To Preserve and (Self-) Protect?

For more than three decades, the American Film Institute has been a cultural landmark in Hollywood, an organization that its founding chairman, Academy Award-winning actor Gregory Peck, once described as “a caretaker of our nation’s film heritage.”

On television, at gala fund-raisers and in its literature, the institute has championed the cause of “advancing and preserving the art of the moving image”--images recorded on film and tape that make up the collective memory of the 20th century.

But today, the AFI is striving to overcome severe cutbacks in federal funding while defending itself from critics in the archival community who question the institute’s ongoing commitment to film preservation.

While the institute currently spends about $1.7 million on preservation, 87% of its $13-million overall budget goes to fulfill its other film-related missions, such as running a conservatory for filmmakers, hosting the AFI’s annual Life Achievement Awards and convening an international film festival in Los Angeles.

And, while the AFI has succeeded in drawing the public’s attention to the plight of film preservation, its critics in the archival community say that what the institute is most skilled at is drawing attention to itself.

“My line has always been that AFI does less [film] preservation than self-preservation,” said Jan-Christopher Horak, director of archives and collections at Universal Studios. “It’s become ever more true now [because of federal cutbacks].”

Retired Library of Congress archivist Paul Spehr said that the AFI embraces preservation because “it’s like motherhood,” but adds, “what we’ve seen very often is money going elsewhere.”

“They certainly say preservation is one of their major priorities,” said Edward Richmond, curator of UCLA’s film archive. “The question a lot of people ask is, ‘Are they doing enough?’ When people give money to AFI to support preservation, to help save America’s moving image heritage, are they really getting value for their donations?”

AFI executives defend their record, saying that they should not be compared to a film archive since their mandate is much broader than preserving films. Still, they note that many vintage films would have never have been saved without the AFI’s efforts.

“When AFI started, it sent out a call--and it was a first call--and that resulted in a dramatic response,” said AFI Director Jean Picker Firstenberg. “People started looking for films that they had kept . . . and they were sent to AFI by the truckload. People looked for them and they found them in their basements, their attics and garages. That, I think, may be AFI’s greatest contribution in the long run, because if that cry and call had not gone out, we would have lost much more.”

Film preservation always inspires passionate debate because funding is scarce and much of America’s cinematic past is vanishing. Of more than 21,000 feature-length films produced in the United States before 1951, only half exist today.

In the earliest days of Hollywood, film was made of cellulose nitrate, which gave black-and-white movies their vivid lights and shadows. But nitrate film steadily decomposes in the can and is extremely flammable.

Movies that are presumed lost include Lillian Gish’s “Angel of Contention” (1919), silent vamp Theda Bara’s “Cleopatra” (1917), Rudolph Valentino’s “The Young Rajah” (1922) and Gloria Swanson’s “Madame Sans-Gene” (1925), according to Tom McGreevey and Joanne L. Yeck in their 1997 book “Our Movie Heritage.”

To save what’s left, archives around the country have undertaken the expensive and painstaking process that involves transferring deteriorating or unprotected film to modern film stock, making new preservation masters and storing the films properly.

But duplication does not come cheap. A black-and-white feature film, for example, costs about $1,000 a reel to restore, experts say; there are 10 to 15 reels in a normal feature. Restoring color films is even more expensive. Archivists estimate that a color feature-length film from the 1940s, for example, can cost between $250,000 and $300,000 to restore.

Over the past three decades, the AFI has assisted the archives by collecting and cataloging films and then sending them on to the archives for restoration and storage.

“It was the first organization that sent out a sort of roving film detective and he found the most extraordinary things in the most extraordinary places,” said London-based film historian Kevin Brownlow.

One of the AFI’s key roles was channeling money from the taxpayer-supported National Endowment for the Arts to the archives. In all, the AFI received $16.3 million from the NEA, of which $9.7 million was sent out as sub-grants to various archives for nitrate film conversion.

But the NEA’s support has fallen drastically since Republicans won control of Congress in 1994--dropping from $2.3 million four years ago to a mere $40,000 today.

“It has been terrible,” said former Universal Pictures studio chief Tom Pollock, who chairs AFI’s board of trustees. “We were, in effect, created through the NEA. . . . Obviously, it’s been a difficult time for us financially.

“Naturally, people are upset with us for not giving them more money,” Pollock added. “I would say there is a lot of unhappiness that we don’t give more money and we wish we had more money to give them. We have less money than we had before. I am astounded we have been able to keep up the level of preservation work despite our own budgetary problems--that we haven’t had to cut back on that work yet.”

Pollock, a longtime film preservation advocate who boosted Universal’s preservation budget five-fold when he ran that studio earlier this decade, said that to offset the NEA cutbacks, the AFI has had to raise more private money, reduce its overhead and become entrepreneurial.

“What we mean by entrepreneurial is not so much we’re going to go out and develop ‘Seinfeld,’ the television series,” Pollock explained. “We have to find something that fits within our mandate.”

To that end, the institute this summer produced a television show called “AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Movies,” showcasing the century’s greatest American films. The show, broadcast on CBS, was expanded to 10 one-hour shows that aired through the summer on the TNT cable network.

The nonprofit institute, created at the suggestion of President Lyndon B. Johnson during a 1965 Rose Garden signing ceremony, has for years used the glamour of its entertainment industry connections to carry its message to the masses.

The AFI was established in 1967 with Gregory Peck serving as chairman and George Stevens Jr., the son of director George Stevens (“A Place in the Sun,” “Giant”), as founding director.

Today, the institute’s board of trustees includes top executives from every movie studio as well as the ABC, CBS and NBC television networks.

With her distinctive white hair and businesslike demeanor, Firstenberg has run the institute since 1980. In that time, the $170,000-a-year executive has become a familiar voice on behalf of film preservation, while presiding over 101 full-time employees and a $13-million annual budget.

To the public at large, the AFI is perhaps best known for its televised Life Achievement Awards, a celebrity-studded affair held annually to honor the masters of film. Past recipients have included John Ford, Orson Welles, James Cagney, Henry Fonda and Bette Davis, to name a few.

Yet, the AFI’s penchant to hype itself rankles many preservationists.

“Their hunger for publicity drives [AFI’s leaders] to view colleague institutions as small fry at best and potential competitors at worst,” said Steve Ricci, the head of research and study at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

AFI responds that it has always tried to draw as much attention as possible to its sister institutions and that publicity is needed if the institute is to offset government cutbacks.

Others say that the institute’s ability to tap into wealthy Hollywood donors while drawing publicity to itself has bred jealousy in the preservation field.

“I can understand how a person sitting there working on reels and reels of independent films, who can’t raise money, can be jealous,” said Ted Perry, who once headed the film department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “But I think it’s short-sighted.”

Behind the controversy lie decades of disagreements among film archives. In the past, some archivists were so distrustful of others that they hand-carried their prints to other countries, watched them as they were projected and then hand-carried them back.

AFI has experienced that distrust itself. As recently as 1988, when the institute was collecting titles for a computerized database of films, some archives elected not to share their information with the institute. It took many years and many meetings to encourage them to support the project.

Colin Young, a past chairman of UCLA’s theater arts department who helped lay the groundwork for that university’s film archive, said that the AFI was viewed with suspicion in the early days.

“I would say the welcome mat was not thrown out for AFI at the time--not only in preservation but in education, training and publications,” said Young, now a resident of Kent, England. “They were given a pretty rough ride and I was probably one who gave it to them when I was in charge at UCLA at the time.”

Some archives acted like “wonderfully civilized gangsters” in those days, Young recalled. “They were obsessed with their profession and would do anything to get hold of a print.”

Over time, bridges were built between the AFI and the archives, but the preservation field is still rife with debate over the AFI. This contention can be seen today as the AFI grapples with cutbacks.

In April, the AFI suffered a blow to its prestige when the Brussels-based International Federation of Film Archives announced its intention to demote the institute from full-member status to associate member--a step that would curtail such privileges as borrowing prints from archives worldwide.

“[The federation] concluded that AFI was, in fact, doing less actual preservation than the poorest archives in the poorest countries anywhere in the world,” said UCLA’s Ricci, a member of the federation’s executive committee.

The AFI is protesting. “The federation, in reviewing AFI’s preservation work, has proposed a change in status that the AFI is appealing and expects will be reversed,” an AFI spokesman said. The earliest the federation could take up the appeal is in November.

In June, the AFI laid off its longtime administrator, Gregory Lukow, and his assistant at the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, which serves as a coordinating body for film archives nationwide.

The institute has also cut staff and reduced programming days at the AFI Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

Belt-tightening even led a professional archival group called the Assn. of Moving Image Archivists to move its secretarial functions from AFI’s Los Feliz location across town to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Beverly Hills. The move came after AFI asked to be compensated for providing free staff time for the group’s mailings and to coordinate its activities.

In the 1960s, film preservation barely registered as a blip on the public’s radar screen of worthy causes. Today, it is front-page news.

The AFI reaped widespread publicity in 1996 when it announced it had been given and restored a silent version of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” made in October 1912, that had long been considered lost. Predating “Birth of a Nation” by three years, “Richard III,” kept for years by a projectionist in Portland, Ore., is the oldest surviving American feature film in existence.

The institute is currently working on another historic find: a seven-minute-long portion of the original 1922 “Our Gang” comedy, which had been lost for decades.

It may surprise some, but the AFI is not a film archive. It has no vaults where films are stored; no employees labor over canisters of disintegrating nitrate film. Instead, the AFI acts as a clearinghouse--collecting, documenting and cataloging films and then sending them on to the archives for restoration and storage.

