About 10 years ago, when Averill Geus discovered it in her barn, her son warned her that the reel of nitrate film could combust and burn the whole place down at any minute. Ms. Geus, a historian and daughter of Frank Dayton, placed a call to Genie Chipps Henderson, the archivist at LTV, to see if she had any desire to take a reel off her hands.
"It was all covered in hay and we were looking it at like it was a time bomb about to go off," Ms. Henderson recalled of the day she collected the nitrate film. The crystal-clear negatives of this early-to-mid-20th-century photography method come at a price: The material is very unstable. Once ignited, a burning reel of nitrate film cannot be extinguished, neither by water nor foam, explained Ms. Henderson.
Ms. Geus did not know anything about the film, and Ms. Henderson speculated about whether Mr. Dayton, who was a prominent East Hampton resident and skilled amateur photographer, might have had something to do with it. At any rate, Ms. Geus guessed the reel was a 1923 film of East Hampton Town's 275th anniversary, of which LTV already had a copy, said Ms. Henderson.
Since it was, in theory, a copy, and what with all the oh-my-Gods and this-is-so-flammables that met the film upon its arrival to the studio, Ms. Henderson could have assumed that it should be disposed of, and for a decade no one paid it much mind.
LTV's film archives from the 1940s, things like the 300th anniversary of the town in 1949, the Free Life balloon launch in 1970, "wonderful stuff of the '60s," make up the station's "very small, but very nice little collection."
Some of the collection also has back-of-the-closet origins, like a 1927-to-1936 reel discovered by Richard Barons, former executive director at the East Hampton Historical Society. Not knowing what it was, he gave it to Ms. Henderson, who sent it off to a digitizing house in New York. It came back showing the building of Guild Hall, lawn parties -- "It's years and years of someone having a lot of fun with their film camera."
Ms. Henderson also loves the home movies shot in East Hampton, as well as footage that just shows Town Pond in the 1940s with cars driving by, "much as they do today."
As Ms. Henderson put it, the collection is not the sort that includes every last basketball game played in 1984, but has a value if it is saved. There everyone had been thinking that DVD was the great new technology! "Well it isn't," Ms. Henderson said with a laugh. "DVD has a short, 25-year shelf life and now we need to digitize it and get it into the cloud."
Enter New York University's Moving Image Archive and Preservation program, which started a Regional Media Legacies grant, allowing preservationists to track down hidden archives on Long Island and help them save various collections in a better format.
"They were bowled over by the notion of LTV's archive," Ms. Henderson said.
Robert Anen, a film buff among the Moving Image Archive's postgraduate students, saw those bins of film and told Ms. Henderson that he'd do anything to get his hands on them. Since many of the reels were not of real relevance to the station, she told him, "be my guest."
It was early October when Mr. Anen came to get the film, and after his preliminary assessment, looking over 90 films, he found that the reel from Ms. Geus's barn was among those in the bin. Though sensitive to heat, apparently nitrate does not combust as spontaneously as Ms. Henderson was originally led to believe, something Ms. Henderson thinks the person who stored it was aware of after all.
The film was in perfect condition. And furthermore, it was not a copy. In fact, it was never-before-seen documentation of the 1915 Fourth of July celebration on the village green, where the Ladies Village Improvement Society used to hold summer fairs. With the windmill and St. Luke's Church visible in the background, "we're quite confident it's our East Hampton," said Ms. Henderson.
Mr. Anen has not yet pulled apart the entire reel, so only a few snippets of celebration are apparent so far: a band, girls running in all-white dresses and knee socks, families assembled with children looking skeptical of the photographer. "Someone was cranking the camera like they did in old Hollywood," explained Ms. Henderson.
Only one or two places on the East Coast handle nitrate film, said Ms. Henderson. And the film must be driven to these places, not mailed. The sender would have to be certified to package nitrate and the United States Postal Service won't take it, so it must be sent by a private courier service.
When the final assessment from New York University's Regional Media Legacies division comes in, Ms. Henderson is hoping that LTV can raise the money to have the nitrate film digitized. "Or we might just go ahead and do it."
"I'm just so thrilled with the sequence of events that rediscovered it," she said.
