dwsiddall said:
Why do you think prints are rare? This was the biggest film of all time and showed in thousands of theaters around the world. There must have been 5,000 or more prints of this film struck. Is there a reason to believe that most of these prints were destroyed? (Maybe there is…I sincerely don’t know.)
Films are “on loan” to theatres, and theatres must return them to their owners (the studios) at the end of the loan period, like a checked-out book at the library. Private ownership of film reels only even happens when someone says “Oopsie! We lost the whole film! Just bill us the replacement cost!” which sometimes happens for real, but is often a way to get film reels into the gray market. The studio owns them, and for these particular films, I believe Mr. Verta has verified that the “destroy order” for these films both exists and is still in effect today. So in short, if everyone was a good rule-obeying theatre operator, every single print would have been destroyed long ago. The prints still in existence are almost entirely due to other sorts of theatre operators.
So it’s not really a matter of how many copies of the films were struck, so much as how many people had the foresight to pull a fast one on the studios and get a private copy. Of that, how many got the type of print that didn’t fade into useless reels of pink vinegar after ten years (the vast majority of reels out there were fast-fading)? So, yeah, rare–and due to chemistry, getting rarer every day.