Archive's Horak on film prints lost in Universal fire

Los Angeles Times reporters John Horn and Susan King spoke with recently-appointed Archive director Jan-Christopher Horak for a June 4 piece about the back lot fire at Universal that destroyed hundreds of rare 35mm film prints.

“The prints were high-quality copies of decades-old movies,” the Times reported, “not original masters, which are stored in a Philadelphia vault. But the loss of the copies in Universal’s scorched vault building, which the studio had not yet quantified, could affect several upcoming screenings of classic films at museums, festivals and repertory theaters.

Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of UCLA Film & Television Archive, said that in addition to the uncertainty surrounding [the classic] “Hold Back the Dawn,” the status of several other film prints was murky but not as bad as once feared.

“Initially, with the flood of e-mails [asking for prints], the situation seemed more dire than it turned out to be,” Horak said. “Universal did find prints on some stuff.”

“It is upsetting,” said Horak, who [was the Founding Director of Archives and Collections] at Universal. “I feel bad for my colleagues at Universal. I was in that vault. It was filled with stuff. It’s going to take quite a while to assess what really was lost.”

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