NPR reports that 75 American silent films which had been presumed lost forever will be returned to the U.S. from New Zealand.
...for film historian Shelley Stamp of the University of California, Santa Cruz, those all pale in comparison with the discovery of the missing first reel from director Lois Weber's Idle Wives.
"She made hundreds of films and over 40 feature films. In the 1910s, her name was routinely mentioned alongside D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille — names we still remember now — as one of the great minds of filmmaking," Weber says. "But her reputation didn't survive — she wasn't as good as DeMille and Griffith were at sort of promoting herself and insuring her historical legacy.
Apparently, movies ended up in New Zealand last after making their distribution tour around the world. Because shipping was so expensive, often, the movies' producers weren't willing to pay to have the reels returned and ordered them destroyed. Many were, but some were put in storage instead.
...one of the most remarkable finds is a lost feature by four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford.
"The feature is called Upstream and it dates from 1927, a year from which no other Ford films survive," Melville says. "Only about 15 percent of John Ford's films from the silent era survive today."
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