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Is this still a totally lost film??

Disks for the trailer and all reels (except reel #5) are at UCLA. But no film known as of now.

Thanks for the update...

I can't get over how even just one print can't be found of this, when there were once probably hundreds.

The average domestic run was 200-250. Then, you have to figure after the run, about 2/3s of the prints were disposed of by the exchanges, the rest kept for later bookings. These left-over prints as well as the studio print were on nitrate stock, so likely a number of those rotted, and a number of them were disposed of because of insurance reasons. You can see how the initial number of prints quickly dwindled.

What is curious is that the elements for a sound film were lost by the studio. But again, they could have succumbed to decomp, vault fires and floods, ambitious studio execs who couldn't even see the film as an asset and ordered it junked, legal imbroglios.

What a shame... Barrios says Nanette "scored a sizable success" for Bernice Claire and Alexander Gray.

Apparently Alice White was slated to star but demanded more money, so she was dumped and Claire was hired.

It is often that the most popular films are in the poorest condition because the elements were 'printed' out. The survival rates of much lesser prints or negs is better in lots of cases & those heaps of money is spent on poor survival material to get a restored, acceptable copy. One such was the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty which they have now found better material, apparently.

As for junking by execs, I remember been on an invited visit to MGM in about early 1972 or 73(forget at the moment) to see a Bill Golden who had an office in the Thalberg Building & he arranged lunch with JJ Cohn & special effects man, Buddy(AA) Gillespie(who took me to the Beverly Hills Country Club & then his home later) at the commissary. He told me their negatives & other material were important assets & nothing is destroyed in that line. Other information tells us that there are a lot of discrepancies with that answer. He did say that they would not give all their papers to archives & colleges because there are some things 'we don't want the public to know'. He was particularly referring to finances. Considering his age by appearance, I would say he had left us now but I don't know. I was about 22-23 then & about to start my own film importing business which I did before going into a shop with other wares like records & sewing machine. Good prices & a good dollar rate for me at the time & no sales tax or customs fees at that time for film imported into Australia.

You are right that both of your hosts have died long ago.
About that time, however, MGM was well into their project of conversion of all their nitrate film to safety, using their own lab.
Certainly, after that, much of the nitrate was disposed of due to decomposition. The balance of it went to Eastman House (also in the mid 1970s). Fortunately, it had been copied, thus saving a large number of films where the nitrate was destroyed in a fire at that facility in 1978.
MGM's conversion from nitrate had to be one of the most thorough ever undertaken. They did the features, shorts, and trailers (MGM made their own trailers, not using National Screen Service, so had the negatives).
If there was a color insert in a feature, short, or trailer, it was copied in color and safety preservation elements kept.
I am not so familiar with the paper archives, except to know a lot of it got to the USC Library and the Academy.
It is possibly Mssrs Cohn and Gillespie were not the right ones to be familiar with the preservation efforts going on at the time you saw them.

It was more what Bill Golden said who was still there and was the instigator of the meeting & lunch. I wished I had met Sam Marx as I liked what he said in various documentaries over the latter years of his life & I am sure he was fairly accurate in his comments.

Gillespie only gets one line or two in the Louis Mayer book or recent vintage which I found rather strange. Gillespie told me that he & a friend had been in WW1 and they had no work prospects and with a engineering background or degrees or whatever they decided to look at the film industry & went to the Goldwyn Pictures at Culver City. I don't know who his friend was but Gillespie said that he signed a new contract to stay on at the new Metro-Goldwyn. After a drink at his country club he took me to his home where he had a poolroom that had collections of smoking pipes on the wall & photos of some of his miniatures from films he worked on(we call them models). Don't know what might have happened to them on his demise. The house was in Beverly Hills and alongside a major road but in a sort of gully which would not be too good if a car on the road suddenly veered off to that side and over!!! he said that in the famous 1967?? bushfire that lost Joe E Brown his house, Gillespie says he trained a hose on the place and saved it. it is a situation the outer areas of my city & the state as a whole suffer regularly with similar weather. Doesn't help in LA if people have their films or TV shows stored in their basements or garages and only know copies.

Gillespie has prior to my meeting been in Singapore where he suffered a heart attack(he was a big man, tall) and had written a book on his life & the subject of special-effects. This was in the style of a coffee-table book and no publisher would touch it owing to the not wanting to issue such books at the time. Not sure if tis was correct. He got the idea my father or I were in book publishing and could help him but this was not the case. TV service was my father's game at the time with his own solo business which suited him. I believe after Buddy died that someone published the book but I never saw it. Could well have been very informative.

My dream would be to read on a disc the MGM house magazine. I have a few of the Lion's Roar radio shows from various sources mostly hosted by Frank Morgan.

I was taken on a walk thru the studios by Golden but there was no filming on the lot that day. When Gillespie took me off in his car I saw the area that was once the backlot with its new housing estates etc.

I do appreciate the efforts that took place to save so much material in the past and, I guess, having an in-house lab helped a lot. I wished I could find more here but a lot that might exist is either crumbling or well-hidden(& still crumbling). Fire department orders have seen a lot go as well as stuff routinely sent to the melting down plants. But, as I have said before, no one knew where the MGM films went after they were finished with in my city. MGM owned theaters in Melbourne(2 in downtown that were old live houses) & a suburban house that might also have been used as a movie house earlier but, like another major house in that suburb owned by Fox at the other end other end of the street, it is now demolished. They had a twin drive-in abutting our second university allowing for two different films a night or two simultaneous screenings of a popular film. I never went there and the site is now part of the University grounds but the area is close withing 15mins of my house.

