Lost film

For example, the 1922 film Sherlock Holmes was considered lost but eventually rediscovered with some of the original footage missing.

[5] Some are produced in quantity for display use by theaters, others in smaller numbers for distribution to newspapers and magazines, and have subsequently preserved imagery from otherwise lost films.

Stills have been used to stand in for missing footage when making new preservation prints of partially lost films: for example, with the Gloria Swanson picture Sadie Thompson.

Many other early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film employed for nearly all 35 mm negatives and prints created before 1952 is highly flammable unless carefully conditioned and handled.

When in very badly deteriorated condition and improperly stored (such as in a sun-baked shed), nitrate film can spontaneously combust.

Nitrate film is also chemically unstable and over time can decay into a sticky mass or a powder akin to gunpowder.

[13] Some pre-1931 sound films produced by Warner Bros. and First National have been lost because they used a sound-on-disc system with a separate soundtrack on special phonograph records.

In the 1950s, when 16 mm sound-on-film reduction prints of early talkies were produced for television syndication, such films without complete soundtrack discs were at risk of permanent loss.

As a consequence of this widespread lack of care, the work of many early filmmakers and performers exists in the present day only in fragmentary form.

Clara Bow was equally celebrated in her heyday, but 20 of her 57 films are completely lost, and another five are incomplete.

Fewer than ten movies exist from Frederick's work from 1915 to 1928, and Ferguson has two surviving films, one from 1919 and the other from 1930, her only talkie.

However, unlike Suratt and Bara, because Bushman and Desmond continued working into the sound era and even on television, their later performances survive.

Following a series of trials, he was ultimately acquitted, but not before his name had become so toxic that studios engaged in the systematic destruction of all films in which he had a starring role.

[16] In contrast, the filmography of D. W. Griffith is nearly complete, as many of his early Biograph films were deposited by the company in paper print form at the Library of Congress.

Many of Griffith's feature-film works of the 1910s and 1920s were added to the film collection at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and were preserved under the auspices of curator Iris Barry.

Stars such as Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks benefited from their great popularity: because their films were repeatedly reissued throughout the silent era, surviving prints could be found even decades later.

Conversely, and more commonly, some early sound films survive only as sets of soundtrack discs, with the picture elements completely missing, such as The Man from Blankley's (1930), or surviving only in fragmentary form, such as Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929) and The Rogue Song (1930), two highly popular and profitable early musicals in two-color Technicolor.

The original isolated scoring session recordings for the soundtrack of the 1968 musical-fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were either lost or discarded when United Artists merged its archives, with only the original cut soundtrack recording on the standard 12-inch LP left, as well as several CD releases with mediocre remastering, although still lacking the complete score without dialogue.

An example is the 1910 version of Frankenstein, which was believed lost for decades until the existence of a print (which had been in the hands of an unwitting collector for years) was discovered in the 1970s.

It turned up among about two thousand rusty film canisters donated by Haarlem's eccentric Dutch collector, Joop van Liempd.

Actress-turned-gossip columnist Hedda Hopper made her screen debut in the Fox film The Battle of Hearts (1916).

In 1993, Delpeut released The Forbidden Quest, combining early film footage and archival photographs with new material to tell the fictional story of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.

The mockumentary Forgotten Silver, made by Peter Jackson, purports to show recovered footage of early films.

"Cigarette Burns", an episode of the horror anthology series Masters of Horror directed by John Carpenter, deals with the search for a fictional lost film, "La Fin Absolue Du Monde" ("The Absolute End of The World").

Lon Chaney in London After Midnight (1927), one of the most sought-after lost films, whose last known print was destroyed in the 1965 MGM vault fire . A set of production stills survives.
Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917). Four hundred stills , twenty seconds of the film itself, and the intro are known to have survived. A small loop of the film exists.
The First Men in the Moon (1919), a lost British film, reputedly "the first movie to ever be based entirely on a famous science fiction novel" [ 6 ]
Tenderloin (1928), starring Dolores Costello , the second Vitaphone feature to have talking sequences, is considered a lost film because only its soundtrack is known to have survived.
Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), the third Warner Bros. film shot in Technicolor , is a " partially lost film ".
John Wayne in the lost Western The Oregon Trail (1936)