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A Pennsylvania man spent years trying to offload his great-grandfather’s trunk of old silent films with no luck — until the Library of Congress discovered it held the last known copy of the world’s first sci-fi movie.
For years, Bill McFarland lugged two dusty trunks full of his great-grandfather’s old films to antique stores and museums and he even listed them to eBay, but nobody wanted them until a film digitizing company recognized its value and pointed him toward the Library of Congress, according to local outlet the Times Observer.
Archivists at the library were happy to accept the donated contents of the trunks, and made a stunning discovery buried inside the forgotten haul — a copy of a 56-second film from 1897 titled, “Gugusse et l’Automate”–“The Clown and the Automaton” — the last known original copy of what is believed to be the first science-fiction film ever made.
The old trunks of films belonged to McFarland’s great-grandfather, William DeLyle Frisbee, known as “Professor Frisbee,” a traveling showman who spent roughly 30 years touring rural schoolhouses and churches across northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio starting in the late 1800s, according to the report.
His road show kit included hand-painted glass magic lantern slides, an Edison phonograph, and eventually silent movies on nitrate film, a format McFarland allegedly learned is so hazardous it can explode and burn even underwater.
But after the trunks sat in storage for decades, McFarland set out to find them a proper home, he told the outlet.
McFarland’s friend Dan Sorensen helped shopped the collection to antique stores, museums and online film forums, but nobody wanted them until the Library of Congress recognized for the first time how unique the collection was, reports said.
The William DeLyle Frisbee Collection, which contains 42 films, now rests in a climate-controlled vault at the Packard Campus in Virginia — a Cold War-era bunker once built for the Federal Reserve Bank and later refurbished into a state-of-the-art film preservation facility before being donated back to the government.
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