There is nothing like
going to a theater,
a communal atmosphere,
watching something
that is bigger than life.
It's dark...
You don't look at anybody...
And then the movie started
and it was really,
really magical.
I went to a movie at 10
in the morning,
which to me was so odd, right?
Who goes to a movie at 10?
But there was light, there was drama,
there was narrative
and I think what I most loved was the way
the filmmaker was present,
saying "Here, take a look at this,
think about that."
We were all an eight-year-old boy.
We were all a 10-year-old girl.
We were all sitting there in that audience
watching whatever that movie was.
It became a magical experience.
You go into the dark
and you learn something new
and you come out
and it's almost
like a religious experience.
If you want a window
into what was going on...
in humankind at a given point in time,
you look at movies.
It gave me the sense that...
I was more
than just this little boy,
and there was a lot of other things
out there that I could do.
And if I just kept going
in the right direction,
maybe the right thing would happen.
Because that's what happened
in the movies.
It's heavy.
What is it?
The, uh...
Stuff that dreams are made of.
Huh?
Media giant Ted Turner
has upset a lot of people,
because of what he's doing
to some of Hollywood's greatest old films.
Turner recently
bought the M.G.M. film library.
Now, he's adding color
to the black and white ones.
To colorize or not to colorize,
Ted Turner has said is his choice.
Well, last time I checked,
they were my films.
You know, I'm working on my films.
Let us just say that a very rich man
has purchased all the films
ever made in Hollywood.
He calls together his staff and says,
"take all the black and white ones
and turn them into color,
using our new computer."
It was kind of an artists' rights issue
involving material alteration of films,
such as colorization,
panning and scanning,
that sort of thing.
It was a big controversy between directors
who don't like to see their films changed
and studios who were looking to take, say,
black and white films
and introduce them to a new generation
by, they thought, colorizing them
would make them more appealing.
Colorization
really was the combustible issue
because a lot of film critics,
as well as the directors...
and the cinematographers and the actors
were all so incensed at these changes,
especially the possibility of changes to,
you know, classic films.
Because the films are a part
of our cultural history,
and like all accurate representations of
who and what we were,
I think they deserve preservation
in their authentic form.
The committee rooms were packed...
and when you get Jimmy Stewart coming,
you know, Mr. Smith literally
coming to Washington,
you know, I was just sitting there,
sort of admiring the whole scene.
I feel that they're being
tampered with...
and I...
I want to speak out against this.
The Librarian of Congress got the idea
that if film was honored...
in some way by the national government,
that it would be recognized
as having cultural and artistic value.
Today, the congress is taking up a bill
called the National Film Preservation Act.
Congress finally stepped in
and we were kind of...
the person brought in
to referee it if we could.
And that was essentially
the creation of the National Film Registry.
The National Film Registry
is a list of films...
of enduring cultural, historical
and aesthetic importance,
recommended to the Librarian of Congress
by a very distinguished board.
25 films are announced each year
as being added to that registry.
1989, the first year of the board meeting,
was very much focused
on the artists' rights issues.
And then after that,
it seemed very quickly to fade.
The issue became preservation,
and which films should be
awarded the seal
of the national film preservation board.
This process
serves as an invaluable means
to advance public awareness
of the richness and variety
of the American film heritage.
This is not simply
just another list of great films.
It is saying to America
and to the world,
"These films matter."
What the film registry says
is "Here are great works of art."
They were created in a commercial context
but we need to preserve them the way...
the metropolitan museum
preserves Leonardo da Vinci's.
One of the nice things
about the National Film Registry...
is that it's not only preserving our films,
but it's also, to a large extent,
preserving our cultural heritage,
and all the things that film capture.
If you look at the advent
of movies from the 1890s forward,
they were in many ways
the most important force...
for shaping a common sense
of American culture.
There was a time
when people in Southern California
didn't have much in common
with the people in Maine
and the people in Florida had
virtually nothing in common
with the people in the Pacific Northwest,
and it's movies
that came along that began...
to create the sense of nationhood.
The American film was
a particular way in which a young nation...
learned to express itself,
express its exuberance,
expose its problems,
reflect its hopes.
It was living history,
audio-visual history
of the 20th century.
Movies have been the document
of our history and culture.
They tell us what we looked like,
what we wore, what we aspired to,
our dreams,
the lies we told to one another...
Because in those movies
are those little gestures
and those little images
and the styles and the...
ways of speaking to each other,
the way men spoke to women...
and women to women
and men to men and...
and the way they projected their
own dreams and desires...
into narratives and fantasies.
That is what the movies does,
and it does it better than
anything else.
American film really tells us
so much about this country.
When it starts with
storytelling about individuals,
underdogs,
immigrants,
people who don't have something.
I saw that film
when I was still in Hong Kong
when I was a teenager.
I think it gave me
a sense of America.
Life can be bright in America
if you can fight in America
Life is all right in America
if you're all white in America...
The lyrics to that song,
they're really quite sarcastic
about being an immigrant in America.
That movie was a huge influence on me
when I was a teenager.
I mean, I probably saw it
five or six times in a row.
I was also in love with Natalie Wood.
That helped.
You never really understand a person
until you consider things
from his point of view.
Sir?
Till you climb inside of his skin
and walk around in it.
Gregory Peck was kind of...
what I thought America was
in many kind of respects.
In this country,
our courts
are the great levelers.
In our courts...
All men are...
created equal.
That's the America that my father
respected most...
in that kind of man that Gregory Peck
was always meant to play.
We identified so strongly
with those kids somehow.
Oh, it's just, like, instant tears.
It still gets me, still makes me cry now.
He really portrayed
a father who was just...
so understanding and had such a close
relationship with his kids.
A lot of people...
would love to have a father like that.
I mean, who wouldn't?
I would love to have a father like that.
Many of the characteristics that my dad
portrayed in that film are really him.
Of all the films that he did,
it was a film
that was closest to his true character,
certainly the character he...
he would want to be.
It's a different form of honor than
getting an academy award.
It's a more cumulative
or retrospective kind of honor.
It's saying your film
has stood the test of time.
There's never been a day so sunny
it could not happen twice...
The Academy Awards preserve...
the consensus within
the industry at the time.
Sometimes history proves them right,
but very often,
history proves them wrong.
Most lists exist nowadays
for pop culture reasons.
It's an excuse for a TV special.
It's to sell magazines.
It's to get people arguing,
and that's what lists do.
The congressional language
setting up the registry was done...
by congressional staff back in
1988 and they used...
"culturally, historically
or aesthetically significant,"
which, we love that phrase because
it basically means almost anything.
Whoever came up with it,
I forget the person's name, the staffer,
but I'm forever thankful
because it does allow...
a lot of leverage in terms of
the sort of films we're able to pick
and put onto the registry and preserve.
