Frequent commenter Dan, in the comments to the below post, asks what I “make of” a very long post on a horror movie fan message board. It is titled “FINDING THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER ‘LOST’ FILM IN CINEMA HISTORY” and it begins:
Yes. It is true. For those who scoff and doubt (I’m sure you will be legion) that the most notorious lost film of all times was located, I will say it again with authority and conviction…
I, Sid Terror, saw Lon Chaney’s lost classic LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT with my own eyes. Without a doubt. No I am not talking about a recreation made completely from still photos, I’m talking about the entire long-lost motion-picture!
And here is where the tale veers. And here is where the back story becomes very necessary…
To translate from the horror movie enthusiast idiom into the faux hip-hop idiom, “those who scoff and doubt” means “the haters.”
In any case, the long piece that follows details, for the most part, how Mr. Terror had a job in the ’80s as a film print courier of sorts; how during his tenure at said job, he actually managed to find a complete print of the long-lost Lon Chaney-Tod Browning horror picture London After Midnight (which is indeed something of a Grail for film fanatics of all stripes)…and how he got his good friend who worked at the company where it was stored to retitle the print in said company’s database…in the expectation that someone would just pick up that ball where he left it…as opposed to alerting anybody at either the company or in the film preservation/archiving field as to his discovery. And how now, with the friend who entered the print in the database having shuffled off this mortal coil, and the facility where this print had been stored now defunct, he puts out the call to the home video and film preservation industries to go find that print!
Read the whole thing, if you like.
So… Dan asks, what do I make of this? All I’ll say is I’m reminded of a brief conversation I had in my college days. I was sitting at the William Paterson pub with my Close Personal Friend Ron G., discussing this and that, and over to the table saunters this fellow I’ll call Bill, an amiable but dull lad. Greetings go all around as he stands over us—“Hey man,” “How ya doin’,” “Hey, what going on,” and then Bill just…stands there. And I look up at him and Ron looks up at him and he looks down at us and he says, “So…I hear there’s some pretty good acid floating around.” And I raise an eyebrow, and Ron shrugs, and Ron looks up at him and says, “Really? You know where we can get it?” And Bill looks down, and Bill looks left, and Bill looks right, and Bill looks down again, and he says, “No.”
So, that’s what I make of it. Although I’d be delighted to be proven incorrect in my assessment.
I’m not one to usually make pronouncements without fully reading the source. But since the source article is so mind-numbingly lengthy (I’ll read it in full after I put my son down for his afternoon nap), my first impression after a short skim is:
BULLSHIT!!!
But promise to write my obligatory “eating crow” retraction if I’m proven wrong.
Scoffers and doubters, indeed.
Tony, honestly, that was my gut reaction too. I find myself wondering why this never came up back when they were working on the recreation from stills. It’s not like Rick Schmidlin is incompetent, unconnected, or ignorant. The guy’s a pretty dedicated vault-digger and he’d HAVE to have been scouring every vault in the LA area just to find the stills in the first place. This film’s alternate title never once pinged his radar?
We’ll know for sure once somebody goes and looks it up. He practically gives us the address to find the print and I’m a little surprised some enterprising film nerd hasn’t just gone out there and taken a look.
Lies, all lies. When we find something, it won’t be reported on a blog or message board, but given to newswires.
See: Criterion forums “Four Devils” discovery vs. Argentina “Metropolis” recovery. One is (very very likely) fake, the other is oh so deliciously real.
Although, if you believe that, I have a copy of Theda Bara’s “Cleopatra” to sell you.
Why’d the moron in your anecdote have to be given the alias “Bill”? I’m so angry right now!
But anyway, even if this Terror fellow is telling the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, he’s a lazy, good-for-nothing maroon. In the article (which I could only bring myself to skim) he says that after he told his friend Ros, his company contact, to change the label, he said to her, “Have I ever steered you wrong before?” And that’s it. Why in God’s name wouldn’t it have occurred to him to instead ask Ros if he could get a brief word with one of the higher-ups, because he believed he’d found a print in their vault they would very much like to know about? At worst, they’d have blown him off, but he would have taken the most reasonable course of action.
In the comments section of the page Glenn links to, someone does actually ask Terror more-or-less that very question, and his response is basically, “Well, this company was dedicated to film preservation, and the print was in a location in the vault that showed they were going to take care of it.” All well and good, except that doesn’t explain why he didn’t simply tell someone at the company exactly what he’d found. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Oh, shit.No offense intended, sir. To tell you the truth, I called him Bill because that’s the name I actually recalled; the “let’s call him” bit is just me being cute.Sorry.
I didn’t think you actually meant anything by it. My anger was mere play-acting.
Crap. It sounds completely untrue. I live in Buenos Aires and know the people involved in the complete METROPOLIS affair. Let me tell you: they found a LOT of clues before finding the real print. Where are the real clues to find LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT?