I’m not so young anymore. Not yet old but definitely not young anymore. And this quest has taken up much of my life.
Well, that makes it sound like the central part of my life, which it isn’t. I’ve had a conventional education and jobs (searching for obscure cult films doesn’t put a lot of food on the table or coal in the fireplace, so needs must), a family, a broken heart, a broken marriage and all the rest.
But it’s always stayed with me, this quest for this mythical film.
It has become a form of modern-day mythology for me. I suppose when you live in a more secular society you might still want to have your own versions of myths and fairy tales, the unknown, the other. This is my version of that.
The internet has fed the flames of that myth, with its never- ending spaces for discussion, sharing, commenting and voracious need for content. Stories with no end, like the “Will it, won’t it be found?” of The Corn Mother are ideally suited to its open-ended nature.
I suppose you’re thinking “But surely somebody would have spoken up by now? If the film existed and if maybe a few preview copies were made then surely something would have resurfaced?”
You’d think so wouldn’t you?
The modern world leaves few spaces in which culture can be truly lost but this seems to be one time it is. From what the rumour mill says, all copies of the film, both dailies and the edited finished reels, were destroyed back in the eighties. Some say it was an oversight and that they were just thrown away during a storage clearout, others suggest they may have been deliberately destroyed and there is much debate about if that’s the case, then who arranged it?
All I know at the moment is that it seems as lost as The Werewolf, which was a 1913 silent short said to be the first werewolf movie, all prints of which are thought to have been destroyed in 1924 during a fire at Universal Studios. I’d probably have more chance finding that.
