Original subtitles

- When I first, you know, became aware of lost films,

it was more of so the realization,

like, artwork in general can just degrade and become lost.

- You know, a lost film, by definition,

would basically, or at least my definition would

basically be a film that has otherwise not survived.

You know, it's a film that

for whatever reason, we don't have.

But when you start looking at the lost films

in the '60s and '70s, and especially

the genre films the Vinegar Syndrome is interested in,

you start unpacking this treasure trove of film.

- Don't call me, baby, I'll call you.

- It seems like genre films are more vulnerable

to being lost because there were fewer prints made of them.

A lot of times, these are independently produced films,

as opposed to studio films.

- One of the problems with genre films,

they were done at these smaller labs,

DuArt in New York, WRS in Pittsburgh,

and when those labs closed,

a lot of negatives disappeared.

- Check me out.

- My God.

- I think that these independent producers weren't thinking

about the life of these films

after their initial exploitation, which is where

they're gonna make the majority of their money.

- If you want a good smoke, try one of these.

- I mean, they just had a low opinion of the movies.

They just saw them as a commercial product

and they didn't really see them as something

that was deserving of being preserved.

The level of restoration work

that has to be done on these movies is so extreme

that it takes a lot of work and a lot of passion

to keep these old movies alive.

- Our mentor, Dave Friedman,

would often say that a film is like a sack of flour.

Every time you shook it, a little bit more would come out.

- Before Vinegar Syndrome

and my professional career, I was working

at a place called Film Workers Club out of Chicago,

and there I specialized in film transfers,

digital color work, but mostly on advertisements,

not necessarily feature films, but occasionally.

My first job was actually working

as a projectionist in a movie theater during high school,

and second job was at a video and records store.

So it very much plays into what I do today.

- Prior to meeting Ryan, and certainly long

before Vinegar Syndrome was even a concept for either of us,

I was helping to manage a video store in Chicago,

where I was born and raised, called Odd Obsession Movies,

which became kind of a meeting ground social club

for a lot of the more interesting cinephiles in the city.

And I was also working on a volunteer basis,

‘cause it was a volunteer cinema,

at Doc Films at the University of Chicago,

where I was helping as a programmer

and finding materials and so on.

And this is one of the ways

that I initially became more aware of film rights

and actually began speaking

to filmmakers and film distributors.

It didn't ready faze me in that I wanted to find

or rescue lost films.

My interest was always themed around films

that look bad in the available versions,

or seemingly don't have good materials available.

- The term "lost film," to me,

is a film that we know existed at some point,

but we cannot find any existing elements to it.

- You know, this is one of those questions

where I've been thinking about this for so long,

where I feel like now I've lost

what a lost film actually is.

- I would not consider a film to be lost

if it was still on a digital format.

I think that a lost film, in order to qualify

as a lost film, is there is literally nothing left of it,

save for maybe, you know, a couple of,

I don't know, a couple of frames or something like that.

It's something that we literally cannot get back.

- When I began being interested in film history,

a lost film was something which I couldn't view,

and that was my perspective of it.

That being said, nowadays, I'm much more

of the opinion that there are different classifications

of a lost film.

There's a lost film which is accident,

which means it survives somewhere, it's just not viewable.

There's a lost film which is lost to its original medium,

something which may only exist on tape.

- Cut, let's try and get it right this time.

- But all in all, a lost film is a work

that doesn't exist in the accessible format

that it's meant to be seen in, I think.

- You know, a film that was never completed,

in my minds, that's not a lost film.

Like, "New York Ninja" is not a lost film.

It's just an incomplete film.

- If it's not finished, how can it be a lost film?

Like, it needs to be finished in order to be a lost film.

I agree with that to an extent.

However, when it comes to something like "New York Ninja,"

which is what I worked on and helped finish,

it was a film that had been shot but not finished.

So the question is, is it an unfinished film

or is it a lost film?

In the case of "New York Ninja,"

I would probably say it's a little bit of both.

There was actually some knowledge of the film existing prior.

One of the great things about "New York Ninja" is it

actually shows our love of preservation.

I'm not sure a lot

of other companies would have taken the time

to take an unfinished film

and put the money and resources into finishing it.

- An orphan film is a film that

we have elements for, however,

the copyright owner has either passed away

or cannot be identified.

I guess the best example for that would be a lot

of stag films are considered to be orphan films

because these people who created them, they used fake names.

So we don't really know who these people were

or created them.

These are different from lost films,

though, because we know that they actually existed

and we have the elements to kind of prove it.

- You've already proven how good you are.

Now let's see if you can act.

- Now, I would always read "American Cinematographer,"

and they had some just great articles

with Scorsese and directors, you know,

concerned about their films, you know,

especially the film stocks

just weren't gonna last over time.

And that was probably, like, in the '90s

when I started to really realize

that, you know, film itself was,

like, more fragile than some of the other art forms.

- Phew, this one's bad.

- Probably everyone that's watching this hopefully knows

what the definition of vinegar syndrome is by now.

And I think that's something that,

you know, both of us are proud of.

You were asking me what vinegar syndrome smells like,

It smells like vinegar, yeah.

- So how I originally got started here,

I was being asked to do some QC work,

and then they started training me.

I was also learning to restore, really,

the first releases.

- So I think it's really important

to call attention to the fact that the people who work here,

even if they had interest in film

or some kind of, like, formal technical training

in digital editing or post production,

they, for the most part, had never touched a piece

of film before coming into this building

and beginning to work here, and certainly had never worked

in terms of restoration and archival materials.

Yeah, I think that that's really important

because it shows both their level of interest

and dedication to what they're doing

and what we're doing collectively,

but also, you know, this is work

that can be done by anyone

if they are really motivated

and have the discipline to study it

and focus on it and learn the technical side of it.

- You got it.

- Excellent, thank you.

- So the lost films of Herschell Gordon Lewis,

these were three films, "The Ecstasies of Women,"

"Linda and Abilene," and then "Black Love."

- A young man begins in earnest

to try to arouse a girl sexually.

He caresses her leg and talks to her gently.

She resists, but he continues.

- It was cool to find these

because there was kind of, like, rumors about them.

You saw posters, but otherwise these were lost.

- It's hard to ignore the name Herschell Gordon Lewis,

and as somebody who had been, you know,

really interested in the history of erotic cinema,

seeing Herschell Gordon Lewis, you know,

with lost films and having all those films

also be erotic was really interesting.

- Oh, hi, my name is Harry,

glad you could drop in, this is?

- Sandy.

- Oh, yeah, Sandy, that's it, Sandy.

Excuse me a minute, will you, folks.

- Genre filmmakers who worked in sex films

in, like, any capacity, it's almost always

that their genre film work is gonna overshine

their sex film work.

- You took care of me last year in 1868.

Now I'm gonna take care of you in '69.