Because of the 10-year rule,
we look at only films
that are 10 years old,
and that gives us
some space and some time.
And I tell ya what.
From his footprint,
he looks like a big fella.
You see something down there, chief?
No, I just think I'm gonna barf.
Why the 10 years?
Why not 50?
Why not five?
Why not one that just opened?
But I suppose it's to have
a little bit of a distance, which is proper.
Does the film have a lasting benefit?
Does it stand to history?
The idea is that here
is an arm of the U.S. government
saying that,
hey, some films are important.
They're part of the picture.
So you immediately confer upon them
a certain status and dignity.
Each year we do try to fashion
an eclectic list,
one that is also stand-alone
on its own merits.
If we pick 25 famous films one year
or 25 films no one had ever heard of each year,
then the list, to us,
would be a lot less useful.
The way we pick the national film registry
each year is a multi-stage process.
We start off by soliciting
public balloting.
So we take very seriously
what the public recommends.
They often recommend things
that nobody's even heard of.
We tabulate those results...
and send them to the members
of the film preservation board.
Each year a group of people,
representing all areas
of the industry and education
come together and recommend
to the Librarian of Congress
the films of enduring cultural, historical,
aesthetic importance.
People have their personal
campaigns, their pet films,
their pet causes,
and that's as it should be.
Having gone through the obvious choices...
Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane.
Rosebud.
Then the less obvious films
come up for discussion,
and that's where
the discussions get interesting.
This was really a good meeting,
and I've been on this board
since its inception.
In the early years, you knew
there were certain kinds of movies...
that were the sprocket-worn classics,
the great films,
they would be on the list,
and then you'd put in a couple more
that you hoped you would expand people's
consciousness about.
It's great to be on the board
because there are so many people
from different aspects of film
and scholarship
and everything related to film,
and they bring up films, you know,
that I always write them down
because I go, "Oh, I haven't seen this.
I'll have to go see it."
I'm a fairly new board member.
In the beginning,
it is overwhelming.
There are hundreds of films
that are talked about.
The discussions can range...
from being
very lighthearted to very serious.
They have people talking
about home movies,
people talking about newsreels,
people talking about
short films of various kinds.
And it's always
one of the most interesting moments
to see what has been chosen.
And as you go through, you think...
"Well, of course that.
I can't believe it wasn't chosen before."
And then you'll come to something
and say... "What?"
'cause this is thriller
thriller night,
and no one's gonna save you...
Now it really is American history.
Michael Jackson's iconic video, Thriller,
was named today...
to the National Film Registry
at the Library of Congress,
the first music video ever
to receive that honor.
Thriller,
thriller...
The nice thing about the list is
it's all over the place. It's democratic.
You're tearing me apart!
I vote for films
that I think are culturally significant,
and sometimes I vote for films
that I think
even films that...
I don't particularly like,
I will vote for it because I think
they have a special place in film history.
I certainly felt,
as a cultural historian myself,
that this was an important part
of American culture
and that it had to be preserved not simply
so that our grandkids could enjoy
the same films that we did,
but also so that they could understand
what America was like at an earlier stage.
Dr. Billington, the Librarian,
said something very profound
a little while ago.
He said that stories unite people.
Theories divide them.
So that in itself is a wonderful reason
to preserve stories.
Stories are profoundly important
to human beings.
500 years from now,
people will look back and they'll say,
"This was the beginning.
This was the first 100 years.
These were the origins.
Why didn't they take better care of them?"
And the "they" they're talking about...
is us.
Film is the art form of the 20th century,
and we have let it go?
The studios stored the films badly
and they deteriorated, they burned.
They didn't think of them as an art form.
Half of the movies made before 1950
no longer exist in any form whatsoever.
Maybe 80% or so of the silent era
is gone.
So much of film history
has already been lost,
but there's still a very great deal
which can be saved if we're willing to do it.
It's really amazing
to pick up a roll of film
and just to see this and realize
the age of this film
and all the people who went into making it
and just to look at the images on it.
All these people who worked on these things
who are all gone now,
but they've left behind
these amazing shadows...
for us to enjoy.
I always keep a little memento
of my beginning here at my desk.
This is a Castle Films...
headline edition, California bound.
It's actually a three-minute clip
from the W.C. Fields film,
it's a gift, where they go
to this rich man's estate
and the family basically has a picnic
on the lawn and makes a mess.
Look out where you're going!
Oh! Look what you've done!
She ran right in front of the car!
When I first saw W.C. Fields in this film,
his humor, his sort of laconic behavior
and kind of slovenliness,
it spoke to me
as a man and as a human being.
- Stop it!
- Oh, you idiot.
Those were my mother's feathers.
Stop it.
Never knew your mother had feathers.
Probably the most amazing
and unique thing about the Packard campus
is that it is part of
the Library of Congress.
We are fortunate
in that we get a part of a budget...
from Congress every year
and part of that budget,
and a fairly good-sized chunk,
goes to preservation.
In the late 1890s,
the nitrocellulose film was developed.
The... sort of uniqueness of...
of the nitrate film
is why they actually have a manager
for just the nitrate film collection.
So much of the nitrate film collection
is unknown,
so we are constantly working on the collection
to try and identify those little bits of film
that might be something really important,
but we have no idea what they are.
The major problem with nitrate
is that it is very flammable.
And when I say "very flammable",
I mean it is very flammable.
It is like setting a fuse
on a piece of dynamite.
We continued using nitrate
up until the 1950s,
when the triacetate safety came out
and was deemed just or almost as good
as the nitrate film that preceded it.
Well, this is my little world here.
We call this "nitrate land."
These are the nitrate vaults
of the Library of Congress.
We have 124 climate-controlled vaults.
They're maintained
at about 39 degrees fahrenheit,
about 30% relative humidity.
Within these vaults, we have...
130,000, approximately,
rolls of nitrate motion picture film
dating from about 1894 to about 1952.
It is a truly amazing collection
and one of a kind.
See what else we got here.
Nah...
P-eww!
this is our triage area of films that...
the other staff find
that are questionable,
and they're brought to me
to do inspection on. This is a can...
of small fragments.
Normally, with a film
you should be able to,
like, it should give somewhat
and be somewhat loosely wound.
This one is solid as a rock.
This is what we refer to
as a hockey puck.
It has been wet.
It is probably very stuck together,
so I'm going to see
if I can at least peel something off
to tell what it was...
ah!
Oh... darn.
Look at that... wow.
Through a variety of reasons, through...
basic neglect or...
deterioration especially,
many of our early films, and actually
some more recent ones, are lost forever.
I mean, there's nothing left.
I know of one Academy Award winning film
called The Patriot
and all that survives on it
are a few trailers and stills.
The other reason a lot of them
don't survive, of course,
is just because the studios
didn't really care about 'em.
They were just product, and once
they were done and made their money,
they went on the shelf.
