Editor's Foreword

On February 27, 2005, Roger Mayer received the Hersholt Award at the 77th Annual Academy Awards of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, California. Mr. Mayer, whom many individuals in our association know well, was acknowledged with a special Oscar for his humanitarian work for both the Motion Picture and Television Fund and for the cause of film preservation with the National Film Preservation Foundation. Roger Mayer has been deeply involved in moving image preservation for decades not only through his work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Turner Broadcasting, and AOL/Time Warner but also as a volunteer for the National Film Preservation Board and as founding chair of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

For film archivists all over the world, it was a deeply satisfying moment to share in the honor bestowed on a colleague and kindred spirit. It was a double pleasure to have the honoree introduced by Marty Scorsese, who is not only our greatest living filmmaker but also a guiding light in the arena of film preservation, a fact Roger Mayer happily noted in his acceptance speech, when he mentioned the Film Foundation. And just as we in the field rejoiced at Mr. Mayer's moment of glory, so too did he let the world know that this award was shared with all of us.

Mr. Mayer credited his bosses at M-G-M, as well as at Turner Broadcasting, for supporting his film preservation efforts, making the point that the commercial film studios now lead the way in film preservation, along with our largest public institutions, including the Library of Congress, George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, UCLA, and the Academy Archive. For those of us who have been around a while, it was a moment pregnant with meaning: not only was the cause of moving image preservation front and center before millions of viewers worldwide, it was also being discussed as a cooperative venture between the studios and the not-for-profit and government archives, between for-profit commercial entities and the public sphere. This sense of cooperation, although no longer new, had not always been the case, and again Mr. Mayer can be credited with leading the way.

Indeed, for decades there was intense animosity between film archivists in the public sphere and corporate rights holders, at least in some circles and at some levels of management. It is no accident that the original statutes (still in effect today) of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) stated categorically that all commercial institutions shall be rigorously excluded from the business of FIAF. Under their breaths, archivists accused the film companies of neglecting and/or destroying the precious artifacts of moving image history, a charge that could be documented in too many instances. Film company executives, for their part, harbored resentments against film archivists, because they assumed that the latter were illegally duping material they controlled and/or exhibiting it without permission, suspicions that were not always unfounded, as the discussion in these pages of the "buccaneer era" have brought to light. There was no trust, no sense of a common cause, no exchanges of ideas and strategies. It seemed that any and all official contacts between the parties occurred under the threat of litigation. In practice, of course, many film archivists established good personal relations with local exhibitors and distributors, on whom they often depended for print donations, but at the institutional level there was a cold war in progress.

All that began to change about the time I met Roger Mayer and Dick May in my capacity as senior curator at George Eastman House. Mr. Mayer had of course continued a long-standing relationship between James Card and M-G-M, and I was the new kid on the block. But what impressed me was the sense that both Roger and Dick were willing to look at public film archives as an equal partner, not as a source simply to be exploited, because the archives had saved material that previous corporate generations had discarded. A few years later, Grover Crisp and Sony Pictures began directly funding the...