- They came out of the Guffanti Film Lab,

and we're still, you know,

going through this collection to this day.

Also from that collection was

another film called "Massage Parlor Murders."

Finding all of those and starting off with those,

it was an added intensity to get those films right,

showing what we're trying to do

in terms of preservation, in terms of restoration,

and what we want to do going forward.

- One of the questions that comes up a lot is the difference

between restoration and preservation.

I would say first and foremost,

Vinegar Syndrome is a preservation company.

We are one of the few film companies out there

that actually has an in-house film archive.

This means that we store the physical film

in the building, temperature controlled,

humidity controlled, that way we're trying

to preserve the actual physical film

for as long as possible, keeping it

from degrading and deteriorating over time.

Restoration for us is taking that physical film,

scanning it in digitally,

and then going in and cleaning up,

removing the dirt, the scratches,

physically removing that stuff

in order to make a newer restored version of the film.

So Vinegar Syndrome is not the only company out there

that is releasing genre films like this.

There are a number of companies,

Arrow, Blue Underground, Severin.

We all have the same goal at the end of the day,

is to preserve, restore, and release these films.

- Our goal was to always do

the most exhaustive releases possible,

the kind of things that we wanted to see,

I wanted to see, studio level transfers

for these only crappy exploitation movies

that people, you know, gave really bad transfers to,

and go back to the original elements whatever possible,

you know, restore everything

to the A plus level as much as possible,

given the elements we were working with,

and have it as exhaustive of extras as possible.

And I guess really at that time,

the only other guys who were doing it were Don May

and Vinny Bancalari at Elite,

and, you know, I give them a lot of credit

for kind of starting in this arena.

- The law of the jungle, eat or be eaten.

In these film-

- And then that's why we started Grindhouse,

because we were frustrated

that movies we loved were only available

as fifth generation bootlegs from some Japanese LaserDisc

that was, you know, optically censored anyway

in the case of "Cannibal Holocaust,"

so we ready wanted to give these movies some respect.

For "The Beyond," we went to Technicolor in Rome.

Everybody was saying,

"Why do you even care about these movies?"

We went to the lab to inspect the negative,

and, you know, we were winding through it

and discovering that the negative was,

like, in really poor condition,

even though it had ended up at Technicolor,

which is one of the preeminent labs in the world.

You know, it was just, they just thought of it as junk

and filler, and, you know,

I was winding through the negative

and there was a tear through one of the frames,

and I called the lab technician over and he went,

"Oh, no, don't worry about it, don't worry about it,"

and took a tape splicer and just slathered a piece

of tape over it and pushed out the bubbles with his finger,

and it was like, "Bueno, bueno," it was, like, good,

it's like, for him, that was good enough, you know,

for a movie that they thought was just junk.

So, I mean, when people have an opinion

that something is garbage, I mean,

they're not apt to try to preserve it.

- This was actually the second tape I ever owned,

and the first horror movie I ever owned.

It was a French release, I got it on holiday, because-

My career in the world

of boutique labels started before Severin.

We had a VHS label in the '90s in England called Exploited,

and it basically emerged out of collecting horror movies

in the UK on tape, and there was a lot more talk

about the fact that not only were these films

in their commercially released form cut,

but they were also, you know,

not in the correct aspect ratio.

They were old masters,

they were not really the way the filmmaker intended.

So that became much more part of the discussion,

that, you know, widescreen was a thing

that we should be aspiring to to see these films.

Fortunately, I met Bill Lustig around this time,

and Bill splintered off to form Blue Underground

and I went with him for the first, I think,

five years of Blue Underground,

and then we formed Severin after that.

Three of the more satisfying undertakings we've done

over the last few years are the director sets

that we've put together for Al Adamson,

Andy Milligan, and Ray Dennis Steckler.

Adamson was first, and it certainly didn't start

as us doing, you know, as comprehensive a set

as we possibly could, but because most

of the films came from one source,

the actual licensing part of it wasn't too complicated.

The complicated part was finding the films themselves,

and the fact that a lot of them had been released

in multiple versions was re-titlings and recut.

So sometimes there would be three reels

of one movie at Iron Mountain,

and then another couple of reels were at The Academy.

Another reel we might have to get off a collector

because that one seemed to have disappeared,

or that version seemed to have disappeared.

- Filmed on location

where they actually work and play,

see the sensuous ladies of the Mustang Ranch.

- So the archeology wasn't so much in finding the elements.

There was some of that, but it was more

about putting all the pieces together

once we got all the elements here.

- In the archive here at AGFA,

we have the, I believe the only known print

of "Carnival Magic,"

an Al Adamson children's movie classic,

and it unfortunately is in a very advanced stage

of vinegar syndrome.

Well, I think genre films are likely

to become lost for a couple of reasons.

I mean, one, the kind of obvious reason is just

because of what they are.

- From every act of pleasure comes

an equal act of perversion.

- To the general public, these movies are still trashy,

especially if you're going more

into the exploitation, sexploitation end of the spectrum.

Like, that kind of stuff just terrifies,

you know, the average person.

But also, just how they were made,

you know, a lot of these films were financed

by, like, doctors or dentists who were just like,

"I got a bunch of money, I want to be a film producer.”

And because of that, there was very little

if any thought given to the life

of the film beyond its initial theatrical run.

- What about these attributes?

- There's so many lost films

that I'm just kind of dying to see.

It's funny, I think a lot of people

when they think of the idea of lost films,

I think lost films are, you know,

silent era Hollywood productions or early soundies,

talking about things like "London After Midnight"

and things like that.

- Shut the fuck up!

I don't have to tell you if I don't want to.

- Those are the fighting words used to the almighty

when he cast you out of heaven-

- I think my favorite film

that I've helped find is a little movie called "Sex Demon,"

which is the gay porno version of "The Exorcist."

- Did you see what your lover did?

He's gonna rot in Hell, and so are youl!

- Made by a 20-year-old male stripper turned filmmaker

named JC Crickett, or Jimminy Crickett.

It's a film that actually had a fairly high profile

at the time of its release in 1975.

It was featured in national gay magazines

and heavily advertised in, like, issues of "The Advocate"

and a lot of other gay publications

and got mixed reviews.

But for decades, it's been unavailable to see.

If you've ever, like, inspected

or handled a 35 or 16 millimeter print

of a low budget genre film,

you will probably just be disgusted.

They're dirty, they're full of splices.

They're in just really awful condition,

especially adult titles,

which would literally be played on loop

for their entirety of their runs over

and over and over and over again.

I think the reason why genre films are overlooked

by, you know, more reputable archives

or institutions are because they don't have the prestige

that Hollywood films have, but that stuff is important,

and these films are our history, our heritage.

They should exist and people should be proud to have them.

- I disagree with this just a little bit

because I feel that the institutions that do the most

in the way of film preservation are pretty indiscriminate

in the kinds of films they preserve.

