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It was a bit of a risk four years ago when American Movie Classics decided to launch an annual movie festival to raise funds for film preservation.

AMC president Kate McEnroe recalls that the general consensus at the cable network was: “This is going to be some education process. I don’t think people are really aware of how difficult the restoration process is and how costly it is.”

During the first festival, AMC received some hate mail from viewers who were annoyed with the pleas and video spots asking for money. “People became more accessible and more concerned by the second one,” McEnroe reports. “By the third one and then last year’s, there was an outcry [of support].”

Over the last four years, AMC has raised $1.3 million. The Film Foundation, an organization of filmmakers founded by director Martin Scorsese in 1990, works with the studios and distributes the moneys raised to its six-member archives: the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art Film Department, National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive.

AMC hopes to raise $500,000 with its fifth annual festival, which kicks off tonight at 9 with the 1946 Burt Lancaster classic “The Killers.” The festival, which continues through Sunday, highlights the film noir genre and the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Also featured is a special taped at a film noir themed gala last week in Los Angeles, spotlighting Carly Simon singing selections from her new “Film Noir” album.

AMC plans its festivals with Scorsese, whose landmark 1976 drama, “Taxi Driver,” was recently restored. The director will introduce several of the films he chose for the event.

Scorsese says he’s noticed a change in the public’s awareness of the need of preservation since the festivals began. “There is not only a greater awareness, but there’s more of an expectation now to see restored films, whether they are restored with missing sequences placed back or cleaned up with new negatives and new sound tracks created, so you can get the best possible image.

“Sometimes, when you look at these old restored films from the early ‘30s, depending on the condition of the elements, they look as if they were shot yesterday,” Scorsese adds.

“It’s fascinating. It’s a matter of understanding that they are seeing the original film, which is very different from the copies you saw on TV.”

Scorsese recalls watching movies on TV as far back as 1948 in less than ideal conditions: “[I saw] poor copies, probably dupes, and yet somehow over the years, some of the power of those films stayed with me. Can you imagine if we reacted to such extraordinary bad presentations the impact it might be having on people who see possibly some of the better and best presentations of films over the years?”

Still, thousands and thousands of films have been lost. More than half of the 21,000 shorts and full-length features made on the highly flammable and corrosive nitrate stock before 1950 are gone. Only about 10% of the movies produced in the U.S. before 1929 still survive. Even films made between 1950 and 1975 on Eastmancolor stock are fading away.

The Library of Congress estimates that it costs between $10,000 and $50,000 to preserve and restore a black-and-white film and $30,000 to $300,000 for a color one.

This year’s AMC festival features several restored classics, including the 1947 film noir “Out of the Past” and the Hitchcock greats “Rebecca,” “Notorious,” “Suspicion,” “Spellbound,” “The Paradine Case” and “Vertigo.”

Scorsese singles out the 1947 film noir “I Walk Alone,” with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster as one of the festival’s highlights.

“I think it’s underrated,” he says. “What I like about the film is that it was one of the first pictures to show the transition between the underworld, prewar to postwar, which became high profile respectable like big business. It reflects society at that time.’

Scorsese screens “Out of the Past,” which made Robert Mitchum a star, at least twice a year. “If you asked me what the plot is now, I can’t tell you,” he acknowledges. “But I watch it every four or five months and it’s like I’m watching a new film every time.”

Both “Out of the Past” and “Suspicion” were restored by the Library of Congress. Though the Library has the original negative for the 1941 “Suspicion,” 60 feet of sound was lost.

“It was a much bigger job than we thought originally,” says David Francis, chief of motion picture broadcast and sound division of the Library of Congress.

Thanks to AMC and the Film Foundation, the Library of Congress has received between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, “which doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but I’m afraid with the present resources available for film preservation, it’s really a significant sum.”

With AMC money, the Library of Congress restored the 1930 Oscar-winner “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which took three years and cost nearly $80,000.

“We had to work from four or five different copies,” Francis says. “What we try to do when we restore is not try to get back to the version the director would have liked, we’re trying to get back to the version that was first seen by the public.”

More importantly, Francis adds, “is that we’re the only archive who has their own restoration lab. We have used some of the money to pay the salary of someone to do restoration because our staff had gotten so small. We had lost so many people from downsizing. It’s grants like the one we have received from AMC which have enabled us to keep on people we would have otherwise have lost. It’s been incredibly valuable.”

Francis says he notices the shift in the public’s awareness of film preservation because “the industry itself is actually talking about restoration and using restoration [as a tool] for selling classic films like ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ Once I feel the industry takes the work of the film archivist into the commercial arena, it shows that everyone is getting aware of the importance of film preservation.”

The majority of the studios now have preservation policies in place. Still, Scorsese acknowledges, “if we start now to try to restore everything, we won’t get it. So we will just have to continue going as much as possible title by title in the vaults with the archives and the studios to have a concentrated effort to save everything they can.”

In this past decade we have witnessed a growing awareness of film preservation. However, the deterioration and eventual disappearance of films have not come to an end. We're still racing against the clock to save what we can.

There are two areas of film preservation that each have their own unique problems. The first is the film libraries owned by the studios, which represent the majority of American films. The second area is orphaned films — meaning films in the public domain or owned by small companies that have no money for restoration; this also includes documentaries, newsreels, independent features, shorts and avantgarde films. In both areas, many of these titles have to be transferred from nitrate to safety stock — 100 million feet to be exact.

Regarding the studio libraries, there has been substantial progress — to different extent.

Regarding orphan films, the problem is overwhelming. Just the cataloguing is a daunting task. This is the area where major losses have already occurred and continue to occur every day. Whereas it was relatively simple for The Film Foundation to help build a bridge between the studios and archives, with orphan films there is nothing to build a bridge to — when work happens at all, it happens at random, by chance or by luck.

The National Film Registry has been valuable in the recognition of film as a vital part of our cultural heritage. However, the challenge in our country is so large and so costly that it requires a unique partnership bringing together resources from many different areas — the private sector as well as public and government institutions. Each area has its contribution to make, but no one can get the job done alone.

It is important to emphasize that the best case of all for preservation is made when films are seen and appreciated by audiences. Screening preserved films serves as a reminder of a precious and vital part of our culture.

During these last few decades, technology has evolved in unforeseen ways. In the 1960s, film libraries were thought to have no value whatsoever — they were just a storage expense. Just consider how the situation has changed.

We foresee a future in which technologies will bring a new cinema, born out of those technologies. Perhaps cinema as we have known it in these past one hundred years will really become a part of the past. If so, that is one more reason to save what we have and, most of all, to preserve the negatives as an irreplaceable source.

The Film Foundation will continue to work with the studios and support joint projects studio-archives.  

It will also support a proposed mechanism called The National Plan, spearheaded by the Library of Congress, which would call for a dollar-for-dollar match of contributions from the government and private sectors to preserve orphan films.

Films of the past are alive as part of our own creative work in the present. As Peter Bogdanovich said recently, "There are no old movies, but movies I have seen and movies that I haven't seen."

Beverly Hills (May 1, 1990) — Film directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg announced today the formation of The Film Foundation, dedicated to ensuring the survival of the American film heritage.

At a news conference at Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills, Martin Scorsese, President of the new foundation's Board of Directors noted, "When filmmakers in the 21st century ask what was done to preserve the pictures made in this century, they will look to us. As friends and colleagues who have been concerned about film preservation for many years, we have come together now as filmmakers to assure that fifty years from now, we'll be able to give an affirmative answer to our successors." Scorsese was joined at the news conference by fellow founding members George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, and Steven Spielberg.

Allen, Coppola, Kubrick, Lucas, Pollack, Redford, Scorsese, and Spielberg have each been involved as individuals in the film preservation cause in the past. With The Film Foundation, they have joined together to work as creative artists dedicated to the principle that as filmmakers, they have a special responsibility both to the work of the past masters of their art and to the motion pictures which they and their peers are creating today.

The Film Foundation has four primary goals. In all of its activities it will foster a greater awareness with the general public of the urgent need to preserve motion picture history; second, the foundation will work with the archives to raise funds for preservation; third, the foundation will encourage cooperative preservation projects, bringing together the archives and the industry; fourth, it will work to see that reliable preservation practices are in place to ensure the long life of current productions.

The foundation will be advised on the establishment of goals and policies by its Archivists Advisory Council, made up of leaders from the nation's five major film archives. Chaired by Robert Rosen from UCLA, the institutions represented on the council include the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the AFI, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

The foundation will be administered by Co-Executive Directors Raffaele Donato, (Martin Scrosese's archivist), and CAA agent Jay Moloney. Serving as Secretariat to the foundation will be the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the AFI, playing a coordinating role with the broader archival field.

The foundation has already established a number of projects it will pursue. The first of these is to encourage the creation of a Studio Preservation Fund, totaling at least $30 million for restoration projects to be undertaken jointly by the studios and the archives. The foundation has also announced an initiative on behalf of the preservation of independent films, to be spearheaded by board member Robert Redford. A third initiative, chaired by Archivists Advisory Council member Paul Spehr, will deal with guidelines for the preservation of current production.

Fifty percent of all the films made in the before 1950 have already been lost, and many more remain endangered. Says foundation Board member Steven Spielberg, "Our hope is that the partnership of the archives and the studios will ensure that our film heritage is something that we can pass on to our children."