"A film isn't really preserved until you get to that point where you show it to an audience and get a reaction," says James Hahn, the 20th Century-Fox nitrate curator and vault manager at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hahn, who calls himself a "film archaeologist," is a silent film lover — Buster Keaton is one of his idols — who also happens to be an expert "nitrate curator" — in other words, a film preservationist.
I met with Hahn at the Academy's Mary Pickford Center in Hollywood to talk about one of his most recent restoration successes: the long thought lost 1927 silent classic Sorrell and Son, a surprisingly touching — and daring — father-son love story directed by that year's Academy Award nominee Herbert Brenon, and starring a mostly first-rate cast: H. B. Warner, Nils Asther, Anna Q. Nilsson, Mickey McBan, Carmel Myers, and Alice Joyce.
Sorrell and Son tells the story of a World War I veteran (Warner) who, after being deserted by his materialistic and selfish wife (Nilsson), performs all sorts of menial jobs in order to provide a decent living for his son (McBan as a boy; Asther as an adult). The film's final moments — and much of what happens in-between — may be even more controversial today than in the late 1920s.
During the interview, Hahn discusses the challenges posed by the restoration of Sorrell and Son, including the inconvenient fact that the only surviving print of the film was a low-quality, high-contrast dupe made in the 1940s for producer Lester Cowan, who was apparently considering remaking the film. (A talkie remake had already been filmed in England in 1934; it also starred H. B. Warner.)
Additionally, Hahn talks about other motion pictures he has helped to restore, including the 1917 melodrama Triumph, starring Dorothy Phillips and Lon Chaney, and the 1950 Fox films noirs Where the Sidewalk Ends and Night and the City, both starring Gene Tierney.
He has also finished work on Darryl F. Zanuck's pet project, Wilson, a 1944 cinematic hagiography starring Alexander Knox as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
The interviewer may be more than a little amateurish, but the interviewee is a professional of the first caliber, with loads of interesting information to share.
Sorry, the James Hahn interview is temporarily unavailable