Here's What Happened to Seven of the Most Important Film Reels in History

Something you may not know is that fifty percent of movie theaters play films through an old-school projector. Yup, that means that some of the movies you watch come from actual film reels instead of some invisible source on the internet. But now that I’ve said that, you may as well forget it, because by 2015 theaters will be digital only and film as a tanglible object will be a tale we tell our grandchildren.

But despite the digital shift, those clunky reels from old films still exist: underground, in salt mines, locked in temperature-controlled vaults. Footage from old movies and our most important historical events are kept in government archives, private collections, and media archives. Chances are, original film of your favorite 60s pop group or old Hollywood movie still exists, and it’s beautiful.

Eadweard Muybridge was close with his animation Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, but it wasn’t until Étienne-Jules Mary invented a chronophotographic gun in 1882 that the video became a possibility. And in 1888, Louis Le Prince, “The Father of Cinematography” created the first ever film, Roundhay Garden Scene , clocking in at 2.11 seconds.

On the night he was meant to reveal his discovery, he mysteriously disappeared. And thus started the long battle over film rights and patent rights for “the method of and apparatus for producing animated photographic pictures,” which the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison tried to claim as their own. If you’re interested in the whole story, you can check out Richard Howell’s paper here.

As for the film itself, the original negatives were lost. Luckily, they were at some stage printed onto photographic paper and mounted onto numbered strips of card. Half a century after his disappearance, in 1930, Le Prince’s widow Marie gave these cares to the National Science Museum in London (now known as the National Media Museum).

Cartoon historian Jerry Beck helped me out with this one. Apparently Popeye traveled all over the country before finding his home in the MOMA’s archives in Manhattan. Its story is similar to that of other cartoons at the time — after they were shown in movie theaters, Beck explains that they sat around “like an old unfashionable shoe that no one’s going to wear anymore.” So when TV became popular in the 40s and 50s, studios couldn’t to wait to sell the shows to them and cash in.

Movie theaters were upset about this sale, so it took place secretly. Paramount studios, the original owners of Popeye, handed over all the film to AAP, a company that specialized in selling cartoons to television. And AAP in return gave them millions of dollars. AAP needed to cut the negatives and change the credits to “AAP Productions Presents Popeye”, so they brought the film to New York. After being bought and sold by companies such as United Artists, MGM, and Ted Turner, Popeye was finally bought by Warner Brothers, who put it in MOMA’s archive.

Since the original footage was kept on nitrate film, the reels have to be kept in a special room that has its nitrate and temperature levels controlled.

Yes, there’s the movie. But what about all the videos people shot independently? Of course, they’re scattered everywhere, but one woman shot enough footage to make a living off selling it. Archivist Rick Prelinger discovered Lisa Law, a former member of the commune Hog Farm, and her extensive collection of home videos she took while at the festival. He put her name in a list of archives he published, and she suddenly got an incredible amount of stock footage business. Law wrote to Prelinger that he had “turned her from a Hippie to a Yuppie,” she had made so much money selling her footage.

The Zapruder film is undoubtably one of the most studied pieces of film in history, and you probably already know everything about it. But there’s no way we could have left it out of this “famous tapes” article! At Motherboard, we also know the film as the world’s

most valuable home movie

, and in 1999 it became the most expensive historical artifact in American history when the government paid the Zapruder family $16 million for it. (But, oddly, the government didn’t buy the actual copyright. This the Zapruder family donated to The 6th Floor Museum in Dallas.)

Gary Mack from the Museum explained that Time, Inc, publisher of LIFE Magazine, owned the film from November 23, 1963, until April 9, 1975, when ownership was returned to the Zapruder family. Shortly after the transfer, the film was stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. as a courtesy to the family. And since its purchase, it’s kept under high security in a temperature-controlled room at National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

A week ago was the anniversary of Apollo 11, but we still haven’t uncovered the lost original footage. We’ve only got a TV recording from Australia, that was thankfully restored a few years ago. By this point, everyone’s best guess is that our original copy was accidentally erased so that NASA could use the tape to record satellite data. Dick Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, commented about this loss: “I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody’s happy about it.”

NASA wants to make sure no more mistakes are made. That’s why they keep every film ever taken in space locked in their archive at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. In this room, the air temperature and pressure levels are controlled, and once film enters it can never leave. That means that if film needs to be copied, it is copied inside the archive.

Your only experience with Frankenstein may be from the 1994 version starring Robert De Niro, but Mary Shelley’s classic was interpreted for film as early as 1910 by Edison Studios. As with other early films, it wasn’t copyrighted, and the only way it was preserved was as a series of still-shots printed on long rolls of paper. While the Library of Congress keeps many of these rolls in its archives, Rick Prelinger told me that it’s rumored that Frankenstein’s is kept by a private collector somewhere in Wisconsin.

Sometime in the middle of the last century, MGM stored every film it ever made, including classics like The Wizard of Oz, A Christmas Carol, and Doctor Zhivago, in a salt mine in Kansas. Apparently, the LA company wanted to make sure they don’t go out of business in case of an earthquake. Notably, in 1996, a near-original copy of Gone With The Wind was discovered in the mine, although now that Turner Entertainment owns the MGM library, it’s unclear if anything remains in the mine.

• These Beautiful Destroyed Polaroids Prove Film’s Not Dead
• This Is How the World Ends…In Film
• Dead: The Greatest Film Ever Made