Film History Washes Up on Universal Lot

By Katey Rich

During the very, very brief period of my college career in which I learned to make movies, I always found something talismanic about the strips of film that hung from pegs in the editing room, collecting in curls at the bottom of trim bins and getting swept, frame by frame, out of the way. They weren't movies, of course, and in my amateur filmmaking class most of the trimmed bits were blurry or discolored shots. But there's something to seeing an image of something recognizable on such a tiny piece of plastic, and making the connection between that insignificant scrap and the glorious movie images on the big screen.

Of course, we're moving away from that even as I write, as my colleagues at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam talk about the new wave of digital projection in Europe. But Primer Magazine, pointed out to me by way of Anne Thompson, has a little snippet of film history that washed up, so to speak, in the wake of the Universal Studios fire. You can see at left the single frame from a print of Back to the Future, charred but very recognizable. How crazy is it that such a tiny little piece can show up intact, in a neighborhood near the location of the fire? And isn't it even crazier to think that Marty McFly and Doc Brown can burn?