The accidental archivist

When filmmaker Eugene Jarecki needed historicalfootage for his politically charged documentary Why We Fight, he made a phone call to Chicago. The party he called was film archivist J. Fred MacDonald, who, as CEO of MacDonald & Associates, oversees what may be the world’s largest private film collection. “We contribute to a lot of documentaries and TV journalism, but we do Hollywood features, too,” MacDonald says. “I just sent out some Cold War stuff for a movie that Robert De Niro’s making about the CIA, and we provided some period TV commercials for The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.”

Business is good, but lately MacDonald, 64, has been thinking of selling off his collection and retiring. The hitch is that he’s been unable to find a buyer who’s both willing to meet his price of $5 million and able to accommodate the 50 million feet of film he keeps in a climate-controlled, 9,000-square-foot office building in the North Side neighborhood of Hollywood Park. “If I had my druthers, it’d go to a research institution,” says MacDonald, surrounded by shelf after shelf holding stack upon stack of metal and plastic film canisters. “There’s the potential here for a million dissertations. That’s why it blows my mind that no university is interested.”

A retired academic with six books to his credit, MacDonald became an archivist almost by accident. “I was a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University, and in 1972 I began teaching about American popular culture, which put me on the lookout for old films I could use in class. When the ABC network started calling me up and asking for footage of President Roosevelt or whatever, I gave it to them. Then one day in 1986, I got a call from a guy who said, ‘Have you ever thought about charging money? Because I do this for a living, and I can’t compete with free.’ That’s how I found out I was giving away something people would pay for. Pretty soon I had no time left for teaching and no room left in the basement for films.”

MacDonald’s archive contains just about every kind of film imaginable: features, documentaries, cartoons, educational shorts dating back to the silent era, television series from all over the world, commercials and primordial music videos made for an extinct video jukebox from the ’60s called the Scopitone.

Much of MacDonald’s collection narrowly escaped becoming landfill. “The Hearst newspaper empire used to market a daily newsreel called Telenews that was sold directly to local TV stations in competition with the network news,” MacDonald says. “This man in St. Louis did a summer internship at a TV station in 1960, and when the station threw out three years’ worth of Telenews reels, he rescued them. He stored them in his basement for 30 years until I bought them. Basically it’s a world history from 1956 through ’59, and there’s only one other complete set in existence.”

MacDonald’s rates vary according to how his footage is used. “For television it’s $30 per second for broadcasts limited to a single continent, $40 for worldwide use and $50 if a DVD release is involved,” he says. “Theatrical releases pay more, but academic researchers get deep discounts.” MacDonald apologetically adds that he no longer deals with the public. “I’d get these impossible requests: ‘I remember this commercial from when I was a kid, can you get me a copy?’ ‘My parents were on this quiz show in 1957, can you help me find it?’ We’re just not set up to deal with that.”

Asked to name the strangest thing in his archive, MacDonald ponders, then nominates an hour-long home movie shot by an American couple on a road trip through Nazi Germany in the summer of 1938. “It’s bizarre,” he says. “The people look like normal people. They pass a Coca-Cola truck on the way to Berlin. Nazis drank Coke! I never knew that. I thought they drank fire.”

Prospective buyers can e-mail MacDonald at macfilms@worldnet.com. Serious inquiries only, please.