News

— A Savant Guest Article by Wayne Schmidt —

Fires, clerical errors, and lab mistakes have caused films to become unavailable in good quality, or even lost forever. Studio indifference also allows vintage films to be ignored to death, while their negatives rot in cans. So it’s great to hear a ‘lost film’ story with a happy ending.

A note from Glenn Erickson: About twenty years ago, when I worked at MGM, I had some contact with MGM’s in house Film and Video Services team, and learned how the department maintained the MGM library of film titles. My old friend Wayne Schmidt was at the time over at Sony, and busy doing much the same work for that studio’s older Columbia film library. Naturally, the first thing I asked about was the status of both studios’ Hammer film collections!

Wayne had also been a video editor, and even...

I'm not the sort of person who is precious about my consumption of films. For me, the recent hubbub surrounding the death of 35mm projection has largely been white noise that confuses the method of consumption for quality. However, if there is any argument that could possibly change my mind, it is sure to be found in the pages of the new book, A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies, by Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph....

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Handwritten letters and radio serve as primary means of communication in impoverished nation.

By Gil Kaufman

Louiny Fontal broadcasts from Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Photo: Nicholas Kamm/ Getty Images

While the world tweets, texts and blogs about the aftermath of last Tuesday's 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, the massive destruction of the island's infrastructure has left many Haitians scrambling to communicate with and find loved ones.

Cell phone service has been spotty on the impoverished Caribbean island nation, and even those lucky enough to still have mobile phones that work are having trouble finding a way to charge the devices due to the massive power outages.

"What's really interesting is how people have cell phones but no electricity in their homes, so they carry their chargers around and plug it in whenever they find an outlet," Scott Sundick, a surgeon from New Jersey who has been in Haiti helping the sick and wounded for the past week,...

'We have to step up and give them a hand,' Jeffrey Joseph from Radyo Pa Nou says.

By Jayson Rodriguez, with reporting by Sway Calloway

Jeffrey Joseph, vice president and general manager of radio station Radyo Pa Nou

Photo: MTV News

Celebrity outreach to Haiti may be dominating the headlines, but everyday heroes truly do exist in the wake of the calamity caused by the earthquake that crippled the country.

For instance in Brooklyn, New York, local radio station Radyo Pa Nou has been assisting the local Haitian community by helping to locate loved ones lost on the island.

Jeffrey Joseph, the vice president and general manager of the station, told MTV News on Friday (January 15) how they've been able to communicate back and forth to Haiti — Radyo Pa Nou contacts sister stations in other zones, away from Port-au-Prince, and relays names that have been called into them.

Joseph...