What were those Sawyers movie scenes for?

[Silas Buchanan]

Why would you buy these? For a home movie? Couldn’t you just shoot the shot yourself if you were making a vacation home movie?

[Joerg Polzfusz]

IMHO it was made for two purposes:
a) You forgot to shoot Market Street or had technical problems with your camera (empty batteries, …) or had problems due to fog/rain/earthquakes/fires/tornadoes/zombies/… that prevented you from shooting there.
b) You have never been to SF, but shooting in NYC: actors leave hotel room, actors enter car and drive out of sight -splice in Market Street here- actors leave car and enter a Chinese restaurant.
😁

For France, there was „Kronos Film“ that also offered such scenes. Here, the benefit was more obvious as they offered a lot of shots made out of a helicopter (Eiffel Tower from above, Louvre from above, …) or shots from museums/churches/palaces where you either needed a special, expensive allowance for shooting or where it is too dark to shoot without additional lighting.

[Joerg Polzfusz]

Picture from an eBay auction: buying this film was/is cheaper than renting a helicopter/drone and getting a permission to fly and shoot there.

[Dominique De Bast]

Although it seems a good idea, there are two main issues when doing that : 1) If you shot in Kodachrome and spliced a scene from one of those films, you will pass from good colours to faded ones, and then good colours again. 2) There is every chance that you wil have to reframe during the projection as different cameras have different framings.

[Joerg Polzfusz]

These are valid points, Dominique. Especially the Kronos films will most likely have faded by now. And e.g. splicing some ORWO material (DEFA Heimfilm also produced such sequences) into a film shot on Fujichrome R25N is also verrrry noticeable.
But in the pre-video-era, this was the only way to also use „stock footage“ as an amateur. So you had to choose which way to die: by having a visibly different scene or by not having that scene.
And some companies like Sawyers tried to reduce the visible differences by copying their sequences onto Kodachrome.

As for the framing: That’s the reason why the projected area is smaller than the recorded area for all film formats. (Yes, there’s still the chance that this happens, but the risk is lower than one might think.)

[Dominique De Bast]

I had no idea some of those films were also made available on Kodachrome stock. Must have been expensive to buy.

About the framing : I have that problem with some commercial films I spiced together on larger spools to show them without a break. I don't understand how it's possible as the films are supposed to have been printed on the same machines. I never had that with 9.5, so far, though.