Word: greedfully
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Connecticut happily antique-hunting with your mother. You stop off at an auction and spend $3.50 on a "mystery chest." Six men help you carry it to your Ford station wagon, and when you open it, you find 40 metal film tins marked: Greed, Reels 1-40. "What a long film to make about such an unpleasant subject," your mother says as you open one of the tins. The film wound around the rusty reels is brown and moldy: fungus-like organisms have sprouted from the innumerable folds. Overcome by a powerful smell, you sneeze on it, and the brown...
...told this to George Stevens Jr. and Richard Kahlenberg of the American Film Institute, they would probably go off into a corner and cry quietly. As President and Archive Director respectively, Greed is of more than routine interest to them: Erich von Stroheim made it in 1924 and his first edited version was eight hours long; making concessions to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he re-edited the film, finally stopping at a four-hour cut. At that point MGM seized it, cut it to two hours and ten minutes, and the remaining six hours has been missing ever since...
...Greed, as Stroheim's masterpiece and one of the highest-echelon Establishment classics, is known only in a version one-quarter the length of the original. Rumors-and-little-else have kept alive the hope of seeing the complete 40 reels someday--prints have been said to exist in secret vaults from New Mexico to Denmark. And Greed is only one of 250 films on the American Film Institute's "preliminary rescue list" of films which do not exist in America on 35mm acetate stock...
...artistic and historical value that have disappeared for one or another reason. Some have vanished (like Hawks' Scarface, produced by the ubiquitous Howard Hughes, and all 35mm prints of Ford's Stagecoach) and the problem is one of location; others, like whatever remains of Stroheim's original cut of Greed, are in serious danger of destruction by decay. Until the last decade, film was made from a nitrate base, both flammable and subject to erosion. The film archivist works against time: the older the film, the more likely the chances of physical degeneration -- and the chance of its vanishing forever...
...Tier Price. Finally, the pressure grew so great that the U.S. refused to continue to feed gold to satisfy speculators' greed. In a telephoned message to British Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins, the U.S. asked Britain to close the London gold market and shut off the flow from the Gold Pool. Prime Minister Harold Wilson hurried to Buckingham Palace for a midnight meeting with Queen Elizabeth, who declared a bank holiday in foreign-exchange trading. That shut off the Gold Pool's dealing, and money markets from Singapore to Lusaka followed suit. The Paris market alone stayed...