| Newsday: February 24, 1998
MOVIE FAN KEEPS THE TAPE ROLLING
Pining for the past was Joe Lauro's passion as a youngster and
he never outgrew it, but now it's his business to supply snippets
of days gone by. If you want Elvis Presley on "Ed Sullivan"
or Jack Kerouac on "Steve Allen", Joe Lauro's got them
in East Hampton.
"I was a classic chubby kid" says Lauro". I was
attracted to old films. God knows why we are the way we are, but
the stuff really appealed to me. I spent a lot of time trying to
find out how I could watch old film."
Lauro, now 41 and trim, still does, but these days it's as co-owner
of Historic Film Archives, one of the country's larger repositories
of film footage dating back a century. from the more than 40,000
hours of silent films, movies, television shows, newsreels, commercials,
travelogues and home movies it owns or represents, Historic Films
sells clips to producers making more movies, shows and commercials.
"It's a wonderful time now for image because there's so many
people who need them," Lauro says. "We get these forgotten
films. We organize them. We give them new life."
In seven years, Lauro says, the company has sold pieces of it's
stock footage for use in more than 5,000 productions, including
most of the Arts & Entertainment Network's "Biography"
series and last week's two-part history of the Motown record label
on ABC.
"We have probably $150,000 worth of footage in that program,"
he says. "A lot of the Motown artists were on "The Ed
Sullivan Show" and that's the best stuff. They come to us.
They can't get it anywhere else.
As Historic Films buys footage or gets permission to act as its
agent, it makes a digital master copy and another on video tape.
The action is logged, second by second, in the company's database,
which can then search for every version of what the producer requests.
For example, the summary of 17 seconds of a 58-minute reel of
New York City in the 1950's reads this way: "Two college-age
girls getting out of convertible. Parents/daughter reunion. Father
taking luggage from car. Going into house."
With that level of detail, the 11 employees of Historic Films
are shipping shots within a day or two, of Wendell Wilkie during
his 1940 presidential campaign or "man sneezing." For
A&E last week, it was gathering shots of Memphis in 1907, the
Ethel Barrymore Theater in 1936, Paris on the brink of war in 1940
and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
"If you're doing a story on Al Capone, there's only 38 seconds
of Capone footage that's really him," Lauro says figuratively,
so you have to fill your one-hour program with other material. You're
creating a patchwork. That's what documentaries are, creating a
new film out of bits and pieces of other things."
A gunshot can last a quarter of a second, while JAnis Joplin at
the Dallas Pop Festival is several minutes. the footage is priced
according to how it's used and whether it's for local use or worldwide
release. Prices range from $500 a minute to $10,000 a minute.
Nearly half of the company's footage goes into documentaries.
A third ends up in commercials, including Time-Life's promos of
its greatest-hits collections. The rest appears in feature films,
such as the opening shot of Woody Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway,"
and corporate productions.
Lauro expects sales this year of about $3 million. Out of that
comes a lot of royalties, a lot of overhead," he says. "We
make a decent living at this, but my philosophy is to pour it all
back into the company, acquire more material, acquire more rights,
hire more people."
Lauro's raw material never gets used up. "It's not like it
leaves and you have to get another one," he says. "We're
only selling a copy of it."
With one detour, Lauro's life has been built on film. He taught
after college, but then got his master's degree in cinema studies
and a job distributing films to theaters that screened classics.
In 1983, he was hired by Archive Films, which began automating the
tedious process of searching for the right footage.
In 1991, Lauro and Richard Plagge started their own research archive,
Associated Researchers and Image Quest, in Manhattan, and found
that licensing footage was more lucrative than researching where
to find it. They moved the company in 1993 to East Hampton, where
Plagge had a home and Lauro and his wife, Karen Edwards, who grew
up on Shelter Island, had visited often.
After Plagge dies in 1994, Lauro sold half the company to California
documentary producer Andrew Solt, who owns rights to all 23 years
of the "Ed Sullivan Show." They changes the unwieldy ARIQ
to Historic Films Archives in 1997.
Historic Films now represents seven years of "The Steve Allen
Show", the Associated Press television footage since 1994,
the Hollywood home movie and screen-test collection of song-writer
Harold Arlen. Universal Newsreels from 1929 to 1967 and scores of
other collections, from comedy shorts to news events to commercials
for Twinkies. Royalties are generally split 50-50.
"Somebody wants a classic Christmas morning in an Italian
house, what could be better than Dad's home movies?. "You never
know what somebody's going to want."
Unlike the old days, hundreds of archives now offer stock footage
and such big players as Kodak and Getty have begun acquiring competitors,
an indication of how big image have become.
"Show business is a good business," Lauro says. "I
love being able to make a living doing this, but my main motivation
is having fun." |
