Japanese television show producers recently called the Wolfsonian Moving Image Archive, desperate for footage of French poodles trained to bark simple words (the footage exists, and it is every bit as unsettling as you think).
Two weeks ago, Oprah's people needed documentary evidence of the young Chris Evert shopping for clothes in a Miami boutique.
Demand is somewhat lower for the collection of intrasquad scrimmages of the 1955 Miami High varsity football team, but if somebody wants it, it's there.
In archivist heaven, this stuff and quite a bit more -- 10 million feet of film -- would be digitized for easy indexing and viewing. Film copies would be made and socked away in separate secure locations. The original stock would be frozen to prevent degradation and stored in a chemically inert container, where it will last not forever but for 5,000 years, by which time storage technology will presumably have improved.
But archivists Barron Sherer and Don Chauncey work, at present, not in archivist heaven but in a claustrophobic room in the basement of the Miami-Dade Main Library, where most of the archive is shelved. The rest is upstairs in the library attic in a couple thousand boxes, which reminds Sherer of Raiders of the Last Ark and Chauncey of ``the last scene of Citizen Kane, except without the furnace.''
The basement smells vinegary, a little foretaste of archivist hell that means some of the stock is in an advanced stage of decay.
`NOT COMMUNISTS!'
On this recent morning Chauncey was doing grant work and Sherer was looking for footage of the early days of the Cuban revolution for a documentarian in Los Angeles. She wanted, in order of preference, scenes of rebels in the mountains, any combat footage at all, and a clip of Fidel Castro announcing to the world that ``We are not Communists!''
The Archive charges $150 for this service, more for distribution rights, but sometimes accepts payment in new footage instead of money. Business has been slow, of late, Sherer said, what with the Hollywood writers' strike, but he expects an uptick as the fall television season approaches and documentarians and writers of TV dramas come looking for source material.
He'd already dug up a Castro speech where a white dove lands on his shoulder -- ''Everybody who does a documentary wants that'' -- and some scenes of Fulgencio Batista at home. Now he pulled up a list of subjectappropriate reels on his computer.
There were some reels of Ralph Renick, the old WTVJ anchor, walking into Havana's Sports Palace, something on Batista's torture tools, and something titled simply ''Atrocity Film.'' Sherer noted locations for those reels but skipped past something called ''Burger King compilation,'' which seemed out of place but probably had a couple shots of the dictator. ''They were probably doing a reel on highlights of the 20th century,'' Sherer said.
`MONEY SHOT!'
He used another machine to scan the results. ''This is the money shot!'' he said, when a line of rebels in fatigues walked across the screen. ``See how short their beards are? Man, you do enough of this, you don't even need to look at the date.''
In the next reel Castro was in Havana and the Batista regime, or those unfortunate enough to get caught, were being tried for crimes against the people. The trials aren't like ''the ones we're used to,'' Renick explained to his Miami audience, attributing this to the ``Latin temperament.''
Later on the same reel he was interviewing the dictator himself. Did he intend to cut his beard?
''Did you hear the people?'' Castro says. ``Do you know what they want? That we don't cut our beards.''
After this, Sherer went out for a smoke break. He still had lots of Batista to get through, but figured he'd have five hours of material copied and ready to send by the end of the day.
If you have a story idea, e-mail nspangler@MiamiHerald.com
Video | See the talking poodle