Paper Print - First Effort at Reformatting

First Effort At Reformatting

By 1902, the paper prints had accumulated to 1413 according to the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. By the time of their rediscovery in the early 1940s, over 3000 were stored within a vault of the copyright office. Librarian Howard Walls made the discovery and described the scene this way,

That vault had been open to all kinds of weather, but the grating was over a shaft so it never rained in there, it never snowed in there. And the successive wrappings on these paper rolls protected them. Each time it was wrapped around, the picture underneath was protected.

Walls recruited a National Archives (NARA) motion picture engineer, Carl Louis Gregory, to help get the movies back into shape for screening. Gregory observed the fragile state of the paper, some of which had sprocket perforations punched through. Sprocket holes or not, the paper could never travel through a projector or automated printer without being shredded.

Gregory designed a system that adopted many of the traits involved with shooting animation in that era. He “modified a process optical printer” and was able to exchange sprocket heads and pull down pins that were necessary to advance the film and yet not tear it to pieces. An adjustable aperture plate was added to frame images that had been produced by a variety of cameras without any uniform standardization. The transfer of the paper prints was done at one exposure setting without any consideration for the variations in image density of the negative, so Gregory adjusted his lighting that reflected off the print to maximize the information captured to a new film negative. There is no record of the film format used to recapture the paper prints.

The war years interrupted plans to migrate more films. Later, Howard Walls would devote his time primarily to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and would try to initiate a program to rescue the paper prints at LC. Nothing seemed to get beyond the fundraising stage, though, as Walls was enveloped in management intrigue and other responsibilities to the Academy.