One studio destroyed all their
silent negatives in the '40s because
they didn't think anyone was ever
going to want to see them again.
I got involved in film archiving
'cause I saw Gone with the Wind when I was 12.
And to think that I might have a part
in somebody, some other 12-year-old girl
seeing a movie that changes their life
is really exciting to me.
I volunteered at the library
for a month before I applied for a job
and while I was volunteering,
Warner Brothers was doing a restoration
of Gone with the Wind,
and sure enough, I walked into
one of the back rooms one day
to find a stack of negatives
and I got really excited
and I remember running
into a couple people's offices,
I mean, like, "Look at this! Look at this!"
And they knew exactly why I was excited
'cause they'd found their favorite movies
and had the same feeling.
My favorite part of the job
is spending a whole day saving a film,
you know, a film that comes
in that's torn and no one can watch
and it's up to me to make sure that
it gets to a point where
it can be rescued.
It's kind of like a lost puppy that...
needs to be taken care of.
Ah, nice.
Nice splice job... oh...
Is it a piece of...?
Oh, that's great.
So we have a piece of scotch tape
that someone just...
stuck on the film to repair a rip.
...that's my job and to know
that because of me spending hours
staring at tiny frames and working with,
you know, small pieces of tape,
that future generations are gonna see it,
is very exciting.
A friend of mine had a 16-millimeter print.
He said, "you have to see this film.
I want you to see this film.
It's, like, this amazing film."
There were no DVDs in those days,
no videotapes, nothing.
I had a Bell & Howell projector,
I put the film on, I watched it and I went...
"Oh, my God!"
Yay!
Hello, Bedford Falls!
- Merry Christmas!
- Merry Christmas, George!
Merry Christmas, George!
What struck me more than anything
was the emotion of it. I cried.
Is this the ear you can't hear on?
George Bailey,
I'll love you till the day I die.
I'm going out exploring someday...
you watch.
I cried when Jimmy Stewart grabbed her
and they were listening to the phone together
and he grabbed her and it was one take.
No cutaways, one take, and said...
Now, you listen to me.
I don't want any plastics
and I don't want any ground floors
and I don't want to get married ever
to anyone... you understand that?
I wanna do what I wanna do,
and you're... and you're...
Oh, Mary... Mary...
George, George, George...
It is my favorite film
because it's a film that
celebrates the value of life,
and there is nothing greater than us all
appreciating the value of our lives
and other lives.
...Auld Lang Syne
We'll drink a cup
of kindness yet
for Auld Lang Syne.
Film should be an experience.
Reality outside the frame
is your everyday life.
The reality inside the frame
is whatever you want to create it to be.
Some films definitely give you
access to a dream world.
I think musicals probably do that
better than most.
Follow the yellow brick road.
Follow the yellow brick road.
Follow the yellow brick road,
follow the yellow brick road
follow, follow...
It immediately takes you out of reality.
It's something that
could only happen in your dreams,
but that doesn't make it less worthwhile.
In fact, for me
it frequently makes it more worthwhile.
It's not a place
you can get to by a boat or a train.
It's far, far away.
I would watch Wizard of Oz
every day when I was two.
I had a really hard time understanding...
that I couldn't go into the film,
'cause it felt so real to me.
Somewhere
over the rainbow...
It's a wonderful universal story.
I mean, if you look at the Wizard of Oz,
It takes a reality,
which is the beginning of the movie,
and it turns it into a mythology.
...dreams that you dare
to dream really do come true.
You know,
all great storytelling is a form of myth.
Tap your heels together three times...
And think to yourself,
"There's no place like home."
The Wizard of Oz
is still my all-time favorite movie
probably for the wrong reasons.
I never got why Dorothy
wanted to go home.
Why would she want to go home,
when she could live
with winged monkeys and witches?
I don't know, I never understood it.
I was sobbing when she went home...
to that dreary farm.
This was a real, truly live place.
And I remember that some of it
wasn't very nice,
but most of it was beautiful.
I've always been an aficionado
of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
The truth is, speculative fiction
has always informed us about who we are.
If you go back
to Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
it was a parable about...
about McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
They have to be destroyed...
all of them!
They will be,
every one of them.
Listen, we're gonna have to search
every building, every house in town.
Men, women and children
are gonna have to be examined.
We've got some phoning to do.
Filmmakers were able to make
that film and send a message...
without having it be a message movie.
It's a malignant disease
spreading through the whole country.
Initially those films were relegated
to B-movies or even Z-movies.
They weren't given
any kind of critical acclaim.
They generally
weren't big commercial successes.
Are you crazy?!
Ya big idiot!
They're here already!
You're next!
I think I'm not
so much a fan of science fiction per se
as I am a fan of cinema that creates worlds,
that creates an entire alternate universe
that you can escape into
for a couple of hours.
The first time
that I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey,
I was completely blown away.
It made me think about mankind,
the future of mankind even the past...
where we came from, where are we going?
And the special effects
were absolutely magnificent,
and it was a film to take seriously,
not a film that was disposable.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
You could truly lose yourself
in that cinematic experience,
really opening up a way of
looking at reality completely differently.
I've always enjoyed films
that reward multiple viewings,
films that if you chose to come back
and look at them again,
you might see something else in them.
It does transport you
to an entirely different time and space,
and to me it does it so well
that I lose myself entirely.
I'm in a dream world
when I'm watching Blade Runner.
Each frame, each shot is full of
the most extraordinary detail.
It's really too much to take in
on a first viewing,
and it requires subsequent viewings to...
to sort of orient yourself in...
in the world of that film
and see all of the different layers
that went into the fulfillment
of that grand design.
I think for my generation,
there isn't a filmmaker
working in Hollywood,
certainly... who can deny
the influence of the Star Wars films.
The first experience
that I had with Star Wars was...
the summer that it came out.
We went to the Coronet theater
in San Francisco and there was a line...
the biggest line I'd ever seen
as a kid around the block.
The lights go down and I didn't really know
what to expect whatsoever.
Huge musical hit
and the Star Wars logo goes back and then
the scrolling of the text happens and...
and I began
to sort of just become mesmerized.
And then the moment that
Star Destroyer comes overhead,
that just seemed like
a forever moment.
I just kept watching
and watching and watching, thinking...
"this is the biggest spaceship
I've ever seen."
To top it all off, by the time
Darth Vader makes his appearance,
people started to boo
and started to hiss at Darth Vader,
and I just thought,
"This is... what is going on here?"
There's something more that
this movie in particular has to offer.
It simply opened up
a feeling of reality in science fiction.
The feeling of a completely
thought-through world...
that existed outside the frame.
I think when you look
at the history of movies,
I don't believe there's been as dominant
a cultural milestone in cinema
as that first Star Wars film.
Now, as opposed to being
on the outside watching,
now, I sort of feel like I'm
part of that now.
Remember,
the Force will be with you...
