I was once given a 35mm hand colored nitrate print made in 1903 of "The Passion Play" it was a three reel feature, and beautifully hand colored with cut out stencils using airbrushes and special color inks. It was one of the most amazing 35mm nitrate prints that ever passed through my finger tips. It was given to me from a filmmaker who had the print in his collection since the 1920's in Boise Idaho. It was still in the original fiber shipping case, on the original reel and can sets, and a tablet worth of a one page contracts that the theater owners would sign and send back to the distributor. I gave away dozens of these copies, and I think I still have a few left. Here's the amazing story. The print, other than the normal wear of projection, was in perfect condition, and had no signs of nitrate decomposition. It wasn't shrunken at all! The filmmaker who has since passed away, on that particular day gave me all of his 35mm nitrate short films he had made in the 1920's. Every single can of film he gave me had turned to the dreaded "brown powder" some were so bad, they had ate right thru the entire stack of film cans! It was truly sad because he had no idea what was even in those cans of film. But the print of "The Passion Play" was perfect? I said; "Jim, where did you store these films of yours that you produced?" and he said he had kept them in a cool dry place, checked them once in a while. I said: "Was The Passion Play stored with these other cans of your?" Jim said: "You know whats funny, I put that film (The Passion Play) away in the attic in my house in Boise, and it's been sitting up there
for fifty years, and in the summer the temperature reached over one hundred degrees, so I have no idea how this print (The Passion Play) survived in the worst possible conditions, but all of my films that I took better care of - all decomposed." The print by the way, I loaned to Morgan of Moorecraft Film
Laboratories in Hollywood back in the late 1980's he was supposed to make a color dupe negative, but I never got the print back, and I never knew what happened to it?
One of the most amazing films I have ever seen!
