Saving Analog Film for Future Use
Located about 50 miles northwest of Wichita on the Arkansas River, the city of Hutchinson, Kansas—known as “Salt City” for its extensive labyrinth of salt mines—is the home of Underground Vaults & Storage (UV&S), one of the largest and most secure storage facilities in the world. A 60-year-old privately held company with more than 40 acres of storage underground, UV&S sits on the site of a former salt mine, 650 feet (58 floors) below the surface of the earth.
Surrounded by a 400-foot-thick wall—and far from urban sprawl and potential natural disaster—UV&S is one of the best and safest places on earth (or under the earth) for storing documents, films, and other perishable materials vulnerable to time, temperature, humidity, and contamination. Enveloped in what is essentially a salt-rock womb, this expansive, naturally climate-controlled space can keep fragile materials from degrading for an exceptionally long time (but perhaps not forever).
UV&S has hundreds of storage areas and private rooms, or “vaults,” of various sizes that businesses, museums, galleries, and even private collectors can rent for long-term storage of artwork, artifacts, film, filmstrips, videotape, photographs, negatives, documents, data tape, books, movie props, and even antique carriages that require a consistently cool and dry atmosphere.
Soon after the facility opened in 1959, film and television studios identified the underground salt mines as an optimal environment to archive movie films and television-show masters. The first Hollywood studio to secure a spot in the facility was Columbia Pictures, in 1965. Today, most of the movie studios rent space at UV&S, where they store original camera negatives and old film prints produced on celluloid nitrate and celluloid triacetate, which could deteriorate over time if not kept in a tightly controlled environment. Warner Brothers, for example, rents 15,000 square feet of storage space there—the equivalent of 12 football fields—with racks that go up about ten feet to the ceiling.
On October 28, 2010, I visited UV&S with my friend and colleague Charles Benton. Charles, the son of William Benton (a former U.S senator from Connecticut, founder of the Benton and Bowles advertising agency, and a quintessential Renaissance man of his times), was a retired past-president of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Company (EBEC), a division of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which between 1940 and 1980 was by far the largest and most respected educational motion picture producing and distributing organization in the world.
Charles had led the production and sales of Britannica films during the 1950s and ‘60s, and although he left the company in 1967 to start his own film distribution company, Film Inc., he remained passionate about maintaining the legacy of the Britannica films, which were produced at the highest production standards possible at the time and written and directed by a who’s who of educational film royalty. These were high-budget productions on a wide spectrum of topics, including real-life stage performances of literary classics—Hamlet, A Doll’s House, and The Cherry Orchard—with professional actors; real-time filming of natural phenomena—e.g., volcanoes, earthquakes, and tornadoes—animals in their habitats; country profiles; space exploration; and the daily lives of workers in the manufacturing, agricultural, and fishing industries, among many others.
Britannica had about 2,500 films stored at UV&S. In going through the collection, Charles and I were concerned that when we opened the film canisters, we would discover that some of the films had developed vinegar syndrome, a common consequence of aging and deteriorating celluloid film that has been exposed to any number of sources of degradation, like heat (which releases nitrogen gases), photochemical exposure (sunlight), or moisture.
Under some adverse circumstances, the celluloid nitrate film could even burst into flames. Since the complete collection of Britannica films date back as far as the 1930s, many of Britannica’s films in the vault would have been printed on celluloid nitrate film, which film production companies stopped producing in the 1950s and replaced it with non-flammable celluloid triacetate. If any of the films had this syndrome, you would be able to to smell the vinegar.
(From the “Epilogue” of my forthcoming book, Publishing in the Digital Age: How Business Can Thrive in a Rapidly Changing Environment)