Always.
The world that he created
is something you had never seen before
and you just wanted to be
with those characters in that world.
I was so blown away,
but I always felt like,
I wanna do that in animation.
- Halt, who goes there?
- Don't shoot! It's ok!
Friends.
- Do you know these life forms?
- Yes! They're Andy's toys.
All right, everyone.
You're clear to come up.
I am Buzz Lightyear.
I come in peace.
Oh, I'm so glad you're not a dinosaur!
It's all I ever wanted to do, you know?
My true love was cartoons,
even when it was uncool, right?
When you're supposed to be into girls
or cars or sports or things like that,
I would run home after school
to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons
and always pray that
it would be a Chuck Jones cartoon.
Kill the wabbit?
The films that have been
the most influential on my career,
are the films of Walt Disney...
Snow White,
Pinocchio,
I can walk!
Fantasia,
["Waltz of the Flowers" playing...]
I think that Fantasia does represent
sort of the pinnacle of animation
of its time.
["Night on Bald Mountain" playing...]
...and I was actually just looking at
"Night on Bald Mountain" the other day
because there's beautiful,
beautiful fire animation.
Animating fire is not easy, and...
I don't even know
how the animators did it.
In animation, you can do anything...
and then the first time you see something
that you drew come to life,
you are addicted
because it's like magic.
When you see something
that you drew move,
that is a mind-blowing experience.
I remember when I was 12 or 13,
and I saw my first super-8 animation move
and it was like...
I wanna say it's better than sex, but
I'd never had sex when I was 12, right?
But it was just incredible.
We knew we were making
the first computer-animated feature film,
but the main focus
was the story and the characters.
Walt Disney always said for every laugh,
there should be a tear,
and it's something that is so important
to me in my filmmaking, is that heart,
'cause I believe that's something
that stays with an audience
much longer than the jokes
have gotten old,
but that heart will always stay there.
You know how you feel
when you first watched these movies
and it brings a tear to your eye.
Absolutely, animation belongs...
on any list of culturally significant works.
Animation... is art.
When one looks through the list of films
that have been selected over time,
what one is struck by most of all...
is the extraordinary diversity
of the kinds of movies.
It isn't just Hollywood films.
It's films that
document America's life and...
America's heritage.
There's a wonderful film that was named
to the Registry a few years ago.
It's a piece of amateur filmmaking
made by the wife of a doctor in a sort of
agricultural town in Minnesota in the '30s,
and she went around photographing
what the place looked like.
Well, this is wonderful. It's like watching
a bunch of live Edward Hopper and Charles
Sheeler canvases come to life, you know?
Who knew?
So there's a film that...
very specifically preserves
a niche in a corner of American life.
There is some sense of sadness
and poignancy.
It's part of our history,
it's part of our family history.
It's the history of a people,
history of our country.
One of the most tragic,
yet fascinating
moments in our country's history
was the mass internment...
of 120,000 Japanese-Americans.
Overnight,
American citizens of Japanese ancestry
were looked at with fear and suspicion,
simply because we looked like the people
who bombed Pearl Harbor.
Mass hysteria took over the country,
and President Roosevelt ordered...
120,000 people taken from their homes,
moved within three days
and put in internment camps
throughout the country.
I still remember that day
when two American soldiers
with bayonets on their rifles
came stomping up...
to the front door of that house
and ordered our family out.
And I remember my mother had tears
streaming down her cheek...
as we moved out.
It became normal for me
to begin the school day
in a black tar paper barrack
with a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.
I could see the barbed wire fence
and the sentry towers
right outside my schoolhouse window
as I recited the words...
"with liberty and justice for all."
I have a nine-year-old daughter
and I want her to be able to experience
and see what these camps looked like.
I think when you talk about
the history of an experience,
you can't really feel it
unless you can see it and visualize it.
My father is Dave Masaharu Tatsuno
and he was responsible for the film Topaz,
which documents life in an internment camp
during World War II.
That's my mother holding me in the desert.
It wasn't meant to be a documentary.
He was just trying
to do a family film for us.
What has come to be known as his film,
was really just a portrayal
of life in the camps,
of the daily struggles
that people experienced
and it captured for all time
something that America
didn't want anyone to see.
Home movies are so important.
They show our history
of our family, of our community,
of our country.
That's important,
that's very important.
The addition of the Zapruder film,
the home movie that captured
the assassination of John Kennedy,
demonstrates, I think,
at its farthest extent...
that America's film heritage,
its movie heritage...
embraces much, much more
than just a Hollywood feature film.
I think, "This film is real
and it happened during my lifetime."
I saw it, it's ugly, it's sudden,
it's shocking and it's inexplicable,
and the only way that you can recreate
the experience of it, is showing it.
Hey you, come on out of there.
Come on!
Well, I'm a... too many of you
dames gettin' away with it these days.
- The cops in the yards'll take care of you!
- Oh, wait a minute.
You wouldn't throw us
off the train, would you?
- Yeah, and you're gonna get 30 days for it.
- In jail?
Yes, in jail!
Now why don't we sit down
and talk this thing over?
Almost always, the things that people
wanted to cut out of movies... were ideas.
And so you have ideas
being cut out of the original Baby Face
by the New York censors.
That man of mine...
Baby face was really interesting 'cause...
I'd known the film for a long time and
actually, I had a copy of it on laserdisc...
for those who remember
what laserdiscs were.
They asked me to go and check the negative
to see what condition it was in,
and that's when I noticed
that we actually had two negatives.
So I get 'em out,
and I start looking at the two reel ones
and I notice
that there's something strange about them,
so I put the two reel ones down on a table
and set one of top of the other one
and that's when I noticed that, you know,
like the one reel one was this big...
And the other reel one was like this big,
and I'm like,
"There's something going on here."
Say, I like it here.
How about a job?
- Oh, we...
- Oh, now don't tell me
in this great big building
there ain't some place for me.
Have you had any experience?
Plenty.
And I started going through the two negatives
and also listening to the soundtracks
and began finding these differences,
great differences between the two films.
And then he has the Eureka moment
and he realizes that what he has...
is the film before it was edited!
That the five minutes with Barbara Stanwyck
going to the city to use what she has,
you know, to get what she wants
is in there,
and they thought it was lost.
The boss won't be back for an hour.
Well then, why don't we go in
and talk this over?
The original negative was cut
to the censorship version.
The duplicate negative
was the original pre-censored version
that had all the naughty bits still in it,
and that was just... I mean that was just
the find of a lifetime.
Look, here.
Nietzsche says "All life,
no matter how we idealize it,
is nothing more nor less
than exploitation."
That's what I'm telling you.
Exploit yourself!
Go to some big city
where you will find opportunities.
Use men!
Be strong!
Defiant!
Use men
to get the things you want!
The version that was discovered...
puts some of the sex back,
but it puts a lot of the philosophy back.
