The board at the National Film Preservation Foundation has announced that the 1000th film that the organization will preserve for future generations will be Huckleberry Finn, a classic 1920 adaptation of Mark Twain's great American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the last surviving films from director William Desmond Taylor.
Taylor died at age 50 in 1922, after directing dozens of films over his 10 year film career, such as Anne of Green Gables, Captain Kidd Jr., and The Witching Hour. His last film was The Top of New York, after which he was MURDERED.
Ah, I love the smell of Hollywood Babylon scandal in the morning... it smells like... Fatty Arbuckle's coke bottle.
The film will be preserved by the George Eastman House from what is believed to be the only surviving complete print of the film, a Danish 35mm color-tinted silver-nitrate print. The print was repatriated to America from Denmark a few decades ago.
The NFPF is a non-profit organization that was set up in 1997 by the U.S. Congress (another time, another world) to save America's film heritage, that essentially started with George Eastman's Kodak motion picture film and Thomas Edison's motion picture camera. Actor and former Senator Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who serves on the NFPF board of directors, said "with only a few hundred thousand federal dollars a year, the NFPF has rescued films from every part of the country and illuminated whole slices of American history."