- I think there's a growing awareness

around the significance of independent film,

and independent film often means genre film.

- We warn you that this-

- There's a more of a willingness

to look at these materials as being significant,

as being uniquely endangered in a way

that a lot of studio films aren't,

and even if we aren't able

to give those films necessarily the love and the attention,

if we're not, like, doing extensive restoration work

on most of them, we're still intervening

on their behalf, getting them out of peril,

and putting them in the vaults.

- Of course, it's easier to get funding for certain films,

and those films tend to be the classics,

things for which there is commercial potential,

things for which there might be some critical acclaim

to the archive for performing the restoration.

UCLA Film Archive has done a restoration of "Ouanga,"

a Black cast film for which I am trying to see

if they will allow me to access,

things like the gay films of Pat Rocco,

not just a film or two here and there,

but documentaries, narratives, shorts, everything.

And, you know, it's important to preserve everything

because we don't know now what's gonna be of value

in 20 years, 50 years.

- Yeah, the first time that I became aware

of the film "The Rare Blue Apes," whereas I tend to refer

to it as "Quack Quack and the Rare Blue Apes,"

or just simply "Quack Quack," it was part

of this huge collection, like, several pallets full

that had arrived at the archive.

It was this female film collector who

had stored these materials, as the legend goes,

like, in her backyard underneath a tarp.

- Fire!

- Polarizing would probably be the best description.

- Partnerships with home video companies such

as Vinegar Syndrome and Severin can be hugely important.

That sort of work puts the films back out into the public,

and that's important in itself,

but I think even beyond that,

by sort of, like, promoting film culture

by having information in your releases

about the elements that the transfers were made from,

you're doing a lot of work to educate cinephiles

about the materiality of film.

People don't always realize that.

They sometimes just think stuff exists, like, in cyberspace,

that it doesn't have some sort of, like,

real existence here in, like, a physical place,

in a film vault.

And the fact that these scans

that home video companies are making

from elements can be traced back

to a particular negative, to a particular interpositive,

and, you know, now they're out there.

- All this sterilization stuff,

the papers keep talking about.

- Some people say it's a good thing, but what is it?

That's what I want to know.

- See that-

- I first became interested in exploitation films

I think in college.

Well, I wanted to be a filmmaker,

I wanted to work in film, but really,

there was no pathway for me, no avenue,

and I wanted to write about film history,

but I wanted to write about something

that hadn't yet been covered

in books and essays and journals,

and really, no one was talking about the exploitation film.

You know, there were a couple of mail order video companies

that would have exploitation categories,

like Something Weird and Scarecrow Video,

and I realize, well, this is a genre

that's not really been charted.

And so I would order as many of these tapes

as I could get, and try to find other films

in video rental places to, first,

amass the films and to begin to understand

what defined them as a genre.

- I think every high school girl and boy's entitled

to know the facts of life.

Many a girl has spoiled her whole life

by making just one mistake.

- And years later, I'm still doing that

because the films continue to emerge.

We continue to discover materials

that we didn't know existed before,

and the more films that we release,

the more films that we restore,

the better we continue to understand this genre.

- The Natives cover themselves

with the skin of the beast,

and so imbibe as they think the courage of the lions.

- The last film which was almost a lost film

that I did in this regard is "Ingagi,"

which is a morally reprehensible exploitation film,

pseudo documentary that pretended

to journey into darkest Africa

and expose a cult of monkey worshipers,

their terminology, not mine,

but it gets into some really messy racial issues,

but for that reason, it needed to be preserved

and made available for study

because like "Birth of a Nation,"

you know, none of us agrees with the philosophy

because "Birth of a Nation,"

but we regard it as one of the cornerstones

of America narrative cinema.

"Ingagi" is not a cornerstone of American narrative cinema,

but it is a cornerstone in the exploitation genre,

and it was a film that was incredibly controversial.

It was actually banned.

Not many films in America are banned, this film was banned.

But "Ingagi" just never made it out on video,

and to my knowledge, never showed in archives.

And it's funny, if a film does not come out on video,

it sort of gets erased from the public consciousness.

It's no longer something that people were even looking for.

So it's important that we continue to unearth

and release the films that were influential at one time

but have become basically forgotten

in the intervening years.

Working with the Library of Congress,

we were able to access two different prints of the film

which were slightly varying.

So I was able to cut together a definitive,

god help me, version of "Ingagi,"

so that that film is now on the record,

and for better or worse, we can see it

and understand it and learn a little bit

about what was considered

acceptable popular entertainment circa 1930.

- Did we ever talk about Jimmy Maslon and Eric Caiden,

who loved Herschell Gordon Lewis

and found the Herschell Gordon Lewis movies.

They tracked down the negatives for "Blood Feast,"

"2,000 Maniacs," "Color Me Blood Red," because

when those guys saved the Herschell Gordon Lewis movies,

that was kind of the start

of anybody saving exploitation films.

- When I was about, I guess about 15, I saw "Blood Feast."

The "Blood" trilogy was playing citywide in Los Angeles,

all over the Valley.

It was probably in 25, 30 theaters,

and of course there was no video or cable back then,

so I went to see it, and with a couple of my friends

in junior high, and it just blew me away.

And the next night, I came back with my cassette recorder

and just recorded all the dialogue from "Blood Feast,"

and went to school the next day

and played it for all my friends.

- Well, Frank, this looks like one of those long, hard ones.

- A couple of years later, I used to go see films at UCLA,

and I saw people kind of laughing that something

that was inept, and I'm thinking,

it kind of clicked in my mind, I go,

"They think that's crazy, over the top?

They haven't seen ‘Blood Feast."

So I went to the projectionist and I go,

"What do you guys pay for a rental?"

And he goes, "We pay 150 bucks."

And so I started thinking, wow, where's "Blood Feast"?

I mean, what if I could get that movie

and get it in 10 campuses every Saturday night?

That could be 1,500 bucks.

But I had no idea who had the rights.

So I just started to trying to figure out

where was "Blood Feast."

And somebody gave me a lead once, Stan Kohlberg has it.

So I called up Kohlberg,

he came back and said it was 10 grand, "You want to rights?"

And this was late, this Is probably, by now,

this is, like, 1979,

maybe 1979 or 1980.

There's still no video cable.

There's only still only four channels on TV,

so Kohlberg probably was thinking,

"Nobody's gonna play this on TV."

And I told Eric about, and he, and Eric knew who it was.

Eric goes, "Yeah, that's Herschell Gordon Lewis.

I'll kick in some money if you want to get that."

So Eric, he just, he knew what was going on

‘cause he had the poster store,

and I met Mike Vraney through Eric.

- When Mike started Something Weird in 1990,

he came across some 35 millimeter prints

of "A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine,"

"The Sin Syndicate," and a few tex-exploitation films.

