i found this at amctv.com
http://www.amctv.com/article?CID=1049-1--0-3-EST
Our culture, literally, is going up in smoke. Less than half of the twenty-one thousand films made before 1950 still exist, because their nitratefilm stock, over time, turns to acid and burns the images away. Even more recent films are at risk; movies shot in Eastmancolor from the 1950s through the mid-70s, for example, lose their color over time, fading toa pale pink (more evidence for Joe McCarthy of a Hollywood Communist conspiracy).
AMC is proud to join The Film Foundation and its founders ? Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, and others ? in an effort to save these decaying films and thereby save the twentieth century's most important means of cultural expression.
Film preservation is a recent idea. As early as twenty years ago, the only people preserving films were underfunded archives. The big studios simply saw film libraries as an unnecessary storage expense that they were unwilling to indulge in. Often, films would be copied onto video tape and the negative destroyed. This haphazard "preservation," however, didn't take into account the low quality of videotape compared to the high-definition digital technology available today. And who knows what technology awaits in the future? In addition, some of the video transfers that were made were of edited cuts of the films. Often the films were not letterboxed before the transfer to video, which caused them to lose the wide aspect ratio of big-screen cinemascope movies, thereby sullying the integrity of the film picture.
Film preservation is now recognized as an important cultural endeavor, and some of the studios have built preservation facilities and improved the preservation policies of their libraries. But funds have been shrinking. Adjusted for inflation, government funding of the effort is less than half of what it was in 1980. A black and white film costs from $10,000 to $50,000 to preserve; a color film from $30,000 to $300,000. AMC's efforts to raise money through our annual Film Preservation Festival are now more important than ever in helping archives preserve not only Silent and Golden Era films, but irreplaceable historical documents like newsreels as well.
In the past, AMC has raised over $1.5 million to support the Foundation's six member archives. We've helped raised the money to restore and preserve films like Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
another article.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/enc...eservation.htm
i think i found the link to the main site for Film Foundation.
http://www.film-foundation.org/default.cfm
mybe they dont even know the problem with mad world.
