We will never see Orson Welles's own cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, drastically altered by RKO, or Touch of Evil, re-edited by Universal. Most tragic, Welles was sent in 1942 to South America to film a color documentary shortly after the completion of Citizen Kane; after Welles had shot thousands of feet of film, RKO withdrew financial support, recalled Welles, and put his uncut footage into the vaults. For years unidentifiable random shots from the film, It's All True, turned up as stock footage in Latin American thrillers, the only Welles color footage thereby becoming scattered and hopelessly lost.
Greed's tempermental director Erich von Stroheim, known when acting as "the man you love to hate," consistently made films Paramount considered too long and too morbid. The Merry-Go-Round was taken away from him and completed by Rupert Julian (The Phantom of the Opera), and no one knows how much was shot by Stroheim; The Wedding March, originally almost four hours, was halved, the second half, Honey-moon, never released and probably non-existent now.
Stroheim's only sound film, Walking Down Broadway, was ripped apart by Fox, small pieces of it used in a later film entitled Hello Sister, also missing apparently. Similarly, Chaplin hired Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) to direct a film, The Sea-Gull, which Chaplin took home with him upon completion and never released. Chaplin never gave a reason for his capricious suppression of the film, and its existence now is doubtful.
Such stories plague the careers of our greatest film-makers, including King Vidor, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Frank Borzage, as well as stars like Gloria Swanson, Rudolf Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney Sr., and even W. C. Fields, one of whose two films directed by D. W. Griffith is lost.
On the positive side, the problem of locating missing films is largely finite. The Library of Congress has always had the right to demand a print of any film copyrighted; according to Kahlenberg, they began exercising this right in 1934, and have prints of all American films made since. Although many of these are on nitrate and must be treated or transferred, the essential fact remains that when the rights to post-1934 films lapse into public domain, they will be available for library use and study. But the Library is not the same as the AFI: when Kahlenberg succeeds in inducing a collector to have a copy placed in the Library, it is still one long step away from having been placed in the much-desired national archive of the American Film Institute. Consequently, Kahlenberg must attempt with equal vigor to secure prints of post-1934 features for the archive itself, with permission from owners to make screening possible to students, critics, and historians. The size of the job has prevented the AFI from setting any rules about use of films: no screenings are planned resembling those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cinematheque, or London's National Film Theatre--and Stevens can only hope that a student writing a thesis on Stroheim will be able to come to the AFI offices in Washington, D.C. and see his films. Both Stevens and Kahlenberg are looking into plans regarding closed-circuit televising of films for study purposes.
America has been fifty years late in establishing a national archive, and its success is far from certain, if only taking into account the diverse goals of the seventeen-man staff of the Institute. Nonetheless, Kahlenberg is as optimistic as he is resigned to a long haul: asked if the archive would include any foreign film, he laughed and said resignedly, "We only have 32,000 American films to get first."