silent pictures and B-movies of the mid-century. “Those films were not paid attention to at the time, and they were not properly archived because they were not products of the major studios,” he says.
In part, the digital crisis faced by independent filmmakers can be traced back to inadequate storage guarantees. (Countless hard drives and drives are forgotten, only aging and spoiling, in closets, under beds and on garage shelves.) But it also speaks to the fragile ecosystem that ostensibly supports filmmakers, from expanding financiers to Ephemeral distributors. “They’re worried about getting the project going and getting it off the ground; there’s not a lot of attention paid to proper preservation,” says Gregory Lucco, head of the Library of Congress’s National Center for Audiovisual Preservation, which now works to digitize physical media.
The sheer volume of digital material now available can be overwhelming, both from a practical standpoint (accumulating storage costs) and from an organizational standpoint. But it was also a blessing. In the world of non-scripted non-fiction material, there is often a new wealth of excerpts, advance interviews, and with scripted features, episodes, and scenes that have never been released theatrically or made their television debut but provide an invaluable understanding of the development of the work. “When all we focus on is the final product, we miss the creative process,” explains Mai Hong Hadong, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Those in the conservation community say it’s better in terms of time and cost to have proper protocols in place in advance. (Often, it doesn’t.) “It’s a different budget and a different model when it’s done later,” says Lance Buddell, senior vice president at Iron Mountain Entertainment Services, a data storage and retrieval company. “Going back and creating something that is searchable, retrievable and locateable is a more expensive and time-consuming process than if you had done it out of the gate. There is a loss of institutional memory because the people involved in making the work often no longer exist.
The Science and Technology Board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has spent years worrying about the issue. However, Andy Maltz, who co-authored the Council’s reports on the subject and is now a director at the public intelligence consulting firm, points out that the situation is “not as bad as it used to be, the industry has really improved.” This includes the development and increasing use of the Academy’s color coding system, which is used to communicate colors and other information.
Andrea Callas, senior vice president of asset management at Paramount, who leads preservation initiatives at the SciTech Council, emphasizes that the best practice for preserving digitally shot film is to “have a copy of that final film at the best possible resolution, in the widest color gamut.” , so you have most of the original material associated with that movie.” She adds: “If you’re moving your files to some kind of infrastructure, whether that’s a data center or a set of clouds, people think about storage policies like keeping multiple copies. “There are also people who choose to store things offline as in LTOs,” he said, referring to the tape-based format that has been used for decades. Good old-fashioned – time-tested – film remains in use as well.
Maltz warns that with the digital landscape, heritage preservation efforts cannot stop. “The data you’re protecting needs consistent migration. You can’t really take your eye off the digital ball. That’s why you have backups. It could happen at any time. The odds are very low (of losing a film) – but chances are still there.”
Migration is also necessary as file formats evolve. “If you have a Zip drive containing TARGA files, do you know how to open them today?” asks Alex Forsythe, director of imaging technology at AMPAS, referring to file classification dating back to the 1980s, which has since been eclipsed by newer, more efficient methodologies. “I don’t think anyone expects these file formats to last for dozens of years, let alone 50 years.”
Some conservationists are more optimistic. Larry Blake, a longtime audio supervisor and post-production consultant for Steven Soderbergh who is writing a book on digital preservation issues, believes concerns about the evolution of formats are overblown. “I’m not worried that the Library of Congress won’t have the intelligence to decrypt it in a century,” he says. “No matter how standards change, DCP (Unified File Package Format) is not going away,” he said, adding: “Also, there are other ways to survive the cockroaches, such as maintaining an image sequence of 150,000 TIFF files, numbered sequentially, for an image. Then a corresponding extension of the sounds of the broadcast wave of sound. You give any archive that, and it is a game, a set, a match.
Experts hope that evolving technology will help rather than hinder, and often point to the idea that artificial intelligence may soon aid in rediscovery. “This is going to be a game-changer,” says Arthur Forney, head of post-production at Wolf Entertainment. His colleague, Mark Dragin, is a supervising producer for three of the company’s productions Law and order series, notes that Special Victims Unit It begins in 1999, and is set on film, so pulling off a flashback — say, star Mariska Hargitay pursuing an old case — can be daunting, especially if it’s an excerpt. “This could speed up finding that needle in the haystack,” he says.
This story first appeared in the March 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
