One of the joys of my job is the constant discovery of things that aren't there, and how telling that can be. Sounds ludicrous, I know. Allow me to digress...

One of our collections contains the original production files for a small variety of film productions. We have anything from a couple to close to a dozen boxes for each title, and the contents of the boxes does generally produce a similar set of file titles - camera reports, cast/crew list, daily production reports, script drafts, production scripts, editors scripts, continuity files, etc. To any student or professional in the field of film, television, or advertising production, these titles will sound extremely familiar to the setting of a motion picture production.

As a student of languages and art history (2D still images primarily), most of these titles were quite foreign to me when I began listing the files of said collection, but after going through a relatively small percentage of the film production files a familiar set of titles was prominent in almost every box. Almost. One particular film falls directly in the 'genre' (if there is one) of contemporary blaxploitation insomuch as the all the elements of the film (plot, characters, dialogue, music) produce a purely stereotype representation of black people regardless of the target audience. The production files for this particular film totaled 3 bankers boxes - which within the context of the rest of the collection is on par with what would be expected of a B-rated film produced by said collection's company. In the boxes were files with the same titles as I expected to find by the time I was listing it - but they were much thinner than I expected. Further investigation revealed that in a number of those files, there were merely a few blank photocopies of forms whose titles matched those of the files (i.e blank daily production report forms were found in the daily production reports file).

I pose this next question will full understanding and awareness that I have no experience with motion picture production, merely the archiving of it: How can you expect to make a film that isn't a total piece of cultural trash without keeping some kind of record of what everyone is doing?

So where's the discovery, you're asking. Get to the freaking point already, you're saying, if you've managed to get this far at all. I'm close I promise.

According to accepted archival best practices and standards, it is generally a wise idea to purge those 'things' in our collections which have no unique information on them (space is and always will be a premium, alas). These blank forms have nothing on them that isn't recorded elsewhere, in fact some of these forms are an industry standard so they will be in every other box of film production records and documents that we have. Logically, what would be the point in keeping these blank files as no researcher in their right mind would go searching for 'the' prime examples of industry standard film production forms in the files of a production they've either never heard of or would rather they hadn't? If all the files in the boxes were just blank forms why keep them at all? Technically there is almost no record of the production of this particular film. Almost.

The two largest quantities of records in the boxes were continuity Polaroids and product placement files. Ah, the product placement files. In this case, these particular files were overstuffed with legal agreements with large product-driven companies. The continuity Polaroids capture images of mostly female cast members* in skimpy clothes or snapshots of portions of a scene where a particular product would be placed. Without a doubt, these are worth keeping, and their value is heightened by the sheer lack of anything other usable record of the production. And there is the discovery.

The blank files were kept, along with the rest of the Polaroids and product placement files. They will "forever" remain together - so that somewhere else down the line, the discovery is there for someone else to make.

*footnote - Whether the images of girls in skimpy outfits being the predominant still image record of the cast during production is a reflection of marketing/production values or is merely a reflection of the main cast's ownership over their own images, I do not know.