When it comes to American Movie Classics' ongoing efforts at film preservation, Nick Clooney is more then just a host -- he's an enthusiastic booster.
"It took me a long time to come around to it. I was like everybody else -- I thought of it as sort of tissue-paper throw-away, just another piece of pop culture, certainly when I was a kid," he said. "And I was probably much too snobbish to admit that these things that I was enjoying so much also had some importance. I think, with the maturing process, you finally can admit to yourself -- sure, it's pop culture, but it's a lot more than that. It is a very important mosaic tile in this whole picture of the 20th century. And we've got the first century with a video."And I don't give a darn if it's really a movie that has almost no intrinsic value as art. I mean, if it's "Charlie Chan in Reno," it still has value for what it tells us about the moment that it was made."
Clooney points out that even a movie like that tells us about the relationships between men and women, between majorities and minorities, what made people laugh, what people ate and drank. "And what did Reno look like in 1934?" he said with a laugh. "You find out all of these things from this one film. You can find out things that there would be no other way in the world to find out about a similar period of time in 1834 or in 1734. We're so lucky.
"And, as usual, when we get lucky we fail to appreciate what we have. That's what we're going after."
The seventh annual AMC Film Preservation Festival is designed to educate viewers about the need to save America's film heritage from decay and destruction. The effort has raised more than $2 million since 1993, and the cable channel has contributed to restoration efforts.
This year's festival is a salute to the films of director John Ford, and the centerpiece is the newly restored Ford film "How Green Was My Valley," the 1941 classic that won five Academy Awards. It airs Friday at 6 and 10 p.m. Other Ford classics scheduled during the Friday-Sunday festival include "My Darling Clementine," "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Searchers," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "Donovan's Reef" and "Cheyenne Autumn."
"We're trying to collect the money, that's very important, but also we want to let people know that this is a problem," Clooney said of the film preservation effort. "That we've lost darn near half the films before 1950. And probably 90 percent of our silent films."
And the irony of the fact that television is driving the effort to preserve film isn't lost on the AMC host.
"Isn't that funny? The mortal enemy of the big screen is what's driving this," he said.
Clooney sees film preservation as part of preserving the history of our nation and the American people. He pointed out that many of the films on AMC come from a time when movies dominated our culture -- in the 1940s, some 80 million people (out of a population of 130 million) went to the movies every week; today, it's more like 24 or 25 million.
"This is now not central to the lives of Americans," he said. "It is, instead, central to a small segment of America -- young America. Therefore, it does not any longer reflect the broad spectrum of American life. Instead, it reflects fantasies.
"When I was a kid and we would go to the movies, we would see our hopes and our aspirations and our dreams. And then, somewhere around the 1960s or so, we began filming our anger and our hate and the things that divide us. That didn't make them less true, but that made them different from what we had encountered. It was a whole different experience.
"And the ones that we are showing on the air now will let a later generation understand the optimism we had -- against the odds! In the face of a war we could lose, in the face of an economic maelstrom that could have destroyed our way of life. And the reason it didn't was we were so bloody optimistic! We thought everything was going to turn out fine. We knew how bad it was, but we were convinced it was going to be better. And the reason was, we were Americans, and that was something special and something different than history had ever seen before. And that was what the movies were reflecting, too.
"Now the movies aren't saying that anymore -- or not very often."
Not only is that something he misses, but it's something he thinks future generations should have around to remind them of what America was.
"I do not envy my son or my grandson because they don't get to see the heroes that I saw, that I sort of tucked away in the back of mind so that they could sustain me in some pretty tough times," Clooney said. "And also giving me goals to shoot for. You were supposed to tell the truth; you weren't supposed to kick people when they were down; you were supposed to take care of people weaker of you; you were supposed to face down those who were stronger and evil. That was natural. I learned it at home, and I learned it at church, just as the kids do now in many ways. But I also learned it in the movies. It all reinforced that sort of optimism.
"Yeah, it was sappy. Yeah, it was sentimental. Over-sentimental and sentimentalized, even. But, for the most part, they hadn't lost the map to our hearts yet. I fear that in some cases, in order to be edgy, the young filmmakers now have lost the map to our heart. And that disturbs me at many levels. That's one of the reasons I go around preaching the gospel about these films and what they were and what they meant."