Lost Films: How 75% of Silent Cinema Vanished and How Archivists Find It

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Picture this, it's 1927

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
And you are looking at a black and white image of Lon Chaney, you know, the legendary man of A Thousand Faces.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Oh yeah, wearing that towering beaver skin top hat.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:11)
Right, his eyes are just wide and manic, framed by that heavy dark makeup.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
And that impossible grin.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:18)
The teeth, I mean, his mouth is stretched into this grotesque smile, just filled with razor sharp jagged teeth.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
It's terrifying.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:25)
It really is. It is one of the most iconic, haunting visual images in the entire history of horror cinema. It's from a movie called London After Midnight.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:35)
And here is the truly terrifying part about all of this. No one alive today has actually seen this movie.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
Not a single person.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:43)
It is entirely, completely gone.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
It's basically a ghost. You know, a cinematic phantom that only exists in like still photographs and the fading memories of people who have long since passed away.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:53)
And that cinematic phantom is our mission for today's Deep Dive. We are exploring the fascinating, tragic, and honestly sometimes miraculous world of Lost Films.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:03)
It's a huge topic.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:04)
It really is. We've got a massive stack of sources here. We're talking historical records, data from major film foundations, reports from the Library of Congress.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:15)
Lots to get through.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:16)
Yeah. And we are going to figure out how we manage to lose the vast majority of our early cinematic history and how dedicated archivers are currently hunting down the surviving pieces.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:28)
Which is incredible work.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:30)
Because when you think about it, in our modern era, every silly video you've ever taken on your phone is automatically backed up to the cloud.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:37)
Right. And like three different data centers.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:39)
Exactly. So it's almost impossible for you to imagine that multi-million dollar blockbusters featuring the biggest movie stars in the world could just vanish into thin air.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:48)
It really does defy our modern understanding of, well, media permanence. And to set the stage for you on the sheer scale of this loss, the Library of Congress estimates that around 75% of all silent-era films have completely perished.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:01)
75%? That is wild.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:04)
Yeah, let that sink in. Three quarters of an entire foundational era of an art form just wiped off the map.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:10)
Okay, so let's unpack this. How does that even happen?
How do you lose 75% of an entire industry's output?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:18)
It takes a lot of effort, actually.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:19)
Right. I mean, before we even get into the dramatic stuff like vault fires or the chemistry of deteriorating film stock, we have to talk about the mindset.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:28)
Absolutely.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:28)
We really have to understand the fundamental attitude of the early 20th century film industry.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
And that attitude was entirely mercenary. I mean, the studios simply did not care about preserving art. They cared about immediate profit.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:42)
Which makes sense for a new business, I guess.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:45)
Sure. But a film was considered an event, right? A temporary carnival attraction.
Once the carnival left town, you didn't keep the tent up.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:53)
It was yesterday's newspaper to them.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:55)
Exactly.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:56)
Once a movie had its theatrical run, the studios considered it completely worthless. The Martin Scorsese Film Foundation actually estimates that over 90 percent of American films made before 1929 are lost.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:08)
90 percent.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:09)
And if you think the invention of sound saved everything, think again. It is estimated that half of all American sound films made from 1927 all the way to 1950 are also just gone.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:22)
What's fascinating here is the sheer logistics of early Hollywood. Vault space cost a tremendous amount of money.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:29)
Oh, I bet.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:30)
Storing massive, heavy film reels in temperature-controlled environments was a huge financial drain. So studios would actively junk their own movies.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:40)
Just throw them away.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:41)
Worse, they would literally sell their classic prints to scrap dealers.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:46)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:46)
And the motivation was purely chemical, because the film stock contained silver.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:50)
Right. I read about this. The scrap dealers would run these masterfully crafted films through a chemical wash, just to strip the emulsion off the celluloid.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:58)
That's heartbreaking.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:59)
They literally melted down the history of cinema to extract pennies worth of silver content, or even weirder, they would chop the films up.