Yeah.
The New York censors altered
the sharpness of the philosophical thrust
for the release version because they
were afraid that it would offend people.
What chance has a woman got?
More chance than men.
A woman... young, beautiful like you are...
could get anything she wants in the world
But there is a right and a wrong way.
Remember the price of the wrong way
is too great.
Go to some big city
where you will find opportunities.
Don't let people mislead you.
You must be a master,
not a slave.
Be clean, be strong, defiant.
And you will be a success.
You always hear about these things
but they never survive.
Yeah.
And to this day, I don't think
we've found out exactly why...
this negative survives
and why on this particular film,
they actually made this duplicate negative
before they cut the film.
You can make a movie, by the way,
that endorses conventional morality,
that's not the problem.
The problem is that
it was not sincere, it's not real.
And in the case of Baby Face,
when it really said what it wanted to say,
of course, it's better.
That is why censorship is so horrible.
Because censorship
blocks the free expression of an era
talking to another era.
For the most part, most films that are made
are entertainment
and that's all they're meant to be
and I think there's a, an...
unfortunate sense people have that
all films are just films.
Well, I think the shining example
of something that
is a folk fantasy and commercial
and art is probably Godfather.
I used to live in Bayside, Queens,
and there's
a local theater there, R.K.O. Keith's,
which was an old,
kind of ornate theater,
that had the skylights
and the stars and had the balcony...
and that's where I had first seen
The Godfather played in that theater.
And it played great,
it sounded great, it looked great.
Eh... now you come to me and you say,
"Don Corleone, give me justice."
But you don't ask with respect.
You don't offer friendship.
You don't even think
to call me Godfather.
Somehow, with the performances of
all the actors, especially Brando,
hit that neural cord that we all have
and there was a visceral reaction
from almost anyone who saw it.
The cinematographer
on The Godfather, Gordon Willis,
one of the great
cinematographers of our time,
did a very, very daring thing
when he photographed those pictures.
Gordon decided...
that he didn't want people
messing about with his image
and he shot it in a way
that you couldn't print it
in any other way
than the way that he shot it.
You can get the color wrong,
you can make skin green if you want to,
but it's gotta be printed dark.
I'm glad you came, Mike.
I hope we can straighten everything out.
The original negatives of Godfather I
and Godfather II were not in good condition,
were not capable of making new copies,
and they really needed a restoration.
The negative of that film was in tatters.
And this is The Godfather,
this is... this is The Godfather.
This is a film, you know,
I think people consider...
if not maybe the greatest film of all time,
one of them.
A lot of prints were made
from that original negative,
more so than
probably should have been made.
The negative sustained some injury,
as any negative that gets overused will.
The more popular the film,
the worse condition
the original negative is going to be in.
It's been loved to death.
It's not until the past 15,
maybe as far as 20 years,
that the studios have realized
what they have stacked away in their vaults.
They really didn't realize
that these golden treasures that
they had in their vaults and hence,
they weren't looked after very well.
The beauty of this job is that
once you start working on these films
and you start getting to explore them
scene by scene, shot by shot, frame by frame,
you get to see little things,
little nuances, little pieces of the puzzle...
and your appreciation for the film
just explodes.
We're not creating anything.
What we're doing is to try
and take what people made
and just preserve it and make it look like
what it was supposed to look like.
The trick is not to change it.
Don Corleone.
The thing about movies,
it's about storytelling.
And the story that it tells
still today stands up very strong.
At first, you think, "Oh, God,
this is gonna be the same 20 movies.
We're gonna have on here Casablanca,
we're gonna have the obvious ones, right'?"
You do have them.
But then you have some that are surprising.
I said...
"Relax and don't say anything,
I just want to talk about a film
which I'm sure has never been
brought up at the board."
How do you do-ah?
See you've met my
faithful handyman...
People are gonna say,
"You must be, you must be crazy.
The film's lacking in taste,
it's this, it's that."
But at the same time,
here's a film that's played at midnight
in theaters across the country for 30 years.
There's a reason why The Rocky Horror Show
is a popular film.
Well, if it's that popular,
it must be speaking somehow to this country.
There must be something woven
into what makes that film work.
...one hell of a lover
I'm just a sweet transvestite
from...
And I have to sympathize with Dr. Billington
because he has to go...
to the halls of Congress
and tell everyone one...
"one of the 25 films
is The Rocky Horror Show.
It's this great film!
It's about transvestites
and men from Mars
and dancing hunchbacks."
I don't know how he does it.
Well, it...
It certainly widened my horizon.
With your hands on your hips
Bring your knees in tight...
Honestly, when you're dealing
with a wide variety,
you have to be open to a wide variety.
Rocky Horror Picture Show is the...
the most successful midnight movie ever,
way more than Pink Flamingos ever was.
Let's do the time warp
again.
I'll tell you a story about it.
A woman came up to me
and she said, "I saw you sitting here,
and I just had to tell you
that Spinal Tap...
saved my life."
Coming live, direct from hell, Spinal Tap!
You're hot, you take all we've got
Not a dry seat in the house...
No, I'm not gonna tell that story.
No, it was The Princess Bride
that saved her life, so...
Spinal Tap didn't save her life at all.
It was Princess Bride
that saved her life
and I don't think that's on the registry,
but it should be.
...on our way, but tonight
we're gonna rock ya
Tonight I'm gonna rock...
When we first showed it
in a preview in Dallas,
the people came up to me and said,
"Why would you make a movie about a band
that nobody's heard of
and a band that's so bad?
Why don't you make a movie
about the Rolling Stones?"
So it took a while for people
to catch up to it, but once they did,
it became this kind of...
iconic representation
of the world of rock and roll.
What we do is if we need that
extra push over the cliff,
you know what we do?
- Put it up to 11.
- 11, exactly.
I love This Is Spinal Tap.
It takes the things that are...
naturally humorous about that lifestyle
and exaggerates them.
- One louder.
- Why don't you just make 10 louder,
and make 10 be the top...
number and make that a little louder?
These go to 11.
Oh, Ma
Oh,...
I never would have heard of this...
a very early sound film demonstration
which is a quacking duck.
Oh, Ma!
One can look at Gus Visser
and you can think...
"What is the aesthetic value?
That might be hard to justify."
It's there because it demonstrates
an important breakthrough...
in the technology of the history
of motion pictures.
It was brought to our attention
and we watched it and said...
"We have to have this,
it's a sound film demonstration.
And it's hysterical."
It's a film you can't really describe...
How he makes the duck quack.
He's kissing me.
I will say that
when I was looking at the movies
that are on the National Film Registry,
I was pleasantly surprised
that Blazing Saddles was on there.
Blazing Saddles
was basically nominated by a reporter
who has done a lot of articles
on the Registry and preservation.
Blazing Saddles
has a special place in my heart.
