Our film, television heritage is fragile
“Super Bowl” has become a metaphor for anything that’s allegedly of gargantuan proportions – in a couple of days, someone is sure to refer to the New Hampshire primary as “the Super Bowl of American politics” – but, as hard to believe as it now seems, the first Super Bowl in 1967 wasn’t much of a big deal at all.
It was tacked onto the end of the regular football season following the merger the year before between the National Football League and the American Football League. The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs in that maiden match-up before a half-empty stadium, and the halftime entertainment didn’t consist of artists who were popular at the time, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but college marching bands. It was simulcast on both the CBS and NBC television networks, but neither one thought it was of sufficient consequence to preserve for posterity. For years, it was believed no complete or near-complete recording of the first Super Bowl existed.
However, as outlined in a story in The New York Times last week, the spectacle was, in fact, recorded on a professional machine with two-inch Scotch tapes by a man named Martin Haupt. They were stowed for years in an attic in Shamokin, about an hour northeast of Harrisburg, and are now in the hands of his son, a North Carolina nurse anesthetist. Haupt’s heir would like to sell the tapes, but the NFL is not interested, but also kindly informed him if he would attempt to sell them to anyone else, lawyers will be summoned.
Boy, that makes a lot of sense.
The recording of Super Bowl I is still around thanks to the handiwork of a rank-and-file fan, but Super Bowl II is gone, as are portions of subsequent Super Bowls. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the movies and television programs that have been lost over the years. Almost all of the installments of NBC-TV’s “The Tonight Show” during the first 10 years of Johnny Carson’s tenure exist now only in memory, as do the first television appearance by Elvis Presley, which occurred on the variety program “The Louisiana Hayride,” the 1948 debut of Ed Sullivan’s “The Toast of the Town,” which also marked the first television appearance by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and almost the entire output of the DuMont Television Network, which was on the air from 1946 to 1956.
The situation is hardly better when it comes to our motion picture heritage. It’s estimated 75 percent of silent films are lost, and that sad tally includes work by such giants as the directors Alfred Hitchcock and D.W. Griffith and first-tier stars like Gloria Swanson, Errol Flynn and Lon Chaney.
The loss of so much of our television and film history is, of course, a heartbreaker for popular culture scholars, but it’s a deeper loss to the entire culture. Movies and television were an integral part of the 20th century and the development of the mass media. They shaped how we saw and understood the world then, and still do today. They are our heritage, our birthright.
According to Martin Scorsese, perhaps America’s greatest living filmmaker, “We need to say to ourselves that the moment has come when we have to treat every last moving image as reverently and respectfully as the oldest book in the Library of Congress.”
The Library of Congress is, in fact, one of the institutions rushing to preserve as many films and television programs as they can, along with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y. But they’re up against an unforgiving clock – the need is great and resources are limited.
We hope those who engage in this important work are doing so carefully – but also speedily.