Going Back 41 Years

[Maurice Leakey]

For many years the Central Booking Agency of the British Film Institute published an annual book "Films On Offer". This listed thousands of 16mm features available for clubs, societies, schools, etc. Furthermore, they offered for a fee to BFI members, their ability to book such films. This saved a film booking secretary the hassle of having copies of all the relevant 16mm film libraries' catalogues.

I have just bought of copy of their 1979 issue which has 190 A4 pages itemising over eleven thousand features then available for hire. But, of interest, here are three items of note from 1979.

1) Derann had a 16mm sound library, and they also offered ready spooled programmes of balanced films to suit all ages.

2) Over 20 popular features were available on Super 8 magnetic sound from the Rank 16mm Film Library.

3) The editor said: "In view of the impending arrangements by most of the major 16mm distributors concerning the availability of video cassettes for hire and/or sale, the market should have established itself more firmly by next year". (1980).

The last item certainly was the writing on the wall. Within ten years many film libraries had disappeared.

So; here's a question. What happened to all the 11,000 16mm features? No doubt, the BFI still has some 16mm available for hire, but how many?

[Clive Casey]

It doesn’t bare thinking about what happened to all those films. At a guess I would suspect they ended up in land fill. What a waste. It’s the same with all the cinemas being demolished and sometimes replaced with a big shed and they call it a cinema. I must admit since I retired 5 years ago I have lost a lot of interest in the cinema. To my way of thinking the films are not the same as in my day. The presentation is just none existing. When I started in the cinema in the 70s I was told you never showed a white screen, you played decent music in the background, not a head banging row. Maybe it’s me just getting old, after all the grandkids call me grumpy grandgrand. But I’m proud of my years in the real cinema.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

I will bet for $100 that at least 90% of them ended up being destroyed (shredded to million pieces/burned/dumped/whatever). Only the very minority of them would survive and managed to find their home in the collector's hand.
From corporate's point of view all of these are assets, which will hold their vales only to a certain period. After that the book value would eventually plumed down to zero, or even negative value if there's any cost to keep them in storage while you can no longer make any profit out of them. So why bother? Just get rid of them to end the issue.

Sounds harsh & sad, but very true.

[Brian Fretwell]

I know the BFI got rid of the Ten Best competition films hire prints by giving them to the IAC (It was reported in Movie Maker) so they did survive, I have no idea about the thousands of others. I would hope that if they didn't have 35mm prints of a film they would have kept the 16mm ones though.