Against the Grain

- When I first, you know, became aware of lost films,

it was more of so the realization,

like, artwork in general can just degrade and become lost.

You know, a lost film, by definition,

would basically, or at least my definition would

basically be a film that has otherwise not survived.

You know, it's a film that

for whatever reason, we don't have.

But when you start looking at the lost films

in the '60s and '70s, and especially

the genre films the Vinegar Syndrome is interested in,

you start unpacking this treasure trove of film.

Don't call me, baby, I'll call you.

- It seems like genre films are more vulnerable

to being lost because there were fewer prints made of them.

A lot of times, these are independently produced films,

as opposed to studio films.

One of the problems with genre films,

they were done at these smaller labs,

DuArt in New York, WRS in Pittsburgh,

and when those labs closed,

a lot of negatives disappeared.

Check me out.

My God.

- I think that these independent producers weren't thinking

about the life of these films

after their initial exploitation, which is where

they're gonna make the majority of their money.

- If you want a good smoke, try one of these.

- I mean, they just had a low opinion of the movies.

They just saw them as a commercial product

and they didn't really see them as something

that was deserving of being preserved.

The level of restoration work

that has to be done on these movies is so extreme

that it takes a lot of work and a lot of passion

to keep these old movies alive.

Our mentor, Dave Friedman,

would often say that a film is like a sack of flour.

Every time you shook it, a little bit more would come out.

Before Vinegar Syndrome

and my professional career, I was working

at a place called Film Workers Club out of Chicago,

and there I specialized in film transfers,

digital color work, but mostly on advertisements,

not necessarily feature films, but occasionally.

My first job was actually working

as a projectionist in a movie theater during high school,

and second job was at a video and records store.

So it very much plays into what I do today.

- Prior to meeting Ryan, and certainly long

before Vinegar Syndrome was even a concept for either of us,

I was helping to manage a video store in Chicago,

where I was born and raised, called Odd Obsession Movies,

which became kind of a meeting ground social club

for a lot of the more interesting cinephiles in the city.

And I was also working on a volunteer basis,

‘cause it was a volunteer cinema,

at Doc Films at the University of Chicago,

where I was helping as a programmer

and finding materials and so on.

And this is one of the ways

that I initially became more aware of film rights

and actually began speaking

to filmmakers and film distributors.

It didn't ready faze me in that I wanted to find

or rescue lost films.

My interest was always themed around films

that look bad in the available versions,

or seemingly don't have good materials available.

The term "lost film," to me,

is a film that we know existed at some point,

but we cannot find any existing elements to it.

You know, this is one of those questions

where I've been thinking about this for so long,

where I feel like now I've lost

what a lost film actually is.

I would not consider a film to be lost

if it was still on a digital format.

I think that a lost film, in order to qualify

as a lost film, is there is literally nothing left of it,

save for maybe, you know, a couple of,

I don't know, a couple of frames or something like that.

It's something that we literally cannot get back.

- When I began being interested in film history,

a lost film was something which I couldn't view,

and that was my perspective of it.

That being said, nowadays, I'm much more

of the opinion that there are different classifications

of a lost film.

There's a lost film which is accident,

which means it survives somewhere, it's just not viewable.

There's a lost film which is lost to its original medium,

something which may only exist on tape.

- Cut, let's try and get it right this time.

But all in all, a lost film is a work

that doesn't exist in the accessible format

that it's meant to be seen in, I think.

- You know, a film that was never completed,

in my minds, that's not a lost film.

Like, "New York Ninja" is not a lost film.

It's just an incomplete film.

- If it's not finished, how can it be a lost film?

Like, it needs to be finished in order to be a lost film.

I agree with that to an extent.

However, when it comes to something like "New York Ninja,"

which is what I worked on and helped finish,

it was a film that had been shot but not finished.

So the question is, is it an unfinished film

or is it a lost film?

In the case of "New York Ninja,"

I would probably say it's a little bit of both.

There was actually some knowledge of the film existing prior.

One of the great things about "New York Ninja" is it

actually shows our love of preservation.

I'm not sure a lot

of other companies would have taken the time

to take an unfinished film

and put the money and resources into finishing it.

An orphan film is a film that

we have elements for, however,

the copyright owner has either passed away

or cannot be identified.

I guess the best example for that would be a lot

of stag films are considered to be orphan films

because these people who created them, they used fake names.

So we don't really know who these people were

or created them.

These are different from lost films,

though, because we know that they actually existed

and we have the elements to kind of prove it.

You've already proven how good you are.

Now let's see if you can act.

- Now, I would always read "American Cinematographer,"

and they had some just great articles

with Scorsese and directors, you know,

concerned about their films, you know,

especially the film stocks

just weren't gonna last over time.

And that was probably, like, in the '90s

when I started to really realize

that, you know, film itself was,

like, more fragile than some of the other art forms.

Phew, this one's bad.

- Probably everyone that's watching this hopefully knows

what the definition of vinegar syndrome is by now.

And I think that's something that,

you know, both of us are proud of.

You were asking me what vinegar syndrome smells like,

It smells like vinegar, yeah.

So how I originally got started here,

I was being asked to do some QC work,

and then they started training me.

I was also learning to restore, really,

the first releases.

So I think it's really important

to call attention to the fact that the people who work here,

even if they had interest in film

or some kind of, like, formal technical training

in digital editing or post production,

they, for the most part, had never touched a piece

of film before coming into this building

and beginning to work here, and certainly had never worked

in terms of restoration and archival materials.

Yeah, I think that that's really important

because it shows both their level of interest

and dedication to what they're doing

and what we're doing collectively,

but also, you know, this is work

that can be done by anyone

if they are really motivated

and have the discipline to study it

and focus on it and learn the technical side of it.

You got it.

Excellent, thank you.

- So the lost films of Herschell Gordon Lewis,

these were three films, "The Ecstasies of Women,"

"Linda and Abilene," and then "Black Love."

A young man begins in earnest

to try to arouse a girl sexually.

He caresses her leg and talks to her gently.

She resists, but he continues.

It was cool to find these

because there was kind of, like, rumors about them.

You saw posters, but otherwise these were lost.

- It's hard to ignore the name Herschell Gordon Lewis,

and as somebody who had been, you know,

really interested in the history of erotic cinema,

seeing Herschell Gordon Lewis, you know,

with lost films and having all those films

also be erotic was really interesting.

Oh, hi, my name is Harry,

glad you could drop in, this is?

Sandy.

Oh, yeah, Sandy, that's it, Sandy.

Excuse me a minute, will you, folks.

Genre filmmakers who worked in sex films

in, like, any capacity, it's almost always

that their genre film work is gonna overshine

their sex film work.