“What I wish I knew then… ”

Veteran Producer and Missing Movies Board Member Richard Guay reflects on lessons learned

Filmmakers are really good at a variety of tasks — managing tight budgets, managing large groups of people, taking complex stories and translating them from words on paper to visual imagery that can make your heart stop. One area that filmmakers are absolutely lousy about is caring for their own legacy.

There’s a good reason: there are only so many hours in a day and the job of developing, financing and actually making a movie is a more than full-time gig. There’s just no time to consider history or where that film you are making will wind up in 20 or 30 years.

That was the case for me over four decades — always on to the next project, never considering what would become of the last one. "Someone will take care of it," I thought. Well, for the most part, I was dead wrong.

Over the five years that it has taken to locate, re-negotiate and set up long-term preservation for one of those films — Household Saints — I’ve learned a great deal. Looking back, there are a handful of things that I wish I had known 30 years ago when we made the film. The list is short and most of the items on it were readily available to me at the time but there was no formal process in place to track any of it.

The list of "what I wish I knew" is as follows:

1. Who owned the copyright in my film? Of course, I can look at the copyright notice in the end credits but that information often changes without the filmmaker being notified (see #3 below).

2. What are the physical elements — commonly known as Deliverables — that were created and who has possession of them?

3. When did any of the first two items change? Was the copyright transferred? Were the materials moved or, worse, discarded?

4. What underlying rights were needed to release the film — music, stock footage, photos, etc. etc?

5. Finally, was there any sort of preservation copy made and deposited with an archive that would allow the film to be restored in the event the original materials were lost?

Having any one of these pieces of information at the start of my search would have saved me weeks of searching. And having the last one — a preservation copy — would have provided enormous peace of mind when I thought the film might be lost completely.

Looking back, three things are very clear to me.

• First, obtaining the information for the copyright, the deliverables and the underlying rights should have been on my To Do List. That information is readily available when the film is distributed and I needed to ask for it and keep track of it.

• Second, there needs to be a mechanism whereby the changes to copyright status and/ or the movement of physical materials are provided to filmmakers.

• Third, preservation is a critical element of the filmmaking process. Every film contributes to our cultural heritage and the only way not to lose the bulk of them is to make preservation a line item in a post-production budget. This doesn’t have to be expensive and the requirements must fit the scale of the project, but it must be addressed when the film is made.

I don't think intention is enough here. I think that each of the above items needs to be part of a filmmaker’s standard contract, enshrined with all the rest of that boilerplate that we may not fully understand but will sure come in handy one day.

Preservation Guide fro Filmmakers