AULT: THE VETERAN FILM (RE)MAKER

Bill Ault is working on a special project for the UCLA Film Archives that has probably made him Hollywood’s most prolific film maker. Yet he toils in obscurity.

What Ault does, more accurately than make films, is reconstruct them. He meticulously, tediously copies still photos from movies dating back as far as 1894, frame by frame, back onto film. He has been at it, with only a few years break, since 1958.

Besides the hundreds of titles that are documentary in nature, the paper print collection includes thousands that are one-reel (10 to 15 minutes) stories that are a film buff’s delight.

“We have almost everything that was made by Biograph Studios, including D. W. Griffith’s first effort in 1908, a one-reel film called “The Adventures of Dolly,” Ault said. “We also have almost all of the Keystone Studio’s films made in 1914. That was Mack Sennett’s first studio and includes a lot of movies with Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle and the Keystone Kops. There are three or four of Chaplin’s earliest films, too. We have a lot of movies with Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. As a matter of fact, I just finished copying an early William S. Hart movie the other day.”

Ault’s work is the result of the lack of early copyright laws for movies. Beginning about 1894, soon after the motion picture was invented, until 1915, there was no law which allowed motion pictures to be copyrighted. However, still photos could be protected. So various motion picture companies made still pictures of each frame of film and deposited them with the Library of Congress for copyright protection.

Each still picture is the size of the frame of film, which is about the size of a 35-millimeter slide. The still photos were pieced together in strips, so the finished product looks like an ordinary roll of film, but one in which every frame is actually a fully developed photograph. The rolls of tiny photographs, called paper prints, provide us, according to library cataloguer Pat Loughney, “with the single best collection of early American film images anywhere in the world.”

Between 3 million and 4 million feet of paper prints make up more than 3,000 titles. Ault says, “Without these paper prints most of these films would no longer exist.

“Though I’ve always had an interest in the arts,” Ault explains, “restoring movies wasn’t my burning ambition.” In fact, movies were not supposed to figure into Ault’s career at all. Ault, 62, doesn’t mind that he’s not a household word. “It’s a unique job. And no one else in the world is doing it. My reward is in the historical contribution I can make.”

It all began soon after his arrival in Los Angeles in the late ‘50s when Ault met Kemp Niver. A film historian and preservationist, Niver had built a Rube Goldberg looking device that was the answer to the Library of Congress’ prayers. Since the early ‘40s the library had been trying to turn its priceless collection of paper prints back into film but with little success.

So in May, 1958, Ault started working for Niver and began his career by painstakingly transferring the single-frame photographic images back onto 16 millimeter film. About seven years later, the task was done.

Niver is retired but donated his machine to the UCLA film archives. Ault, now the only person actively running the machine, came too. (The quid pro quo for UCLA doing the work is that the archives gets 35 millimeter prints of all the material processed for the library.)

At the library’s behest, Ault is now copying many of the titles again, this time onto 35 millimeter film. The photographic difference between those copied onto 16 millimeter and those copied onto 35 millimeter, Ault says, “is like the difference between night and day. The ones on 35 millimeter are infinitely better.”

Ault sends the film to a lab in Hollywood where the film is then processed to build up contrast and intensify the images. And if the paper print is in excellent shape, as it is for a 1915 Mack Sennett film with Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle titled “Mabel’s Wilful Way,” the 35 millimeter results are luminous.

The 35 millimeter film negatives are sent to the library, where plans are being made to transfer some of them to laser discs, the same system that both Pioneer and Magnavox have made available for viewing movies in the home.

The library hopes to have its first disc ready by June. It will be 41 minutes in length and contain 37 titles, all rare documentary footage from 1901 on the Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo, N.Y., and the funeral of President McKinley. Still photographs of these events are available in many history books, but few of those have the impact of seeing this history on film.

“We are starting off with one disc to see how it goes,” says library spokesman Bob Carneal, “to see if film researchers like the idea. If they do and we can put together other material that we can gather on a certain theme or subject matter, then we’ll do others.”

As for making the material available to the general public, Carneal hedges. “I would certainly like to make it available, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to. You see, when you do a project of this type sometimes the government says since you’re using appropriated money maybe it shouldn’t be sold to the general public.”

Carneal says he’d like to see a lot of this material transferred to videotape, “but we don’t always have the time or money to pursue them.”

Ault thinks there is enough material for him to copy for as long as he wants to keep on doing it. But, eventually, he would like to train an apprentice.

When he does finally quit, Ault contemplates going to Spain, or Italy, to resume his painting vocation from earlier years. “I always felt I should’ve stuck with my painting, but I got married, and we needed money to live . . .” His voice trails off. “You could say it’s been 25 years of accomplishment or 25 years thrown away,” he muses. “I guess it’s been a little bit of both.”