Back in those days, he worked

at a porno theater called the Apple, and it was in Seattle,

and he didn't know anything about film restoration.

He didn't know anything about how films were scanned

or anything, so he would just bring his 35 millimeter prints

to the theater and project them,

and then sit in the audience with a camcorder and film it,

and then sell them to collector markets and stuff.

So those were some of the first films

that he had found, and it made him think

that there has to be hundreds and hundreds more out there.

He got so excited about these films,

and especially when he, you know,

did his first catalog, and he was like,

"All right, how can I find more?"

There was a magazine called "Big Reel,"

and that was one of the places

where if people were either buying or selling film,

like, you could find something there.

So he put in an ad saying, you know,

"I'm looking for 60s sexploitation films,"

but he also put in an ad saying,

"I'm selling 60s sexploitation films on home video."

I can only speak from my own experience,

but, like, in the early 1990s,

there really wasn't as much interest

in exploitation films and genre film.

There was always been an interest in,

like, underground movies, or things

that were just a little fringe-y.

But I think it was a matter of educating people

that these kind of films even exist.

- Many films that people thought were lost

or hadn't been accessible since the 1960s were

actually recirculated by Something Weird Video.

- "Scare Their Pants Off"

is a new kind of story.

- Something Weird was kind of the gateway drug,

and it definitely got me going down the rabbit hole,

just looking for weirder and weirder

and more interesting low-budget films.

There's always a ton of really interesting stories attached

to these movies, whether it be the actors and actresses,

or the people involved in making the film

or its distribution.

It seems like every movie is its own little microcosm.

- I saw the Chesty Morgan movies in the drive-in

when they came out, and Doris wrote Stan a letter saying,

"I'll sell my movies.

I don't know why anybody would even want these movies."

So I'm going, "Yeah, I want them, Doris.

What do you want for them?"

And she gave me a price, I didn't do anything,

I just said, "Okay, fine."

I think, I don't know what it was.

There were, like, 18 movies.

I think it was, like, 40K or something like that.

And, anyway, I bought the rights to Doris's films.

- Do you know that "Bad Girls go to Hell"?

- Then her films started getting more popular.

- Hey, let me ask you.

How did you come to meet Chesty Morgan?

- Well, somebody told me about her, and I thought-

- And then she got mad that she sold them to me.

John Waters also helped a lot,

and in 1981, he wrote "Shock Value,"

and that's around the time

that I bought the rights to the films.

John Waters really propelled these films into pop culture.

- Barry, did you meet Doris Wishman?

She's so great, you have to see her movies, they're great.

- Really? - I saw-

- Probably the most important exploiter

that Something Weird got involved

with was David F. Friedman,

known as the mighty monarch of exploitation film.

The way that Mike met him was not ideal.

He got a phone call one day saying,

"Hey, I hear you're selling my 'Ribald Tales of Robin Hood"

on video, and, you know, stop it."

And Mike gets on the phone, "Yeah, and people love it.

What can we do, like, to maybe make a deal or something?"

Dave Friedman had his films stored

in Los Angeles on Cordova Street.

He wasn't living in Los Angeles at the time.

He was already back in Anniston, Alabama, where he's from.

So Mike sets up a meeting with him down there

and goes in this, like, you know, stuffy old film vault

and starts looking around, and he's like,

"Oh, what is this?"

And he sees a movie called "Space Thing," and Dave's like,

"That's the worst science fiction movie ever made.

You don't want it," and that made Mike want it more.

And, you know, Dave made some recommendations,

like, you know, he had his very first film,

"The Defilers," he was very, very proud of that movie,

as well as the fact that he knew

that it would probably do well, and Mike was all about it.

So he took about, I don't know, half a dozen films,

and he said, "Well, let's just transfer these

and see what happens," and things sold like gangbusters.

Dave gets his first royalty check and he says,

"You can have them all,

and I'm gonna introduce you to my friends."

- All you kids make me sick.

- The cool thing about Something Weird is

that they were finally putting out a lot of movies

that I'd read about for years.

So, yeah, Something Weird, you know,

they were sort of doing it first,

and the funny thing about Mike Vraney, though,

is he was more into just releasing the movies.

I don't think he was really that into preservation.

- Mike was not worried about the longevity of these films.

It was more important for him to just get it scanned

and put it on home video and then just put it someplace,

and his someplace was not always the best.

And the way that Mike would store films,

it was willy nilly, like, they weren't by genre

or, like, put all the Dave Friedman movies together,

all the Joe Sarno movies together, all this.

It was just random.

- Mike has many different genres here.

I got something in mind-

- I think releasing films to home media was always something

about finding rights first

and then finding elements afterwards,

but I think Something Weird really started this idea

of having elements and saying, "Fuck it,

I just have to put this out."

- Bat Pussy, please, it's a misunderstanding.

- What's a misunderstanding?

- Probably our proudest accomplishment

Is a movie called "Bat Pussy."

- Meanwhile, at Bat Pussy's

secret warehouse hideout, Dora Dildo,

alias the mighty Bat Pussy,

is patiently waiting for her super senses

to tell her that a crime is about to be committed.

- Mike ended up getting a large collection

of 16 millimeter adult films

from a defunct theater in Memphis, Texas

from his friend Mike McCarthy, and people just loved it,

and it became, like, its own cult classic,

and we had no idea, I mean, that wasn't on any lists,

you know, that we would come up with,

‘cause over the years, I mean,

Mike would have me go through our press book materials

or our stills and be like, "Okay, what other films haven't

we found that look interesting and stuff?"

Well, "Bat Pussy" was not amongst any of them,

and, you know, in retrospect now,

it was probably our greatest find.

- I've got so much to offer,

Bat Pussy, this is tougher for me, turn over.

- Around 1991, '92 was when Mike first heard

about the Movielab.

- Movielab was a very large

independent film processing facility,

and it was the lab of choice

for a large amount of independent filmmakers.

At some point, Movielab, in the late '80s, early "90s,

they had to close their doors.

- So Mike goes out to the East Coast and organizes, like,

three cargo containers full of films

to be sent to a warehouse in Los Angeles

where he would go to a couple of times a month

and just process film.

And we started finding some of the most amazing films,

like the Michael and Roberta Findlay "Flesh" trilogy,

"Touch of Her Flesh," "Curse of Her Flesh,"

and "Kiss of Her Flesh."

- Get down there, you slut.

That's the only job women are good for.

- But then, there was an announcement

that there was gonna be an auction of the films.

Arthur Morowitz, who was the owner of Distribpix,

he contacted Mike and said, you know,

"If I buy these films, would you be the custodian,

and we can go in as partners?"

- My father, he had gotten in touch with a gentleman,

he, I believe, bought the building that Movielab was in,

and he was, I believe he was the owner of Panavision,

which they then moved into that location,

and my father ended up having a nice conversation with him,

and my father was pretty well known in the city

at that point, so they had a nice rapport,

and I think the main thing that ties us to Movielab,

or that sort of brings this all together is

that this guy was not looking to throw this film away.

