stone. We regularly modify our Agreements in terms of clarifying grant of rights and other issues. Having experience on the other end, we do have a strong sense of the challenges producers sometimes have in the business of licensing footage clips. The HBO Archive also functions as a picture-researching tool, and it seems like you favor the “give us a call” approach over the “type in a keyword and maybe you’ll get a hit” approach. I’m surprised that such a large archive would encourage person-to-person picture researching, but is this just indicative of the care that goes into the HBO Archive? From the beginning we viewed our website more as a show reel to sample the range of material we have. HBO holds over a million assets. It is just not possible to catalog and digitize everything. Additionally our team knows our collection better than anything we could offer on the website. We do consider ourselves partners of the production community. A researcher may have a specific want list. We believe it is key to talk with that researcher, to brainstorm. Once we get a sense of the researcher’s story and sub-plots we can often offer a number of solutions that they haven’t considered before. Speaking of “The March of Time,” n the past few years, HBO’s short documentary series was revived and screened at both MoMA and on TCM. The 2010s have already been described by many authors as the age of “retro,” but have you noticed a surge in the demand for these strange newsreels? And can you talk a little about “March of Time” and your role in reviving the series in the HBO Archive. “The March of Time” is incredibly unique. For us, it was love at first sight. It is from the newsreel era, but not like anything ever seen before. “The March of Time” won an Academy Award for revolutionizing the newsreel business. There was no mainstream documentary movement in this country until “The March of Time” hit the screens. The typical Hollywood newsreel crammed about a dozen stories onto a nine-minute reel. “The March of Time” dedicated a full eighteen minutes to one story. The Hollywood newsreel was shot more run-and-gun style, while MOT had much higher production values. “The March of Time” had its one cinematographer training school to keep up their high standards and covered stories from around the world in a much deeper way. Hollywood newsreels were more superficial and US centric. The retrospectives we had at MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, and TCM serve as testaments of the importance, and yes, the sometimes quirkiness of this series. We have grown the MOT licensing every year. The success we have had is two-fold. This is a historically significant series that we have re-catalogued with painstaking details for easier search results. We hold the 35mm original films, which can then be transferred to true High Definition Video. Many libraries that hold newsreel films do not have the 35mm backing and cannot offer HD master transfers. Last year, we also launched an initiative to re-patriot lost programs of the earliest days of HBO. The most troublesome period is 1972–76 with Sports programming hit particularly hard. This was a time period when programs were recorded on very expensive and very bulky two-inch Quad videotapes. All the networks were constantly recycling with these reels, burning over history each time they did it. Networks regularly purged these oversized reels to save on storage costs. Sports programs were often targeted as the most disposable. Starting in 1972, our sports programming was wide and diversified. Professional and amateur hockey and basketball, professional baseball, football, soccer, boxing, tennis, wrestling, bowling, roller derby, martial arts, figure skating, and harness racing. Olympic styled track & field, gymnastics and swimming. We even broadcast roller derby. HBO was like ESPN, years before anyone even came up with the idea for ESPN. So much of our early sports pioneer programs remain lost. Our determination to reclaim our history is unwavering. You’ve also been a documentary producer. How does a passion for producing documentaries coincide for being the head of HBO Archives? Can you do both? I simply love storytelling, history, and especially pop culture. When I produced my own stories, either creating or finding the perfect shot was a near obsession. The right piece of footage could make a good story great. I do miss being out in the field producing, but we get a lot of satisfaction helping other documentarians, movie producers, educators, and others find key missing footage to help tell their story in an even better and more compelling way. For the HBO Archives team, it doesn’t matter what side of storytelling you are coming from, we all share the passion of our history, our culture through footage. Unique, compelling, unpredictable footage. ✹ American Society of Picture Professionals
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