Before the AFI was founded, the Stanford Research Institute conducted a survey of the preservation field and found that the archives did not relish AFI becoming their rival.

In America, there are four major film archives: the Library of Congress in Washington; the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; and the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles. While there are “AFI Collections” at all four archives, the lion’s share--more than 25,000 films--is stored at the Library of Congress. But the AFI does not own the collections nor does it pay for their upkeep.

The taxpayer-supported Library of Congress preserves and restores between 300 and 400 films a year. By comparison, the George Eastman House preserves or restores upward of 30 films a year.

AFI officials say they restore many more films than their critics give them credit for.

Over the years, the AFI has restored some signature films. For example, it worked with UCLA in restoring “It’s All True,” an assemblage of footage from a three-part documentary Orson Welles shot in Brazil in 1942. AFI’s lab costs totaled $25,200.

In the past two years, with help from an NEA matching grant, the AFI has preserved 37 films at a cost of $95,000.

On other high-profile projects, the AFI has sought help from private foundations or corporations. For example, a $50,000 grant from the Joseph H. Kanter Foundation was used to restore “Richard III.”

“When someone says AFI is not doing preservation, i.e., actual preservation work, we say, ‘Here is a list of the films AFI is responsible for preserving because we have paid money,’ ” Firstenberg said.

In addition, the AFI has given away $675,000 for various preservation projects in the field since 1995. The money came from NEA challenge grants, with AFI directly raising three-fourths of the total.

The AFI currently spends about 13% of its overall budget on “preservation and documentation.” In recent years, preservation expenditures have varied, rising from about $1.6 million in fiscal 1994 to $2.1 million the following year.

The institute’s latest financial statement shows it spent $1,668,742 on preservation. By comparison, about $4.4 million was spent on education and training programs, $2 million on exhibition and $1.7 million on special events.

Under preservation, one of the institute’s major efforts has been compiling the AFI Catalog, red-bound volumes listing America’s film heritage by decade. The massive project has won widespread praise from film historians, scholars and film critics.

The AFI also operates a National Moving Image Database, the world’s largest computer database about film, with more than 250,000 records.

At the same time, the institute maintains a 13-member development staff to conduct fund-raising. Firstenberg defends the size of the staff--roughly equal to the dozen staffers assigned to the catalog project--saying that they raise money for the entire organization, including preservation.

The AFI has raised millions of dollars for itself from traditional methods. These range from small donations mailed in by average citizens to large contributions, like the $210,132 given one year by producer and AFI board member Merv Adelson.

The AFI also receives support from corporations and private foundations. The Film Foundation, director Martin Scorsese’s effort to preserve Hollywood movies, has contributed more than $200,000 to the AFI since 1994 from money it receives from cable channel American Movie Classics’ annual film preservation drive.

But traditional fund-raising methods have not been enough. When the NEA cutbacks began, the institute not only beefed up its marketing team but also cranked up its publicity machine by hiring a communications director, whose mandate is to raise awareness of the AFI on a national level.

At the same time, AFI executives brainstormed for more nontraditional ways to make money. What they came up with was the “100 Years . . . 100 Movies” project.

The three-hour CBS show, broadcast June 16, drew more than 11 million viewers who wanted to see how their favorite films were ranked--from No. 1 “Citizen Kane” to No. 100 “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Pollock noted that the AFI, rather than take a fee from CBS, went out and raised the advertising money itself from corporations like Cadillac, Blockbuster and Target. In the end, the AFI made a profit of about $300,000, but expects to make money for years to come through video sales and selling foreign broadcast rights. Pollock said the institute is considering future television specials.

But the selections provoked raging debate in newspaper columns and on the Internet, and the widespread suspicion grew in the film archival community that AFI was in cahoots with the studios.

“Almost all the films in the selection process were out on video, so, it’s a way for the studios to sell videos,” said Universal archivist Horak. “The whole raison d’e^tre, to raise money, was not talked about at all. Really, it was an advertising campaign for AFI and the industry.”

AFI officials said that the studios as such were not involved in the selection process, although most high-level studio executives were reportedly among the 1,500 individuals invited to vote for their top selections from the AFI-provided preliminary list of 400 films.

“I had to go with Jeannie to every studio and beg, ‘Please, do this. It’s good for you. You’re doing good work and it can only help you,’ ” Pollock recalled.

“They didn’t know what movies would be selected,” Firstenberg added. “They had no idea.”

Pollock said it is regrettable that the AFI has had to lay off employees and make other cuts to make ends meet.

“We have cut our budget and we’ve tried to raise more money and tried to keep the programs going,” he said. “That’s what you do when you are under pressure for money.”

Fay Kanin, a longtime AFI board member, said that the institute now must look for ways to pare down operations without cutting into film preservation. The cost-cutting, she vowed, “does not send a message that AFI is retrenching or giving up the struggle [for film preservation] in any way.”