This guy, there was something nice about that,

when you hear the story told,

but he couldn't do anything with it,

and it was an enormous amount of film.

- It was a Herculean effort on Mike's part,

you know, processing the film,

and he never actually got through everything.

He would have, like, you know,

piles of different film elements,

like, you know, part of the negative to something,

but, like, it was still missing some of the audio track,

and then, "Okay, well, we know that's over here.

Label it with the title."

And it would be, like, a happy day

when we'd find all of the reels.

In 2012, Mike was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer,

so he knew that his days were numbered,

and he really needed to figure out, like,

what was gonna happen with everything

in the Something Weird archive,

including the Movielab collection,

because that was pretty much, like, the biggest part of it.

After his death, you know, we actually passed it back on

to Distribpix under the custodianship

of Steven Morowitz now.

So it's just funny to think,

all those films came out from the East Coast

and they lived here for a while,

and then they all went back to the East Coast,

and I believe they live in Bridgeport, Connecticut now.

- I think the big thing for me is

when we started merging with Distribpix,

and now it's just making

I think the film archive much more complete.

- Distribpix Incorporated is pretty much

a second generation home video company

founded on the production

of black and white sexual melodrama type films,

started in 1965 by my father and his partner, Howard Farber,

and they grew it into their own small little empire.

They invested in theaters, they bought properties,

and then blossomed that into home video.

I think many people, they're probably familiar

with Video Shack, which was the first real large chain

of video stores in the tri-state area,

and the flagship store being at 49th Street and Broadway.

So I sort of grew up around all this stuff

and just had the greatest memories.

Hundreds of those films were from Movielab,

and my dad was very happy.

He really loved Mike because every month,

they would get revenue checks.

My dad was just happy, he was happy with that,

and Something Weird Video became,

you know, the video label, you know what I'm saying?

A lot of people came up with Something Weird Video.

- I think in terms of just taking a collection

as wide and varied

as what film material Something Weird came across,

the actual branding was also one

of those really important facets of it,

where at a certain point, if you were able to enter

into the back halls of a video store,

you were automatically able to recognize

that at the very least, what you see,

if it has Something Weird on it, is gonna be cool.

It's gonna be something weird that you haven't seen before,

literally, something weird.

But I think that's what makes the actual current landscape

of the boutique label or the releasing companies,

independent releasing companies of today really fascinating

as, like, an actual, really diverse programming world

where literally anybody can do anything

if you love the material and are able to brand it correctly.

- I think that the work that Mike did

from, like, 1990 to 2013, it's an indelible mark

on film preservation.

To me, keeping his legacy alive is,

like, the most important part

‘cause, I mean, seriously, if it wasn't for him,

I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right now,

and I think a lot of other people wouldn't be, either.

I mean, he was a real inspiration to,

you know, many film fans and people

who, like, wanted to do this for a career.

And then to be able to, like, take those films

and just put them, like, you know,

insert them all these other places

where they're gonna just continue to be discovered

by other people, Severin Films,

Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video, Kino Lorber.

There really wasn't any one company when,

after his death that could just be like,

"Okay, I'll do all that."

So they picked and choose, and I help them along the way,

and, you know, it's been really wonderful being able

to work with other people who get it

and, you know, they're bringing their own voice

to this material now.

- Huh, maybe I missed it.

- It's right on the cart.

- What is it?

- I don't know.

- There's this definite misconception

on the parts of people who like these films

and buy the physical copies that,

it's come out on disc, therefore it's preserved,

or therefore the original materials are preserved.

Not every film that we release

and that we restore lives in our archive.

Sometimes we acquire materials temporarily

and then have to return them to whoever owns them.

- Oops.

My father was Larry Joachim, who was a movie producer

and distributor of independent films.

One of my father's friends had a big collection

in storage and in Movielab.

It was up for auction or something like that.

I guess my father went there

and there was nobody at the auction

and he got all these things for very little,

and he just picked it up, and I said, "What'd you do?"

He says, "Oh, I just got another,

like, 50 films and negatives."

So many of the films that are in these storage and things

we found out were missing,

they were lost films for many years,

things like "Red Roses of Passion"

and "Beware the Black Widow."

- The one that I have the closest affinity

for is "Beware the Black Widow."

This particular one seemed really interesting

in that it had, like, it actually had a killing narrative

and wasn't just straight up nudity.

We had, I believe it was seven out of eight reels

of the actual sound,

and one part of the actual picture.

So I reach out to the collector

and see whether or not he had anything else

for this title, and luckily, he did.

- We do know that there was some fires

where the original warehouse is and other places like that,

and many things were ruined

to the point where there's very little left.

Luckily, we have found a lot of it.

- "Deep Inside" is an example of a frustrating project,

in that the only element that we were able to locate

for the film is a comp dupe negative,

and that means that it's a picture negative element

that also has a soundtrack on it,

and because it came from another country

and it was the element that had been sent

to that country for their own theatrical distribution,

the distributor there decided to reedit the film.

So in order to put the film back together,

we had the main feature, and then we had three reels

of chunks that had been cut out, sometimes mid-shots,

from the version that was released internationally.

So all of these different elements were scanned,

and then I had to kind

of haphazardly put them all back together

and figure out where all of these random chunks belonged.

- Do you have to eat that peach like that?

- I love peaches.

- By and large, the most complicated restorations

in terms of elements are either where the element was edited

or completed in a way that requires multiple sets

of elements to be used or pulled from

to create a single version of the film,

or the film was reedited so much

that there isn't a single element,

a complete element that represents the film

as it was originally intended to be seen,

so other elements have to be used

to either supplement, because maybe the negative was recut

and things were taken out of it or reordered

and those pre-print elements don't exist anymore.

So the only element that does exist is a print,

or even worse, only a video master.

And we've unfortunately had to do that

on a number of occasions where the only film materials

we've been able to locate

for a title are either a recut version

or a censored version that's missing material

that the filmmakers certainly wanted in there,

and we've had to pull from a far inferior source.

- The most extreme situation that

I've encountered was "House on Straw Hill ."

- Perhaps this is the first time in a long while

that I really feel content.

I actually feel happy this evening.

- It had all kinds of damage

that I hadn't really experienced before.

When you look at the image,

it looked like watermarks all over it and different colors,

and the colors were fading

in different spots in every frame.

So it wasn't something where unless

you actually went into every frame and repainted it

that you would actually be able to restore it unilaterally.

But we found a release print

from a collector here in the US,

and that was actually what we used

for a majority of the master

because it was actually better condition than the negative.