Certainly, by a report by a workmate in the late 1960s MGM did have films with disc soundtracks in the depression era as his school friend's father had a suburban movie house & they went the father on Saturdays to collect the next week's program or maybe that night's. The work week was 48 hours in those days with 8-hour days plus overtime if available or needed.

There has always been a vibrant film collecting culture in my country & now DVDs fill walls of many houses. TCM is a popular cable channel & the real reason why a lot of people I know have cable. I have never had it because I prefer to buy DVDs & Blu Ray && have about 800 Laserdiscs, many MGM films & shorts.

I certainly enjoy the depression era films. I do not recall any been shown in the MGM packages sold to a TV station in my city. They had at least three movie slots a week plus daytime to showcase this library. We got the shorts or some, MGM news thru Hearst headlines of the day edits(probably thru another source & so on. I had to wait until i as ih USA during the early 1970s to see the likes of the Big House and then on the Late, Late Show, with five minutes of film & then ads etc. I don't recal seeing any of the early Paramount Talkies either but all the Paramount's with the MCA logo of the day were damaged in some way with a black line about 25-30% into the film straight down, cue marks after cue marks & click splices. Fleischer's Gulliver' Travels was in that Paramount package then but we had no color in Australia then. I think it was the Warner/First National screenings shown two films back to back in an early afternoon slot on the same station that owned the MGMs that got me heavily into film. The station also had the trailers which they screened of those(& probably the MGM's too) & each of these had the WB local at the start which is odd because this is not so on DVDs etc for those trailers.

Happy memories & a start of a long film collecting pasttime.

Jack Theakston wrote:What is curious is that the elements for a sound film were lost by the studio. But again, they could have succumbed to decomp, vault fires and floods, ambitious studio execs who couldn't even see the film as an asset and ordered it junked, legal imbroglios.

Don't forget that screen musicals became poison in 1930. The market was so saturated with Broadway Melody rip-offs that they went from being cash cows to, in at least one case (`The March of Time') - being scrapped altogether because the taste had changed so rapidly.

I'm guessing that would mean that holding on to a film from this genre and era would have been at the very bottom of the priorities of both the studio and exhibitors.

You've had some very interesting times, moviepas!

vitaphone wrote:Disks for the trailer and all reels (except reel #5) are at UCLA. But no film known as of now.

I came across some information on the 1930 No, No, Nanette in doing research for an artlcle. Here is the relevant section.


The ultimate effect of such legal complexities can be seen by reviewing three Anna Neagle pictures. In 1940, following a series of historical dramas, the leading lady and her producer-director husband Herbert Wilcox began a series of minor musicals for RKO, each based on a popular Broadway show. First to appear was Irene, a remake of a 1926 Colleen Moore film. RKO had bought the property outright from Warner Bros. in 1937 as a possible vehicle for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Irene was RKO’s second most profitable picture of 1940, and RKO looked for other properties for Neagle.

No, No, Nanette (1940) and Sunny (1941) were produced under a curious deal with Warner Bros. which had produced earlier versions of each title in 1930. With No, No, Nanette, Warners sold a seven year license on the property to RKO for $165,000 and agreed to destroy the negatives and prints of the 1930 version (except for one library print). At the end of seven years, RKO agreed to return all story rights to Warners, and to destroy all negatives and prints of the new version (again, except for one library print). A similar agreement was executed for Sunny.

Source: Agreement, ‘No, No,Nanette’, Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. and RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., 27 June 1940. Agreement, reassignment, release and quitclaim, ‘No, No, Nanette’, RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. and Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., 19 November 1947.

David Pierce, "Forgotten faces: why some of our cinema heritage is part of the public domain," Film History. Vol. 19, No. 2, 2007, pp. 125-143.

A. Arnold Gillespie's Collection is at the Academy.

I've seen the 1940 Anna Neagle film (not bad) and even the 1950 version with Doris Day called Tea for Two. Neither of these films used much of the original score. But then even the 1930 version used only a few songs from the Broadway production.

David Pierce wrote:RKO agreed to return all story rights to Warners, and to destroy all negatives and prints of the new version (again, except for one library print). A similar agreement was executed for Sunny.

I have a 16 print of SUNNY. It's quite enjoyable and Neagle is charming. IRENE made it into the C&C package, but the color reels were printed in B&W.

SUNNY survives in the Turner/WB library.
The color section (I think it was reel 3AB) of IRENE (1940) was restored by Turner, and is shown on TCM.

The Herbert Wilcox RKO released titles were shown years ago on TV in Australia but there would not have been color because we had no color TV here then. It would appear they did a Hitchcock, or even an Alexander Korda and rushed out of England for the relative safety of USA during the war. The Wilcoxes did, however, return to UK in 1942 after Forever & a Day, a very odd all-starrer for the war effort. This film, released in 1943, was slated for destruction(another RKO release!) but this did not happen. I have this film on an early DVD but the quality is just so-so. Neagle made They Flew Alone(1942) when she returned to UK but it was released before the earlier made Forever & a Day. Just released on DVD in UK she plays another heroine, this time Amy Johnson, the flyer & Robert Newton is her husband. Wilcox married Neagle in Aug 1943. Many of their films have not made it to DVD yet, some might be missing.

The RKO destruction of material is a curious one but thru various recent columns one has read about this, particularly about "Ambersons" then there is the story of what might have happened to the FBO material after the TV deal did not come off with Joe Franklin. I read once that RKO had the best survival rate of shorts to other studios but I find this hard to believe & those I have(many of them) are not too great & really only a curiosity. But those deals are rather strange to say the least. Keep in mind the destruction deals King Features had with Columbia re Blondie & some cartoons. Blondie is around but a couple of the cartoons seem to have been destroyed.

Thanks for the info about where A Arnold Gillespie's collection went after his death. Pleased to hear it.