A treasure trove of lost American silent films were recently discovered at the EYE Filmmusem in Amsterdam. The collection includes a 1927 short that features Mickey Rooney’s first starring role, an Oliver Hardy comedy from 1920 and a Koko The Clown animated short from Fleischer Studios.
The EYE, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, spent two months researching and identifying the films, which were distributed in the Netherlands in the 1910’s and 1920’s on nitrate prints. Some of these are the only remaining copies or the best-known samples of the films, notes The Hollywood Reporter. The National Film Preservation Foundation and EYE will be working together to make the films more available to the public.
Twenty-six of the films will be restored, including Mickey’s Circus, which stars a six-year-old Rooney. Hardy stars in The Backyard from 1920. Koko jumps “Out of the Inkwell” in Koko’s Queen (1928) from Fleischer. There’s a ZaSu Pitts drama called For The Defense from 1922. Another example of animation is 1925’s Fifty Million Years Ago, which explains the theory of evolution.
“There’s a good reason these films haven’t been preserved,” Annette Melville, the NFPF director, told the LA Times. “Many of them haven’t been identified because the way films sit on their reels, sometimes the credits are most exposed to the atmosphere.”
That means that researchers have to take the time to find out what the film is, without any help from credits, which were always placed at the front of films during this era. If the credits survived, they were usually in Dutch, of course.
You can check out the full list of films to be restored at FilmPreservation.org.