So I actually went to

where the James Kenelm Clarke films were stored,

which was at his farmhouse in Norfolk, in England,

and it was a barn, but when I went in there,

there was a hole in the roof of the barn,

and all the film cans were just encrusted

into the wall, basically, like,

the brick work was kind of falling apart,

and it was almost as if the cans themselves were kind

of part of that old ruin.

But it was covered in pigeon shit, years and years of dirt,

and the elements in Norfolk could get in,

like, hot in the summer, freezing in the winter,

snow, whatever must have been on those things,

and all the film cans were completely rusty,

and this is how the negative of "House on Straw Hill"

and all his other films had been stored for decades.

I did manage to pull enough reels of each of the films,

which I then loaded into my rental car.

When they arrived here, you know, you could smell them,

you could smell that film, and we had

to then have them all sonically cleaned,

take them down to what we call the bath house here in LA

and have them sonically cleaned, and they complained

about the condition of these things,

like, "What the hell are you bringing us?"

But at least then they come back

in the best possible condition to put on the scanner,

and then we have to figure out how well

they can be restored, which Is never gonna be perfect,

but at least we've then scanned them until, you know,

until 8K scanning comes along, we've got them

and we've got them, you know, in better conditions

than they were being kept for the last few decades.

- One of the very earliest collections

that I became involved with was the material

from a guy named Elvin Feliner,

who for decades was just buying film libraries.

- I knew Elvin Feltner for many, many years.

He figured out early on that he could buy a film library

for X and then have it valued at,

like, 10 or 20, even 100 X.

What he did is he amassed a film library

and he got an appraisal of the film library

for $400 million,

and so he basically lost interest in the library

and he was really only interested

in borrowing money against the value of the library.

- He didn't really care what it was.

Like, he would buy, like, TV shows,

he would buy films, he would just buy anything,

and one of the libraries that he bought were all

of the independently produced films by Albert Zugsmith,

who is best remembered for his flirtation

with Hollywood respectability, but like many people

who got their starts in Hollywood, he ended up working

in exploitation films in the '60s and "70s.

- The film you're about to see is a new art form,

"The Incredible Sex Revolution,"

written and directed by Albert Zugsmith,

who's brought you such great motion pictures

as "Written on the Wind," "Touch of Evil," and "Panty Hill."

- The materials were stored well for several decades

until the early 2000s when they were reportedly moved

to a carpeted former Bally Total Fitness.

- He was dying of leukemia.

I was in the hospital visiting him,

and I happened to notice on the table next

to the bed a pile of mail, and there was a piece of mail

that was registered mail from Florida.

So I kind of quietly grabbed

that piece of mail and I went into the hallway,

opened it up, and of course it was from the landlord

of where his film library was stored.

I copied down the name and the phone number.

Later that day, I reached out to him,

and the guy said basically that he's foreclosed on it,

he has a dumpster, and in two weeks, the entire contents

of the storage space IS going in a dumpster,

and I went down to Florida to rescue the library.

There was no air conditioning

and there had been a roof leak.

Like, the worst possible conditions

you could ever imagine for storing a film.

- A number of the films that were salvageable,

although decaying, were "The Incredible Sex Revolution,"

which was a lost film, and "Violated,"

which sadly still only survives

in terms of a couple of faded prints.

We have the rotting Zugsmith films

in this building for a while,

and we'd basically purge every couple of years

because it was in such a bad state

that even in two years' time,

film that was semi-salvageable would have decayed

so much more that it became un-salvageable.

- We're sitting on raw scans, raw film scans,

digital film scans

of titles that have, since the film was scanned,

have decayed because film decays.

I mean, you can only slow it down.

You can't stop it, you can't reverse it.

Film is like people, we just continue to get older

and, you know, there's more problems

and more aches and pains.

But I wish there was a way to just hit the pause button,

but you can't.

- There was a certain amount of crosspollination

between exploitation films

and other low budget filmmaking of the time.

I first learned about the driver's education films

of the '50s and '60s,

the explicit "Death on the Highway" films,

and to me, those films were mythic,

and I didn't necessarily believe that they existed,

at least as described to me.

- They have been called the most

effective traffic safety motion pictures ever produced.

Without a doubt, you have witnessed

the most shocking scenes ever put on motion picture film.

The object of the whole thing,

our traffic safety film program,

is simply to make you a better driver.

During these years of filmmaking,

we have shown you the results

of almost every driving mistake in the book.

- And the intention of the filmmakers

with these films is to show them

to high school drivers in driver education classes

to scare them into habits of safe driving.

And eventually, I tracked down the makers

of some of these films and some of the more elusive films

that weren't available from mail order companies.

I was able to find films on eBay

because no one saw the value in certain films.

- This car loaded with teenagers slid

into the end of a guardrail.

The rail knifed through the car,

pinning all of the young men in the rear portion of the car.

Believe it or not, no one was seriously injured.

- With industrial and educational films,

typically the pre-print material,

that is the negatives, don't survive,

and I have an especially tragic story to share.

When I was working on my documentary

on driver education films,

I was seeking out the negatives

for those really landmark films,

like "Signal 30" and "Mechanized Death,"

and the producer who owned the rights,

Earle Deems, had donated the negatives

to the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

He put me in touch, I got through to the correct person,

and eventually found that they said,

"Oh, yeah, we had that, but we got rid of it."

And it was like, "Why did you get rid of it?"

"Well, he also provided us with video tapes,

and the video tapes were really all anyone needed

or wanted, so there was no reason to hold onto the,

no one was ever gonna do anything with the films."

Of course, I would have done something with the films,

but I got there too late.

Those negatives had been junked,

and he had an inventory of, like,

A, B-roll, 16 millimeter camera negatives, it was,

you know, it was sad, to say the least.

And a lot of people during the rise

of the video era felt like,

"We don't need 16 millimeter anymore,

it's all video and once we have a VHS copy, we're good,"

not looking ahead to realize

that beyond VHS was gonna be DVD and Blu-ray

and 4K UHD and who knows what else.

So it's crucial that filmmakers, producers, distributors

always preserve the earliest surviving materials,

and preferably in more than one form

because there's all sorts of ways

in which films can fade and decompose

and no longer be usable

for the creation of high definition masters.

- So Chicago Film Society grew pretty organically

from when we started in 2011.

We initially were just doing repertory programming,

So we were showing a movie or two every week,

and we weren't doing any other activities.

We were purely a programming organization.

That's how we conceived of it.

But very quickly, we discovered

that that wasn't really sufficient, right,

because after a certain point, you run into a wall,

and you're dealing with a lot of archives

and private collectors and realize the advantages

of having your own collection.

- Film preservation was not necessarily one

of our goals starting up, but we started

with one film preservation project,

and we also started with a small film collection,

and just over the course of operating,

those projects kept coming.

We kept seeking them out and finding them,

and the collection continued to grow.

- We had a lot of prints that were not rare or unique,

but we did have things that were.