I love the myth of the American West.
I like cowboys, I like cowboy stories,
I like cowboy poetry.
I like Roy Rogers,
- I like dances with wolves.
- ...Two...
...Three!
That myth of the American West
is the myth of America.
But Blazing Saddles takes that myth
and twists it and turns it on its head.
It also takes the moviemaking myth
and twists it and turns it on its head.
Raisinets!
And finally, the Board said,
"Well, he may have a point."
And the rest is history.
To see Blazing Saddles on there was...
was a little bit of vindication for me,
that I didn't waste my time in college
watching that movie so many times.
I wasn't wasting my time.
I was enriching myself with film history.
- Why don't you let him go by?
- Well, he wants the whole road.
Now, look, all I'm trying to say is
there are lots of things that a man can do
and in society's eyes it's all hunky dory.
A woman does the same thing the same,
mind you-- and she's an outcast.
- Finished?
- No.
One of the most important things
that I can do
with my role on the Board
is to keep
the contribution of women to film history
in the center of our discussions.
We had to write reports
on what we wanted to be
and the boy next to me wrote a composition
on how he was gonna be a movie director.
And I got so angry at him,
because movies seemed too good for us,
like they came
from magical people in Hollywood and...
here he was, the guy that cheated off
of me during the tests and...
how could he be a movie director?
And then I thought,
"Well, I must be this angry...
because that's what really,
what I want to do."
Awesome!
Totally awesome!
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
is one of my favorite films.
Not the favorite, you know,
but when Sean Penn
ordered the pizza into the classroom...
- Who ordered the double cheese and sausage?
- Right here, dude.
...I thought, "This is the best moment
in American film history," actually.
Very few people know
about the extent
of the involvement of women...
in early film culture
in the United States.
Half of all films in the silent era
were written by women.
All of the top screenwriters
were women.
The highest paid screenwriters
were all women.
And many of the top directors
were women.
It was a growing industry.
It was the popular mass medium.
People were going to the film
every single day.
So, there were incredible opportunities
for women in Hollywood.
Lois Weber is an extraordinary figure
in American film history
and she's somebody who
very few people know about.
Everybody's heard of D.W. Griffith,
everybody's heard of Cecil B. Demille
and in the 1910s,
Weber was often mentioned
alongside Griffith and Demille...
as the three great minds of filmmaking.
She was Universal's top director.
And she was a top director
who made socially engaged films
about the key problems of the day.
The film that's in the film registry,
"Where Are My Children?",
is a film about birth control and abortion
and it was Universal's top moneymaker
of 1916.
It traveled all around the world.
Not only did she make these films
about really difficult...
issues that we're still grappling with
as a culture,
she made popular, box office successes.
When you start looking at the studio era,
the '30s and '40s and beyond,
then you really do see gender bias.
Then it really becomes
nearly impossible for women to direct.
When I was in graduate school
at U.S.C. Cinema,
a group of us organized
a small screening series called...
Films by Great Women Directors
and somebody wrote
across the sign "There are none."
Often when you're working with the studios,
they'll give you a list
of pre-approved directors
and you'll find that there
are very few, if,
in many cases,
no women directors on the list.
Dorothy Arzner is the only woman...
to work as a director in the studio era
in the '30s and '40s.
That's an extraordinary accomplishment.
She would also joke
that she was one of the guys.
She used to dress like a man,
she used to hang about with the guys,
she used to behave like the guys,
and she always said,
"that's how I got on in the industry,
'cause I was just one of the guys.
They didn't think about me as being a woman,
I was just a guy directing films."
Dance, Girl, Dance
is a film that takes on,
in an allegorical way,
Hollywood's representation of women.
It's about a dancer who
aspires to be a serious ballet dancer.
She's sort of stuck as the comic act
amidst all this
sexual exploitation of women and...
the climax of the film
occurs when she stops
in the middle of her performance...
and looks straight at the audience,
which means she looks straight at the camera
and she says...
I know you want me to tear my clothes off
so you can look your 50 cents' worth.
50 cents for the privilege of staring
at a girl the way your wives won't let you.
I'm sure they see through you
just like we do.
It's an extraordinary moment, in which
we, as the audience, are confronted
and asked to think about
what we routinely see...
in movies which is
the sexual objectification of women.
Weber and Arzner
were very different women...
who made very different kinds of films
in very different contexts,
but if I think about it,
what maybe unites them is that...
they had a unique and singular vision
of what they could do
that just allowed them to persevere.
It's really important to have
female filmmakers because
women have a different perspective
on the world, on our culture, on life.
Women filmmakers,
we have an awful lot to bring
to the screen.
There are not a whole lot of us
and we have this nurturing quality
and we have often a different point of view,
a way of seeing the world,
a different way of placing characters
or placing the camera,
so let's play around with that,
let's experiment and that's...
and I did that with
Daughters of the Dust.
And for a lot of people, it worked
And for a lot of people, they said...
"Whoa, what is this?"
"What are you doing?"
And it was like, "I'm exploring
and I'm telling a story... my way."
I was involved
in getting Back to the Future
put on the Film Registry.
What did I tell you'?!
88 Miles per hour!
I went to the fans.
Back to the future
is one of my favorite movies.
I had used a wonderful website,
BTTF.com,
that was
hosted by a man named Stephen Clark
and I wrote to him and said...
"Look, fan response
is an incredible factor
in getting something
on the Registry
and make your fans write in."
And the response was amazing.
Steve Leggett, who works
with the Film Registry,
said that he had
so many e-mails every day,
hundreds of e-mails coming in,
and it was...
the first time that there had been
such an overwhelming response...
to getting one film on from people
outside of the Library of Congress.
It's found its way
into the popular culture so much,
and the fact that you can now buy
a flux capacitor online...
and people will buy them... is saying
something about the impact of the movie.
My moment of triumph as far as
the National Film Registry is concerned...
I had a couple of different ones
that I put on there.
The one film that I actually got chosen
is a little film called...
Let's all go to the lobby,
let's all go to the lobby
let's all go to the lobby
to get ourselves a treat...
A little film made by
the Filmack company up in Chicago.
And it's a bumper
that goes in between the movies
to get you
to go to the candy counter.
The sparkling drinks are just dandy
The chocolate bars and the candy
So let's all go to the...
lobby,
duh, duh, duddiluh, duh, duh.
But I looked at it and was like...
"This is such an
important little piece of film."
Everybody knows it,
everybody's seen it.
It's the perfect example
of this kind of cinematic advertising
that they were doing.
And it's fun.
So I put it in
and sure enough it got chosen that year.
I was totally blown away.
Let's all go to the lobby
- to get ourselves a treat...
- Thank you, thank you.
When I was younger,
I was interested in films about power.
People with invincible skills.
They could shoot a gun
out of someone's hand,
they could snap
a bullwhip around your neck.
