The cutting room

If you’re wearing this year’s polyester, you may be wearing part of one of last year’s big movies.

Ideas are not the only thing Hollywood recycles: The thousands of prints left over after all those blockbusters have run out of steam at the nation’s multiplexes have sparked a thriving industry that helps transform old film into other products, including polyester fabric.

With movies opening at theaters virtually everywhere at the same time, the number of film prints needed for a single title is monumental. Last year’s “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” for example, required 8,400 prints for the U.S. and Canada alone. For that three-hour movie, the total for those prints amounts to about 29,000 miles of film.

After movies go out of release, an enormous amount of film, minus the few hundred prints that will be retained for archival purposes and future industry screenings, has to be disposed of. “We have to do a huge junking three or four times a year,” says Nancy Sams, vice president of film print control for Warner Bros. “If not, we would have to pay storage on film and it would cost us millions of dollars.”

Where do all the film prints go? Once upon a time they went straight to the landfill, but these days the polyester-based film stock gets the green treatment. Some of the recycled plastic becomes the base for other photographic products, such as X-ray film, but it has other, more surprising uses as well.

“There continues to be a huge demand for recyclable polyester,” says Kathleen Beckhardt, chief executive of Film Processing Corp., a division of Eastman Kodak. “The material can be washed by other suppliers and vendors and typically can go back into the fiber market, so any polyester that’s in the clothes you’re wearing right now could have at one time been a movie print.”

“We guarantee that all our processed film is not being burnt or put into the ground in a landfill in any shape, manner or form. It will be recycled,” says Sam Borodinsky, chief executive of Filmtreat West and Filmtreat East, a bicoastal corporation whose services include certified destruction of obsolete film prints.

The Sun Valley warehouse of Filmtreat West brings to mind the final scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” with its crates of film reels stacked floor to ceiling, all of which will be put through a custom-designed chopper and reduced to glittering black confetti.

In addition to recycling the polyester plastic, which the company uses as a base for products it manufactures, including film reels and cores, emulsion from the film can also be recycled to make such products as ceramic.

“We’re making products that go back to the industry at a lower price because of the recyclable product that we’re getting,” says Filmtreat West President Larry Zide. “Ninety-nine percent of everything we get we reuse.”

About 1.5 million pounds of film is processed each year by Filmtreat’s East and West coasts’ facilities, according to Zide. The company also won an Emmy in 1998 for its proprietary rejuvenation process, which cleans and removes scratches from existing prints.

While Filmtreat processes all brands of film stock, Film Salvage, a division of Film Processing Corp., handles only Kodak stock. Virtually all the material recycled at the company’s facilities in Mountain City, Tenn., and Italy gets returned to Kodak.

Rejuvenation has become an increasingly common form of film recycling as well. The process varies, but the goal is to take the best available prints and revitalize the image for less than it costs to strike a new one. “If a picture is not in the main theaters for a very long time, they may rejuvenate those release prints and repurpose them for international distribution,” says Tim Maurer, president of Technicolor Cinema Distribution, whose facility based in Wilmington, Ohio, does rejuvenation work.

Not all prints are destroyed. A few to a few hundred are invariably archived for future use. “I still have about 1,200 of the original 5,500 prints of the first ‘Lord of the Rings’ because they may reissue it,” says Gisela Corcoran, vice president of print control for New Line Cinema. “You don’t get rid of everything right away. We have a special library where I keep beautiful, pristine prints, plus just nice prints for USC or UCLA, who may want to borrow them for their film classes.”

The number of prints for the current “Rings” feature, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” was increased to 6,085 for the U.S. alone. By contrast, Corcoran ordered only about 800 prints for the much chancier “About Schmidt,” which was released on what is known as a platform basis, starting with a few theaters in New York and Los Angeles and gradually adding markets (it is currently in about 1,200 theaters).

The journey that prints make from film laboratories to the 33 distribution depots in the United States, then to theaters and back to the depots once they have been pulled from screens, and ultimately on to the destruction facilities, is accompanied by a flurry of tracking paperwork to ensure that no print falls into unauthorized hands. The way film reels are shipped for junking also makes it nearly impossible for anyone to reconstruct a complete print.

“The prints are intentionally mixed in the box, so that if I were to open up one box, I would not find all six reels for a specific title,” says Beckhardt. “If I wanted to search the whole trailer, I probably could put a whole movie together, but it would take a lot of time to unroll part of each reel, determine what the movie was, figure out the reel number, and then search through 40,000 pounds of material to try and find all six reels to that movie.”

Documentation that accompanies new prints on their arrival from labs follows them to their destruction. “As we get the prints we are in contact with the studio,” says Borodinsky. “Communication is very, very tight. We issue a certificate of destruction based on the print numbers supplied with the film and the number of reels. We’ve very, very security conscious.”

Even with these stringent controls, the occasional print does manage to slip into the hands of collectors and buffs, usually at the distributor or film booker level.

One former independent distributor, speaking on condition of anonymity, describes how he once returned reels of what was essentially scraps to the depot but kept the actual film print. Despite the tight security, he confirms, “You can get a print of whatever was out last summer.”