Reconstructing Lost History Then your next question should be: WHY aren’t museums and institutions compiling and reconstructing the lost film history using film accessories? Simply put, they can’t. Museums, institutions and universities are not set up to reconstruct the film accessories because of their structure. All regular museums, institutions and universities are set up on the same principle. They acquire a collection (preferably donated). They have a curator and archivists to take care of that collection. Then people have to come to that facility to SEE the collection. This brings in revenue, interest and stability for that facility. The archivist job is to take care of that collection. If it is NOT in that collection, it is NOT part of their job – AND THEREFORE DOES NOT EXIST to that archivist and facility. In most cases, this system works GREAT! (and has for many decades). If it is documenting the life of a famous person or an important event, GREAT!! You see, normally a collection will come from a director, or an actor, or sometimes even a studio. For a specific film, they might get the script, production notes, a costume or two and a couple of stills or posters. That would be a pretty good acquisition!!! If you have a couple of posters for each film, isn’t that enough? When it comes to film accessories, suddenly you’re in a different and still largely undocumented world. Very few realize the magnitude of FILM ACCESSORIES!!! For a medium size film, you have HUNDREDS of different film accessories created. It all starts with the keybook. During production hundreds and hundreds of production stills are taken by the unit photographer. A keybook is created containing the best production stills taken for the advertising department to use to promote the film. The rest of the stills are put in storage in case they are