Author and documentarian Anthony Slide's 1992 Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States, is remarkably well researched and complete. After an introduction convincing of the need for film preservation, it proceeds to tell the history of all the U.S. archives and preservationists, detailing dates, the holdings of each archive, and descriptions of founders and succeeding executives (including strengths and weaknesses of the sometimes-sparring characters involved). If the voluminous collection of names and dates can make for sometimes dry reading, the book as a whole is a valuable and needed resource. Along the way, various methods of film preservation are described, the help of private film collectors is covered, and the inclusion of TV programming is discussed.
This circa 2000 edition is published by McFarland Classics, a reprint of the first edition. Ironically for a book on preservation, the black and white photographs included in the McFarland edition are washed out, gray tones and detail missing. One assumes the earlier edition looked better.
Nitrate Won't Wait was published one year after the World Wide Web was introduced to the public and four years before the release of the first DVD, a medium that would open new possibilities for information storage. One chapter, on colorization, while interesting in its own right, has proven to be about a superfluous subject; over thirty years after the book was written, the only viewership who has any interest in "old" (pre-1970) films is an audience who rejects colorization. The process didn't create new audiences for previous B&W films, as hoped by those who invested funds in it; it just made audiences who like B&W films want all the more to see them as intended.
One facet of film collecting I wish the book had covered, although it's probably suitable for a book of its own, is the legality of private film ownership before VHS tapes were marketed to the public. The famous case of actor Roddy McDowell's private film collection being confiscated by the F.B.I. in the early '70s is mentioned. Although charges were eventually dropped, the book doesn't say whether or not it was legal to own films in that time period or why this facet of the government thought they had that jurisdiction.
As thirty-two years have passed since the publication of this book, an updated version of the work would be appreciated, especially since digital production, storage and retention has completely changed the parameters of movie preservation. Inés Toharia Terán's 2021 documentary, Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, in the meantime, does a good job of describing the current state of the profession, albeit with a global perspective.
