Gleason storage site tour

Recently Technicolor donated a large and extremely important collection to George Eastman House (GEH). I was lucky enough to have a glimpse of this collection while given a tour of the Gleason Storage Facility. The collection includes motion picture cameras and printing equipment as well as papers such as technical drawings. This important collection will eventually be made available to the public to view.

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Also while touring the Gleason Vault I noticed a large number of film cans marked ‘The Grifters 1990’ and was curious as to what they contained. Curatorial Assistant and tour guide, Antonella Bonfanti informed me that they contained pre-print material for the 1990 feature release The Grifters starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. Pre-print material consists of footage containing relevant material gathered and used in the production of the film. This can be audio or visual in nature, and in the case of The Grifters, includes a number of reels of various versions of just footstep sounds.

Antonella estimated there were approximately 500 film cans in this collection alone. It was quite an insight for me to see the amount of related footage that can go into the making of a film and am glad we don’t archive these along with the completed film.