This will remind you
that I have been here once and can return.
And so from around six to 10,
those were the staple of my imagination
and you'd leave the movie
and you'd be acting out
all the parts with your friends.
And as a matter of fact,
on the first Western I ever did,
I ruined my first take on horseback
where I'm shooting somebody with my pistol
because on the finished film,
you can see me...
looking at the guy steely-eyed
and pulling the trigger and going...
Really stupid.
But, you know, it shows you the grip
that these things have on you.
When I was young, when I was little,
that was all I used to think about...
the N.B.A.
There's nothing more powerful
than a true story,
because it makes you feel like...
you don't have that escape valve...
that I have when I watch fiction.
When it gets too tough...
or too close or too emotional,
I can always kind of back out of it
just a little bit by saying...
"Eh, this isn't true."
And when you're seeing
a powerful documentary,
and you believe what you're seeing,
you don't have that
and that's a good thing.
My mother, she's like mother
and father to me.
She don't want me really
hanging around over here that much,
'cause of the gangs.
I always wanted to make stories.
This was a chance, an opportunity,
to hopefully tell a great story,
but a story that was true
and a story that,
in focusing on these two kids
and their families,
what their lives had to say
about the American dream,
about race in America,
about poverty in America.
It's something I think
that needed to be said,
and needs to always be said,
and unfortunately continues
to need to be said.
Arthur agee.
I would say an influence for me
early on was Barbara Kopple's work,
in particular, Harlan County.
Come, all you young fellers,
so brave and so fine...
Seek not your fortune
way down in the mine...
The beauty of documentaries is that
it only happens once.
It can't happen another time.
I remember
when I was with the widows...
from the Farmington Mine disaster
in Harlan County.
They had never gotten together
to speak about what it meant
to lose their husbands.
This was the first time
and they sat in a circle
and they talked about
the most intimate details...
of their husbands, of their lives,
of what it meant to be a coal miner,
what it meant to work
in one of the most dangerous industries
in this country.
And one or two of them
just burst into tears.
Another one got really angry.
I live right almost on the seat of
the main explosion, right there,
and they said,
"You get out of your house!"
And the police told me to get out.
Do you know why?
Because they didn't want me to see
what was going on...
up that damn, dirty, filthy mines!
It's about communication.
It's about connection.
It's about stepping in
to somebody's world
that you would never be privy to...
And being able to be there...
and understand
what's going on with them...
and who they are
and what they're about.
I mean,
nothing could be finer than that.
And nothing else will do that.
And if we don't save those films
and preserve those films,
we won't have a history.
Film reconnects us to the world
and to our experience of our lives
in this space, in this time.
...1929's H2O.
It is a short film about water,
where the filmmaker
starts from a distance
and looks at water.
Little trickles of water,
little waterfalls,
streams with the rocks visible.
And he moves ever closer
to the water
and the light playing on water
to the degree that
you no longer recognize it
as water.
Then I guarantee,
once you see this film,
you never look at water
the same way again.
It's not meant to make sense.
It's not meant to tell a story.
But in many ways, it's meant to
touch us the way poetry does.
It is not always easy to engage
the experimental film.
And one has to simply open one's self
to the language of film.
That's where the beauty lies.
We, through the medium,
we see the world anew.
You know, the great thing about the Registry
is that it's grown to be pretty diverse.
It's gotten a lot more inclusive, you know.
There's a lot of experimental,
avant-garde and independent films.
There's lots of documentary films.
There's home movies.
There even are a few industrial
and educational films.
There was a turtle
by the name of Bert
And Bert the turtle
was very alert
When danger threatened him
he never got hurt
He knew just what to do
He'd duck
and cover...
This country has always
been about persuasion.
Really most societies are.
And these films
really illuminate that...
kind of the changing history
of what we were told.
We must be ready every day,
all the time,
to do the right thing
if the atomic bomb explodes.
Duck and cover!
This family knows what to do,
just as your own family should.
The House in the Middle is a
goofy and rather marvelous film
made in about 1953, '54 by...
let me see if I can get it right...
the National Clean Up- Paint Up-
Fix Up Committee,
in association with
the Federal CML Defense Administration.
And it puts forth a really,
really odd message.
Three identical miniature frame houses.
The house on the right,
an eyesore.
But you've seen these same conditions
in your own hometown.
This house is
the product of years of neglect.
It has not been painted regularly.
The house in the middle,
in good condition,
with a clean, unlittered yard.
What it says is this...
If your house is freshly painted and clean
and doesn't have a lot of crap
sitting around in the front yard,
you're a lot more likely
to survive a nuclear attack!
So it really makes kind of
you know, a moral argument...
a behavioral argument
for surviving nuclear attack.
Two houses are a total loss,
but the well-kept and the painted house
in the middle still stands.
Of course it's funded by
the paint industry,
so they're trying to sell
house paint and saying...
"Hey, it's gonna help
you survive nuclear attack."
I mean, this is, you know...
This is a little weird.
The dingy house on the left,
the dirty and littered house on the right,
or the clean white house in the middle.
It is your choice.
The reward may be survival.
Every movie that is popular,
every movie that is popular,
captures...
something of the ideas
that were alive at the time.
And very often,
the ideas that they capture...
and that make them so acceptable
to the public are lies.
This is D.W. Griffith's film.
Essentially, Griffith,
right then and there,
invented a lot of the grammar of film.
Its aesthetic and historical significance
from the point of view of film
is beyond debate.
Its value as a portrayal
of American history...
is not at all beyond debate.
It is basically
a pro Ku Klux Klan view...
of what happened in the South.
I think The Birth of a Nation
really legitimized
the motion picture industry.
It was the first film to be shown
at legitimate Broadway theaters.
I think for the first time,
people realized almost
not only the power of the motion picture,
but also almost
the danger of the motion picture.
What it could accomplish.
Unfortunately...
all these innovative ideas...
were used to advance the notion...
of segregation, Jim Crow,
racism and racial bias.
It was a dangerous film and it caused...
a lot of personal harm to people...
after it came out during that time.
Birth of a Nation was propaganda,
you know, and it was slander,
but it's important to recognize.
I think by ignoring it
or by denying,
you know,
the existence of Birth of a Nation,
you're almost losing
a piece of cinema history.
So we'll find them in the end,
I promise you,
we'll find them.
Just as sure as the...
turning of the earth.
I know the generation of people
that saw The Searchers
when they were young
will never forget it.
It was essentially about a man,
played by John Wayne,
who comes to save a little girl
who has been kidnapped...
by an Indian tribe.
It's always the menacing music,
the menacing war paint...
that was assigned
to these characters.
Growing up,
if you look back at all the cowboy
and Indian stuff I watched as a kid,
why were we the heroes?
I didn't quite get that.
Took me a long time to realize that,
even when you played
cowboys and Indians with your friends.
