Re: Orphans footage/MIAP project LONG

Glad to hear from you, especially with such good reportage. Please share this information below with your class, as I suspect it will be helpful to all.

Where the edited stories and edited newsreel packages are is a difficult question, newsreel archiving being such a mess in almost every instance. Here is what I have learned in trying to track this issue.

2. The Fox newsreels and Fox Movietone News materials that did not go to the University of South Carolina in 1980 remained with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. The originals were mostly in a New Jersey warehouse until 2000, when the Library of Congress agreed to take them in. Fox News in New York has videotape versions of much of this material. The Library of Congress has just begun to process the acquisition, which includes paper records as well as celluloid.

3. Peter Bregman is the sole librarian/archivist at Fox News in New York. He knows a lot and is an advocate for the archiving and preservation of the collection. While Fox does not advertise the fact that its collection is accessible, Peter tells me that the Movietone material can be researched (and licensed).

4. Cooper Graham at the Library of Congress is the staff researcher who has recently taken on the Fox Movietone project for LC MBRS. While most of their holdings date from 1935 on, they do hold some pre-1935 materials. In theory, edited stories or magazines from the 1920s could be in this collection. But I don't know if there is a finding aid or catalog at LC yet.

5. The National Archives has among its newsreel holdings a good bit of Fox newsreel material, including 1920s footage. I only learned of this in the past year. In the research room at Archives II in College Park, Maryland, there is a wall of binders that contain finding aids for newsreels. A few of them are for Fox. In my cursory check of it the holdings appeared to be a hodgepodge, but definitely contained edited stories. A call to National Archives may reveal more. My limited checking in their online catalog did not yield any answers, but this may have been updated recently. Worth re-checking.

6. Bill Murphy, the National Archives newsreel specialist until his retirement in 2000, gave a talk on newsreel preservation at the first Orphan Film Symposium. (See attached.) In it he said:

However, Fox went further than most to destroy the original order of newsreels since they cut and rearranged their silent newsreels by subject matter, assigning individual stories a Dewey decimal-type classification number. Maintaining original order of documents is one of the cannons of archival science. Restoration of a single issue to replicate what it looked like to its contemporary audience would be an arduous if not completely impossible task. [my italics]"

One of the things Cooper Graham and I talked about doing was taking a Movietone News story from 1935 or 36 (in the LC collection) that used Fox library materials and tracking down extant outtakes from the SC Newsfilm holdings that match up. No one has yet done this sort of research, so we are not sure what we would find or what it would reveal.

7. There are other archives and private collections that have Fox Movietone newsreels, but these scattered and generally have small holdings. Fox had many overseas offices, each editing its own versions, often in different languages. Where these materials are (if they are anywhere) is another thing yet-to-be researched. I know, for example, that German and Austrian archives have Fox Movietone Wochenschau material (just as LC holds some of Fox's own Wochenschau film). So it's always possible that UCLA or Archive Films or some other archive may have a Movietone item one is seeking.

I don't have specific knowledge about the Fox newsreel unit shooting footage for Fox features, but it certainly sounds plausible. Another researcher who may be able to shed some light on this is Janet Bergstrom, professor in UCLA's Dept. of Film-Television. She has been recently asking similar questions about early Movietone, primarily because she is interested in reconstructing the program of shorts and newsreels that were shown at the premiere of Murnau's SUNRISE (1928), which also used a Movietone soundtrack. janetb@ucla.edu

9. I briefly met with one of your NYC Noise Abatement collaborators when I was at LC on Friday. I mentioned to her that this bit of Movietone was used in National Public Radio's coverage of the Orphans 3 symposium and broadcast on "Weekend All Things Considered" September 28, 2002. If you go to the link below, you'll find another link that will enable you to listen to the story. http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/archive/orphans2002/

Dan Streible
Professor of Film Studies
Dept. of Art / McMaster 318
1615 Senate Street
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
(803) 777-9158 off
(803) 777-0535 fax
(803) 771-9335 res
(803) 479-2118 cel
http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium