Word: celluloidal
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...catch its hackle-raising horrors, Twentieth Century searched around Europe last spring, out of a ten-mile tangle of celluloid salvaged 2,400 evocative feet, garnished it with an equally evocative script by Emmet John Hughes, author of Report from Spain (and now chief of TIME-LIFE'S foreign correspondents). There were some coruscant scenes: crying, cursing Madrileños "running faster, faster along the very edge of the abyss," truncheon-wielding cops beating them back; women and children being evacuated under heavy air bombardment, their life's possessions tied in burlap on their backs, or black coffins...
Mussolini, the latest example of a notably successful TV specialty, is in great part a monument to a new kind of sleuth: the film searcher. Before Twentieth Century could fit together the show's dramatic jigsaw pattern in celluloid, searchers had to hunt out the bits and pieces of aging film in 25 different hoards in four countries; to give editors a choice, they brought in ten times as much footage as editors could...
Truffle Hound. The hunting ground of the celluloid sleuths is vast-Government agencies in the U.S. and abroad, old newsreel vaults and a network of private collectors, mostly eccentrics whom one NBC searcher describes as "a basketful of live eels who frequently don't own the film legally." Archives are widely scattered, often poorly indexed, studded with tantalizing gaps left by oversight, fire and disintegration. Nitrate-base film, widely used until 1948, has a lifetime of only 25 years. "It is not unusual," says an expert, "to open a can of film and find nothing but dust." Almost...
...which started in the U.S. in 1910 and by now, except for Paramount's stubbornly locked vaults, have been raked by the networks. Ironically, it is TV itself that has put most of the newsreels out of business and thereby shut off one source for future historians in celluloid. The networks are now salting away their own voluminous news film against the day when a show like Twenty-First Century may want to picture the quaint old U.S. at the dawn of the space...
...Japanese seaside village of Kawana, hell-for-celluloid Director John Huston was about to shoot a panoramic movie scene encompassing some 350 fisherfolk extras, all decked out in elaborate 19th century samurai costumes, tunics, kimonos and big wigs. Suddenly a voice bellowed in Japanese over the village's loudspeaker: "Dolphins!" Departing radically from the script, the male extras quickly put to sea in Huston's rented sampans while the women took off their film kimonos and excitedly awaited the return of their men. Net catch for the inscrutable villagers: 270 dolphins worth $3,500 in the seafood market...