So we certainly also felt there was a level

of responsibility there, that when we have the only copy

of something, we can either show it until it crumbles,

or we can, you know, show it once or twice

and then realize, "My God, this film

that we have is the only copy,

and the really responsible thing is

to make a new negative, make new prints

so that we can share it."

- You know, of course we had daydreamed

and joked about doing preservation projects,

and I think at a certain point, it became more serious.

I think that was really how we arrived

at doing the "Corn's-A-Poppin™ project.

- "Corn's-A-Poppin™ is really a great example

of how showing something, even if it's, you know,

maybe a little risky to show the only surviving print,

how essential that can be

to the restoration and preservation process.

- There's a film from 1955 called "Corn's-A-Poppin'."

It happens to be written by Robert Altman.

Altman himself didn't talk about it.

He basically disowned the film.

It wasn't ever available commercially on video.

It didn't screen in revival houses,

it was just basically a title on a filmography.

- What a show, wow.

- Wow is right.

- And you learn that it's not just an Altman adjacent curio,

but a regional film, it's a document

of a musical scene that's vanished,

the country and western swing scene in Kansas City

in the mid '50s.

It is, in its way, a sponsored film

because it was unofficially funded by the Popcorn Institute,

which was a trade group promoting popcorn.

- Remember, Pinwhistle is the pop-ular corn.

- You peel back the layers of the onion,

and unlike a real onion,

every layer smells better and better, right?

And with this specific film,

the more we researched it, the more we found

that there was this very compelling story behind it,

and it wasn't just a silly little musical film

about popcorn, but an actual artifact of culture.

- I think when most people think of what a lost film is,

they mean like a lost Hollywood feature,

or maybe a lost independent feature,

but probably a movie that has some connection

to someone that you've heard of,

but we haven't gotten to see, you know,

this lost corner of their work.

So in that, by that definition,

"Corn's-A-Poppin™ is really juicy

because of the Robert Altman connection,

but actually, I would say a lot

of the smaller cases are just as exciting.

Any home movie footage that

accidentally captures something is really interesting to me.

- If you're focused purely on narrative cinema

or, you know, mainstream film,

there's a kind of very simple cut and dried narrative

of what a movie is, right?

You make a movie, it opens in theaters.

It's made to entertain people

and make money back for its investors.

But when you get beyond that

and look at avant-garde films or industrial films

or home movies or artist films or cartoons

or all these other things,

the tools of a film critic looking

at mass media and saying, "This movie's good,

this movie is bad," those don't apply I think quite as much.

Instead, you're really looking at it more

as an anthropologist at that point.

You're saying, "What is this object, who made it?

What was its use, what community was it part of?" right,

because there can be occasional films

in the same way that there are occasional poems.

There are films made for a specific event, right?

And outside of the context of that,

it might look very modest.

It might just look like a tiny film in a can.

So our job as preservationists is to research the film

and to figure out the backstory of it,

to figure out the meaning it had to its original community,

even if that's obscure now,

to be able to draw in a narrative that can attract anybody.

- I think the most interesting part

about living in the era that we're currently in is

that we're not really beholden to five studios anymore.

I think there are a bunch of different voices

who can actually release films, curate their own extras,

and actually bring histories forward

that were never really a recognized part

of the canon before.

Genre film is something fiercely counter cultural,

very against the grain, if we're using film terms,

and I think Milestone Films is a

really good example of that.

- Yeah, I mean, the canon IS an interesting question,

and how it works, and how it works,

and inside each of us, not just as a cultural artifact.

I think we were all influenced

by the films we saw growing up, by our education,

by a lot of assumptions we have,

and by things that we were taught

when we first started working in the film industry,

and I started working in 1985.

Some of the things that were kind of, you know,

you know, just accepted facts were that certain kinds

of films were sellable and others were not.

So, for us, that seemed to be films by mostly white men,

and that other films, unless they were made by Africans,

I mean, I worked for New Yorker Films,

so films made by African filmmakers might be sellable,

but films made by African American filmmakers, not so much.

And I think coming to terms with how that works

in our own psyches also takes time.

I mean, we say that our goal is to fuck with the canon.

We want to push it, expand it,

and challenge it whenever we can.

- For the last 14 years, we have been working

on Project Shirley, a expansive research

into Shirley Clarke's life, her careers,

and distribution of everything from four

of her feature films, her documentaries,

her unfinished work, her short films.

But our touchstone, really,

is Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep."

We signed the rights in 2001.

It took us six years to clear the music rights,

which the degree of difficulty alone makes it one

of my favorites because I love going after the impossible.

- Working with Charles Burnett really help us kind

of reset our expectations of what film can

and doesn't want to do, that a film can be low budget,

and that can be a great virtue.

I now look at many Hollywood films

and think, "This is crap,"

because it's so trite or so manufactured or so glossy.

- As to why Milestone has focused

on these films is a complicated question

because at some point, we did do "The Bat Whispers,"

and one day, I got a phone call

from this man named Curtis Harrington,

and we spent two years working with Curtis,

trying to free up the rights to all of his films.

So at that point, we were willing to try and do genre films,

but it didn't come about, and once you hit

on a successful release schedule,

other filmmakers of that kind come to you, too.

So if you do horror films, horror directors come to you.

If you do Jewish films, Jewish directors come to you.

So we never really had that momentum

to do anything after Curtis, after "Night Tide," really.

So that's part of it.

Another part, I have to say,

is a lot of these genre films are directed by white men,

and that is something that we have decided

to let other people focus on.

Genre films are the undercurrent of American society,

even though they can seem to be about one subject,

zombie films, for example.

"Night of the Living Dead" was one

of the great political films.

So by investigating these

and seeing another side of society,

it brings out more depth, more understanding

of what this world is about.

- What counts as film treasures changes over time, and that,

in fact, until the French new wave

really celebrated American westerns, the films of John Ford

and Anthony Mann were just genre films.

And so I'm thinking that although perhaps the

big studio films would have been preserved no matter what,

I'm guessing that a lot of, you know,

Poverty Row westerns owe their survival

to Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut

and "Cahiers du Cinéma."

- Going through film,

which has sort of become the very regular part

of my life over the last couple of years,

discovering lost elements, it's invigorating.

But I did find-

You know, there's not a lot of people around.

Sometimes it's odd hours.

It's late at night, you know,

sometimes early in the morning,

and you're going through elements.

You know, we see a lot of labels on boxes,

and a lot of times, what's on the outside

of the box isn't necessarily what's inside the box.

But a few weeks ago, we found a film called "Red Midnight,"

and we of course looked at the leader,

and I believe the element is a blow up internegative,

So the film was shot in 16 millimeter.

One of the clues we had was on the leader,

there was a name.

- So "Red Midnight" was

from the Distribpix Movielab collection.

An optometrist, Dr. James A. Newslow,

he made this one film, "Red Midnight."

