We've all heard about the 20th Century Fox fire that destroyed so many Fox films. I found this in a newsgroup that purports to give details about the July 9, 1937 fire at Little Ferry, New Jersey. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but the post (authored by Sam Sherman) does seem to make sense. What it doesn't address though is if 16mm prints of the misplaced Chans somehow survived into the 50's (which accounts for reports of these showing up on TV)
Steve
"The Fox vault fire legend goes as follows:
1- Contrary to safety procedures both nitrate negatives and fine grains were stored at the same place and both went up in flames - rather than saving one at another location.
2- A great percentage of Fox pre-1935 original film elements were lost.
3- As this was probably the storage for Fox's Deluxe labs, other company's negatives were also lost, including Educational Pictures, World-Wide and others, many which Fox sub-distributed.
4- The receiver in the bankruptcy of Grand National Pictures in the early 1940s sued Fox/Deluxe over this fire, as EH Hammons was the link between World-Wide, Educational and Grand National.
5- To make up for this loss for outside customers, Fox/Deluxe apparently made new dupe 35MM negatives from used 35MM release prints of World-Wide and Educational subjects, which in later years generally existed only in spliced up dupey looking prints. Good quality does exist on the later Educational subjects, which were apparently stored elsewhere, possibly at Deluxe Labs in New York at 850 Tenth Avenue.
6- That is why some of the early Charlie Chan films are lost and films like CHARLIE CHAN IN EGYPT only exist with bad material."
Interesting information! Could the "lost" Charlie Chan films have been so as far back as 1937 - during Warner Oland's lifetime? This could account for the later "remakes," perhaps including "CHARLIE CHAN IN RIO" for "THE BLACK CAMEL," "CHARLIE CHAN'S MURDER CRUISE" for "CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON," and "MURDER OVER NEW YORK" for "CHARLIE CHAN'S CHANCE." All of the originals being pre-1935 and possibly considered "lost" even then, during the Toler era.
In a 1955 newspaper article entitled "Charlie Chan in Hollywood," (available in our Study under the "Charlie Chan" heading) the writer makes mention of many Chan movies, not relating that some mentioned were considered "lost."
All of this could bear some more - much more - study!
Re: Re: Interesting info on fire at Fox film vaults
Dear Rush,
I agree about this bearing more study. Maybe this has been mentioned before, but an interesting project would be to examine the 1950's era TV Guides (or similar publications) and see if any listings for the lost Chans ever appear. Unfortunately this would be an almost impossible task because one would have to examine the magazines for many different markets (since most of these broadcasts were done at the local level as opposed to on a network).
