joey is a teapot wrote:
The fact that the government had to step in is sad, because the film industry should have been doing this themselves. But Congress created The National Film Registry, which picks 25 films every year to make sure they preserve, for historical, cultural, or aesthetic value.

They really treated their silent movies like shit. They either burned up in vault fires because the film stock was basically the same chemical composition of gunpowder, were allowed to rot, were shipped off to other countries and then "lost," or were destroyed for a number of reasons - recovering the silver content, destroying it before it caused a fire...hell, that documentary recounts a story where a bonfire wasn't burning so well, so they put silent film negatives in it to make it blaze up real good. image
25?! I would think they could do more then 25 each year but then again I don't know the lengths they go to preserve the films or how much it costs to preserve each film.

And that second part is really low. Could they not have auctioned them off to people or companies who would surely take better care of them?