Film preservation is a cause that’s near and dear to my heart, but I suspect very few people are really aware that there’s even a need for such a thing. If average, non-movie-fan-type people think about the subject at all, they probably assume that every movie ever made is already safely tucked away somewhere. But that’s not true. The sad reality is that the physical film prints and negatives that comprise our cinematic history have been treated pretty poorly over the years, and even if they haven’t been abused, they are endangered by their own chemical compositions. There are hundreds of movies made prior to the 1950s that are forever lost to modern eyes because the photographic stock they were printed on has literally crumbled into dust. They’re gone forever, not because they were deliberately destroyed (although that has happened, too) but because of benign neglect. Because no one thought to check on all those reels of film sitting in the warehouses on the backlots, slowly rotting away. Because no one thought they were important.

Some of you reading this may sniff and say, “So what? It’s just old movies, and nothing very cool.” But to you I say, imagine a recent movie that meant something to you, something like, say, The Matrix or Pulp Fiction or one of the other recent “phenomenon” movies. Now let’s imagine that we’re fifty or seventy-five years in the future and a new generation is eager to study a film that had a big cultural impact on the late 1990s, or simply wants to see a good old flick that they’ve read about in their film-history books. Except that they can’t see it, because it no longer exists. Somehow, all the physical media that stored copies of that film have decayed away. The data is no longer recoverable. The film will never be seen again, and something that mattered deeply to us, to our generation, is condemned to be forgotten. Still feel like preservation doesn’t matter?

Well, it matters to me. As I’ve said a few times in recent posts, I hate that so little of our culture endures, and given my love of movies of all vintages, their loss especially hurts.

That’s why I’m happy we have men like Roger Mayer.

You may have seen Mr. Mayer accepting a special tribute at this year’s Academy Awards and wondered, “who the hell is this guy?” Well, “this guy” is a gentleman who has spent years copying the MGM film catalog from chemically unstable nitrate stocks to “safety film.” He was doing this on his own, long before any industry-wide preservation efforts were organized, simply because he thought it was the right thing to do. He had the perception to realize what was happening to the old stuff in the warehouse and the vision to see that somebody needed to do something about it for the sake of future film-lovers. And what’s really cool about Mayer is that he didn’t just copy the big feature films that everyone has heard of; he copied everything from public service announcements to trailers to shorts and cartoons. His attitude has been that we can’t say what is going to be considered “good” in the future, and so we ought to save it all.

That’s just plain brilliant, in my book.

For more details on Roger Mayer’s extraordinary efforts, check out Robert Harris’ latest column over at The Digital Bits. The column covers several different topics, so look for the heading, “A Few Words About Mr. Mayer.”