Today, I'd want to be the Indian,
they're the rebels.
And I would be for the Indians
against the cowboys.
I saw The Searchers
with an American Indian
and I was unaware of the racism in the film
until I was sitting next to her and she...
just stormed out
at a certain scene in the movie.
And I went out to follow her,
I said, "What's going on'?"
She said, "Did you see the movie'?"
I said, "Yeah, I saw it."
"Well, did you see what happened?"
These are my people...
Go!
Go, Martin, please!
Stand aside, Martin.
So he was searching for her
so he could kill her,
so she
wouldn't have to live with them.
Because she was living a fate
worse than death.
It was very disturbing.
Ethan, no, you don't!
Stand aside.
I thought that was really...
something that I really
wouldn't want my daughter to look at.
It really helped...
create a persona...
about Indian people that
continues to this day.
The Exiles was made
about Native Americans...
living in Los Angeles in the 1950s,
in other words, Native Americans,
not out in the desert
or in the mountains,
in the kind of environment
that most people,
in cliched terms think of,
but trying to survive
in a brutal urban environment.
The Exiles really put kind of a face...
on Indian people at the time.
During that time period,
it was either relocation
or maybe the serving
in the armed services.
Where a lot of Indian people
left the reservations and...
came to cities
and met other Indian people.
It showed kind of the truth of living...
in an urban area
as far as the isolation,
depicted in the young woman.
She's always seen to be alone...
and longing for a better life.
Film very much is important
in depiction of a people.
Yo, what's your problem, man?
Y'all are brothers, you ain't
supposed to be fighting each other.
Little punk.
Get off my porch, mama's boy.
When Boyz in the Hood
as a document of its time,
it's a document of
what was going on in that time period.
You have to think, young brother,
about your future.
It gave a voice to...
to the voiceless.
Listen,
I want to do something with my life,
all right?
I want to be somebody.
The film, for me,
it's like my diary.
Ricky!
It was a cathartic thing for me to show
where I was from
and what I'd gone through.
Film is a reflection of...
the times of which we live in,
good or bad.
I was responsible
for pushing forward Birth of a Nation
into the Film Preservation Board.
That movie led to the deaths of
many, many black people...
through lynching,
through enacting laws, segregation,
through Jim Crow and everything.
But it really shows the power of film
and for evil as well as good.
When you watch a movie from the past,
you're involved in a dialogue.
A dialogue between past and present.
There's what's up on the screen
and then there's the person looking at it
and every person who looks at it
brings their own history
and finds their own value in it.
You look at every war
that we've been through
and whether it's a war that we won,
like the good war, World War II,
or a war we lost, like Vietnam,
a war like what's going on now
in Iraq and Afghanistan,
where we don't know
what the result is going to be...
the result is the same
on the people who fought it and...
I think that's
important for people to understand.
The best years of our lives
is about three G.L.S
returning from service to their hometown.
I enlisted in the Army Air Corps,
I was a bombardier in a B-17.
I was no hero,
but I was there, I did the job.
Naturally, it hit me particularly hard
when Dana Andrews
playing the bombardier goes out to...
a field where they're cocooning
old B-17 bombers,
and he approaches one
and climbs back up into it.
And the sound comes up
and the filmmaking
makes him experience a bombing raid.
And the sound is extraordinary.
That had a particular meaning
for anybody who was in a bomber.
Hey, you!
What're you doing in that airplane?
It had a great effect on me.
The movies create order
out of the chaos of our lives
and that's what this was.
I was the last person
that I ever would have thought...
would have gone to war.
I War scared me when I was young.
After I came back from Vietnam,
I gave away my uniforms,
I really put the whole thing behind me.
I just thought I could shut the door
and move on with my life.
I don't guess I spoke with another veteran
and or about my experience
for eight or nine years.
By chance
I was put in touch with a guy...
who worked with veterans and he invited me
to a screening of The Deer Hunter.
[Chopin Nocturne playing...]
...really discovered that the issues
that they were dealing with in that film,
how frightened those guys
were once they got over there.
They went over there
with such enthusiasm and such honest,
just sincere patriotism
and discovered themselves
just in this chaotic world.
...it really, to me,
emotionally hit home.
How that stays with you.
Once you've been through that.
...Mike?
It's... it's like something that...
A human shouldn't have to experience.
That... that loss of control.
That having...
really having to give up on life,
because you don't know
that you're gonna be alive in an hour...
in a day...
And that's...
it's just something that doesn't...
That doesn't go away.
It's a good thing that films
like Deer Hunter were made because
it's an honest representation
of the emotion of war,
and I think people need to know that.
We should not go to war easily
because the impact on people's lives
is permanent.
Film captured me,
as it does so many people,
when I was a kid.
As a child,
there were no good movies or bad movies.
There were just movies.
I grew up in a very poor family
and I think going to the movie theater,
the old walk-in theater
that cost maybe 20 cents...
It was the window to the world.
It largely took me, I think,
took me out of my own life.
So for a dime,
I could go and stay there all day...
and watch Three Pictures
and Path News and Mickey Mouse.
So my outlook was to watch film,
any film,
and I did.
I loved them all
and I still do today.
I just loved the glamour of life in film...
from the '30s and '40s,
like I wanted to have
all those glittering costumes
and I wanted Cary Grant
to take me out to dinner and...
but the closest thing I have is... is film.
This is an art.
It's not just how to make money,
it's not just what we can sell it as,
but it's something valuable
that we should save.
This is part of who we are as a culture
and we need to preserve it.
It's not... It's not a matter of,
like, "Should we?"
It's... It's "How are we going to?"
We've got a job to preserve
the aspirations and the images
and the ideals and dreams
of millions and millions of people.
I think one thing we can say
is that 500 or a thousand years from now,
when people want to know
what life was like, they will go to movies.
They will go to the moving image materials
that we created first,
because those are
the time capsules of our era.
They are now being preserved and restored
so that when we're all long gone,
as long as there's something to watch films
with, they'll be able to see these things.
The beauty of film
is that it's everybody's.
It's not just the socially elite,
it's everybody's.
Somebody says...
"Why would you save movies?"
Well, I'd ask those people back...
"Why do you save your family pictures?"
As a society,
we want to do the same thing.
We want to say who were we...
where are we now...
and what do we want people in the future
to think about us?
It's our family album.
It is absolutely imperative...
that we save the art form
of the 20th century.
I mean, how can we not?
Here's looking at you, kid.
Elaine!
resynced & edited by JohnCoffey09
Let's all go to the lobby,
let's all go to the lobby.
Let's all go to the lobby,
to get ourselves a treat.
Delicious things to eat
The popcorn can't be beat
The sparkling drinks are just dandy
The chocolate bars and the candy
So, let's all go to the lobby,
to get ourselves a treat.
Let's all go to the lobby...
to get ourselves a treat...