But STILL, with all that money spent, the American Film Institute declared that 90% of all silent films made in the U. S. are lost forever AND 50% of all U. S. films made before 1951 (when they invented safety film) are already LOST FOREVER. Even if we accept those statistics, when you don’t have the film anymore, what do you do to get information? You could go to the copyright offices, or in our case in the U.S., the Library of Congress. You could go to a film institution or try to find books that could at least give a few basics. Well, what about the posters, stills, pressbooks and trade ads? – you know, the documents issued WITH the film, what we call, the film accessories. But there is a problem. With all the millions spent in the U.S. on film preservation, we have not been able to find a single organization dedicated to film accessories preservation. No poster preservation societies, no groups to preserve film accessories. In fact, most institutions don’t want to handle film accessories because film accessories were considered an “unimportant necessity of the business.” Film accessories were normally produced on cheap acidic paper that is costly to maintain. They are also a pain to store, a pain to handle and a pain to present. Because they are such a problem, and cost so much of their maintenance budget to preserve, many institutions quietly just allow them to decay and disintegrate so they can be removed from their inventory. This has been unfortunate, because when you don’t have the actual film, the film accessories are the primary source of information. They are actually the historical documents issued WITH the film and are invaluable when you want to reconstruct more than just the basic information about a film title. Over the last 10 years of advance research of film accessories, we have been completely SHOCKED that a complete industry is being allowed to gradually disappear mainly because it doesn’t fit into the current archival structure. Here is a small example of what we’re talking about. In 2010, there was a HUGE find in the film community. A film was found that had Charlie Chaplin in it! The film community in California didn’t realize Charlie Chaplin was even in the film! It became the headliner for the 2010 Cinecon Convention. The following is an announcement that they issued: