Hosted by Alec Baldwin, Film Preservation Classics is AMC's premier showcase of restored and preserved films. Our culture, literally, is going up in smoke. Less than half of the twenty-one thousand films made before 1950 still exist, because their nitrate film stock, over time, turns to acid and burns the images away.
Film preservation is a recent idea.
As early as twenty years ago, the only people preserving films were underfunded archives. The big studios simply saw film libraries as an unnecessary storage expense that they were unwilling to indulge in. Often, films would be copied onto video tape and the negative destroyed. In addition, some of the video transfers that were made were of edited cuts of the films. Often the films were not letterboxed before the transfer to video, which caused them to lose the wide aspect ratio of big-screen cinemascope movies, thereby sullying the integrity of the film picture.