Apparently he made it ‘cause he was worried

about urban environments just being too close together

and fires spreading.

Somehow the film ends up with a nuke going off in Cape Cod.

That's a whole other story, too.

Samm Deighan said it best to me,

"The best way to describe it is

if Herschell Gordon Lewis made a spy film."

- Where's the hidden room to assemble the explosives?

- Look about you and see if you can find it.

- It was found at the last minute,

but again, you never know what else is gonna come.

- Something that's actually been very eye opening

with this Movielab collection in general was it

really gave me an idea of what Movielab did.

It's an impressive collection,

and that's sort of where we are,

and as you can see behind me,

we're still about I estimate another six months to a year

of going through this stuff,

taking the films out of the cans,

letting them breathe, putting them into archival cans,

and that's what we're doing.

- You know, back when we started,

we were one of the first if not the first smaller,

you know, at that time really small home video company

that was attempting to do

what only the major studios had done up to that point.

- The first time that I heard about film restoration,

it was probably in the context of "Citizen Cane"

or "Vertigo" or something like that,

where the studios have spent an inordinate amount of money

in doing a restoration of these films that's been kept

in immaculate conditions, you know, it's not

exactly a major undertaking of restoration.

- Film scanners have come down in cost.

Digital restoration tools are more readily available

to ordinary folks.

There's a higher interest, I think,

in preserving these films

and finding these films before it's too late.

But I really think in terms of, like,

the home video side of things, the smaller studios,

like, we were at the forefront,

and I'm pretty proud of that.

- This is the-

- And then you get the rest.

- So as of today, this is not gonna be an exact count,

we have around 4,000 unique titles in the database.

That equals around 7,000 elements in general,

which goes onto equal about 23,000 cans of film,

which is a lot.

- It's a real goldmine for what it is.

There's nothing else like it in the world.

It's an archive just full of films

that would otherwise be lost to time.

- Yeah, when I first visited Vinegar Syndrome,

I was actually just shocked

by how many people work here under one roof.

Normally, an archive will outsource all of that work,

and it can end up being really expensive,

if not entirely cost prohibitive.

And then on top of that,

there's the entire distribution side of the company.

You see where some of this stuff is going,

it's going to Finland, it's going to Germany,

it's going to Thailand, it's going all over the world,

and it all happens one roof, it's insane.

And at the end of the day,

we're making these movies accessible

to people that wouldn't have the means

to necessarily see them at all.

- We do not have an unlimited budget.

You know, we're not getting money from the government.

We're not getting money from taxpayers.

The money that we're getting to maintain our archive comes

from selling Blu-rays, selling 4Ks,

selling shirts, selling hoodies.

You know, that's where the money comes from.

- I really don't feel that we have a right

to say what people should see, what people should do.

- I'm waiting for the day where somebody asks me,

like, "Why do you do this?"

The history is never gonna be fully written.

There are always new stories to explore

and new stories to tell,

and the only way that we're gonna do that is

if people come to the archive and get their hands dirty

and figure out that history.

- One thing that I really enjoy, in general, is logistics,

and one of the most interesting things, as far as film goes,

is to be a part of an excavation, if you will.

One of the most exciting

and most overwhelming was this past February,

I was asked to help out with the remnants of WRS,

which was a lab in Pittsburgh.

- WRS is an enormously famous Pennsylvania lab,

which at different times,

it'd passed through different hands,

but it was very famous

for being the favorite lab of George Romero.

- We showed up and it was like nothing

I've ever seen before.

There were holes in the roof,

all the insulation was down on top of these piles of film.

We were staring at pallets

that had literal piles of feces.

- It's had 30 years of mold caked

into the actual outside of each reel

unless it was in a plastic container,

and if it was in a plastic container,

it's gonna be suffering from higher rates of decay.

- You know, one thing that I'll say

about myself is I don't fall

when it comes to logistical stuff, we always make it happen,

but this was the first time I think I said,

"I don't think this is possible."

- It was just me, Joe Rubin, Steven Morowitz,

who's manning a forklift, the Ralph Stevens,

who is running around winding and unwinding pallet wrap

because he didn't want to spend too much money

on the pallet wrap, but at the same time,

it was all of us together and some hired folks.

I was doing my archivist thing where I was like,

"Yeah, this is a cool film.

This is what this is, this is what that is,"

and kind of trying to get them excited about it,

‘cause it was such an enormous ordeal,

and we ended up saving five truckloads of film.

- There's no doubt in my mind

that there'll be some amazing things discovered.

- Original materials, IPs, CRIs.

The issue with that is that it's

just gonna take a really long time to go through it all.

- The heyday of exploitation movie making will

probably never come again.

The circumstances that led

to those kinds of movies can never be repeated.

It was a crucible of circumstances

in the '60s and '70s and '80s

that led to a certain kind of very free,

very extravagant, very eccentric,

very idiosyncratic filmmaking,

sometimes utterly off the wall and crazy,

but fascinating, and, you know,

the more of that material is preserved, the better, really.

- I wonder where the new member's calling up.

- He's probably calling his tailor

to cancel his orders for a couple of suits.

- I don't really know that much

about how the general public

and even cinephiles necessarily look

upon a lot of the restoration work that I do.

I know most people would be happy

to just buy a new edition of "Metropolis"

and "Nosferatu" every five years,

and don't worry, we will continue to provide them with that.

But it's essential to me to continue discovering new films.

I think we're over corporate culture at this point.

There's still a lot of fascinating history to be told,

and really, do my bit to sort of let the world know

that we are a long way from having,

you know, fully written the history of American cinema.

In fact, the material we're just digging

into is often some of the most exciting

and interesting material

because it's not about the studio system.

- I don't know, I think, you know,

Joe will probably have a completely different answer

and maybe just plead the fifth on this one,

I don't know, but we have, I mean, anyone that knows us,

they know that we're very different people

and we come from different backgrounds

and we're bringing different things to the table.

And not to be, like, cliche,

but I think that it kind of helps, you know?

We have different perspectives and, you know,

Vinegar Syndrome is, like, right in the middle.

- No, these are all mysteries.

That's why I'm calling you, ‘cause I don't know what the-

- We argue constantly.

To an extent, that is a good thing

because it doesn't mean that either of us are going

to always have the final say.

We have, whether either of us want to,

we have a tremendous burden

that we are the responsible custodians

for hundreds, well, thousands, actually,

of best surviving or only surviving film materials

for movies that if they were lost, would truly be lost.

We have tons of lost films.

Are they really lost

if they're sitting 20 feet away from us?

Maybe not, but they're lost in the sense

of no one else can see them

because we haven't restored them yet,

we haven't released them yet.

So we have such a responsibility

to make sure that what we're doing is always geared

towards ensuring that the materials that we have here,

the work that we're doing here, doesn't become lost,

that we're not part of the problem.