I’m talking about the original shooting film with all the bloopers, alternate takes, unused scenes and such, not the final screening print. In the age of film, how long was that stuff typically kept around? Would it be destroyed as soon as the final cut was mastered or would it be kept in some vault somewhere? Nowadays with digital, is that stuff kept around indefinitely or does it get erased at some point?
Are film historians and the like ever allowed to access that material and provide insights based on film that was shot but never used? I’ve never seen any writing on films that indicated they had access to such.
Also, has they ever been any cases of “recuts” of films (in the same vein as remakes) where completely different editors go back to the original shooting film with the intention of creating a completely new version?
Not quite what you are after, but the Aretha Franklin documentaryAmazing Grace may be relevant.
It was shot in 1972 but there were significant problems with getting the audio synced to the film and it was left in a vault as too hard. When someone got back to it, it took more than a decade to finish it.
I think I first read about it in Cafe Society, and the thread was very good on explaining why this sort of thing is so hard to nail.
The Plot Against Harry was one such film; shot in 1969 but unedited and unfinished after the money ran out. It was finally completed and released around 1990.
Whether original footage is saved depends a lot on who, when and where. I do recall reading a few years ago about film labs closing and a lot of unclaimed material turning up.
There’s a documentary, Grey Gardens, about the Beales mother and daughter Big and Little Edie. Years later, they went back to the unused footage and made a whole new companion piece documentary called The Beales of Grey Gardens.
Staring with the Criterion Laserdisc collections in the 1980’s, film historians and critics were called upon to oversee the restoration process of movies and often called upon to provide running commentary. Deleted scenes and unused footage wasn’t usually included due to disc space and cost constraints, but stills and images of promotional items often were, both on the disc and in a printed booklet.
With the introduction of DVD, Blu-Ray and UHD, it’s become more common to include deleted and unused footage, including some material specifically filmed/videoed for inclusion on the discs. But that still doesn’t mean that every bit of footage/video will see the light of day.
It’s still rare for films to be completely reedited, but with 4K+ and High Dynamic Range video today, movies are often recolor graded to come closer (though still not able to capture the full color range) to the original colors seen during the the movie’s original release. Here’s a really long thread at videohelp.comhttps://forum.videohelp.com/threads/394218-Betamax-digitizing-help-of-a-rare-film that devolved into a text shouting match because the OP who just wouldn’t accept that the color on the latest restoration of the latest version of the *Cleopatra *(1963) is actually truer to what the moviegoers was in the theaters in 1963 than his worn out, poorly transferred VHS copies.
As for digital, even though physical space is less of an issue, there’s still the necessity of keeping multiple backups = higher costs, since as mechanical or electrical failure can destroy the original device and data completely.
Prior to television, the studios considered many completed films as useless. It cost to store them and many were filled.
Scenes on the cutting room floor were swept up and thrown away.
TV created a market for old films, but not for alternate footage. And the concept of a different cut of a finished film did not exist. What was released was the definitive version.
There were exceptions. Chaplin owned his films and was able to rerelease them with an audio track. He also kept all his takes (though AFIAK, he never used them; he felt the final take was the best).
This may not be the same thing but the animated movie *The Thief and the Cobbler * began production in 1964 and wasn’t finished and released until 1993.
As you indicated, it simply was the way that things were done back then, but it’s a damned shame nonetheless. Among many other lost scenes we were deprived of several Wizard of Oz scenes, such as the Jitterbug one and the expansion of the romance between Huck & Dorothy.