THE AMERICAN GENRE FILM ARCHIVE is “committed to preserving the legacy of genre films through our archival work, sharing these movies through our home video label, and promoting the power of genre through our theatrical distribution arm.” Over the course of their 15-year history, the organization has rescued lost films, restored forgotten classics, and become the foremost genre archive in the world. Be it distributing crisp digital prints of everything from ATOR, THE FIGHTING EAGLE to YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY or releasing deluxe Blu-rays of the works of Ruth Gordon and Ed Wood, among many other, AGFA is doing the work necessary to preserve genre films for the next generation and beyond. We spoke with AGFA’s Executive Director, JACKSON COOPER, about coming into the organization during their 15th anniversary, what they’ve done, and where they’re headed in the future…
STARBURST: You came into AGFA in the midst of its 15th anniversary – that’s a great time to get on board!
Jackson Cooper: Yeah, two months in, I think. It’s so thrilling. It’s an honor, of course, too, to be in this role and working with the board and the incredible staff. It’s just such a dream. To come into the 15th anniversary was also insane because I grew up with AGFA and so, to come in and be like, “Oh my gosh, it’s an anniversary year!”, it’s just so joyous to come in. It’s really exciting.
It has been amazing, as a fan of cult and genre cinema, to see the organization grow over the last decade and a half. Given how much it’s grown, how do you continue to do this on a manageable scale?
It’s a lot of trial, and I won’t say error, but opportunity. I think it’s a lot of stretching the gum to see how much we can expand and where our limits are, I should say, because we’re a very small staff. We are six people. It’s six now with me. Over the years, it was really driven by our love of these films first, and then it sort of evolved. It was the love and it was the the urgency of preserving films and saving these films because we love them, because the community loves them, and then over the years, it’s evolved really into even bigger mission work – the urgency of not just saving film, but saving the legacies of these filmmakers. People like Doris Wishman, people like the Something Weird catalogue, recognising that the world is changing where there’s so much available all the time that suddenly we are now the curators of the next generation and what they’re enjoying. It’s always been that, and I think what’s made it manageable, to be honest, has been the influx of such incredible companies who are our partners, like Severin and Vinegar Syndrome. Just people who are also doing the work has made it very manageable because we’re all doing our own thing, and we’re all talking to each other, so instead of us being like, “Oh, we’re the only genre film distributor,” we’re looking around and going like, “Severin’s putting this out. Cool. So we can do our thing and Vinegar Syndrome’s doing their thing.” It’s great. I think it’s been this evolution of this community, which has been really exciting.
The interesting aspect of it is it’s not just holding on to these films so that they’re not lost, but putting them out there and as you said, reintroducing films. How does one organisation that’s only six people balance DCPS and Blu-rays, along with doing work for other companies, as well?
How do we manage it all? Well, we all have our own specialised thing that we all do. The question I get a lot is, “How do you curate your titles?” and I go like, “It really starts and ends with the team.” It really does, because we all not just have a connection to AGFA, but all of us on the team are programmers by trade, to be honest, or writers or film handlers, we have that not just personal connection with our love of it, but also that mindset of, “What do people want to see?” Also, just our finger on the pulse with things. But yeah, how do we balance all that? We have a lot of conversations as a team, which is great. A lot of communications. We balance it – it’s our business. I hate that it sounds so straightforward, but it’s amazing that this is our job every day, that we get to save these films and talk about it.
Our Blu-rays really stem from the team’s decision from our catalogue of avails: the libraries we have, like Something Weird, and the archival prints that aren’t owned by studios. What do we as a staff not think will be good, but also our work is unique from Severin and Vinegar Syndrome and those other labels because we’re a nonprofit. All of our work is grounded in mission work. It’s grounded in a mission to really elevate the stories of, specifically, marginalised filmmakers who used genre as a way of expressing their identity, and of celebrating outsider art. When we put that lens on curating the home video line, that’s sort of where we start, the home video line and our restorations. That changes the conversation from being, “What films need to be saved?” to being “What films need to be saved and what stories are they telling?” Or, “What is the story of this filmmaker and why is it important?” I always tell people we’re carving out a new film history because we’re protecting the legacies of these filmmakers by restoring them and then putting them out on Blu-ray.
For DCP creation and such, that’s really determined by our partner labels like Severin and Vinegar Syndrome. They distribute those on Blu-ray and then we distribute the theatrical rights to those. Any time they put something out, we get the theatrical rights and then promote those to our repertory cinema partners, our micro cinemas, so it’s almost like there’s two things happening all at the same time. This theatrical world, which is really led by our head of theatrical, Brett Burke, who’s phenomenal and. And then our restoration and home video line, which is very team-led. We have a great head of film restoration. We have a great creative director who helps manage those. So there’s always something happening, which is really exciting!
To that end, this year’s releases saw something like Amanda and the Alien. It’s a step outside what most folks might think of as releases, but upon watching it, it fits right in. You also restored Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. You’re putting together the uncut version of Love Goddesses of Blood Island, which has a very weird and involved release history. What was the journey of that last film like?
So, Love Goddesses, also known as Six She’s and a He, has had a very long, weathered history and, specifically, with this restoration, which we are extremely proud of, not just because it is, as you mentioned, a lost film. It was released on a DVD-R of one of the Something Weird prints a long time ago, but there was footage missing. There were minutes of the film missing, and allegedly, the only print that had that was in the Library of Congress and so, when we were doing the restoration, we reached out to the Library of Congress to grab the film prints and we found out that, in fact, it didn’t have the footage. It was still missing even from the Library of Congress print! Every print usually goes to the Library of Congress, of course, as a safe measure, copyright, things like that. The Library of Congress has quite a bit of film and prints of most movies that are made.
It was so funny – and I’ve been telling people that the film gods were on our side because – literally within a week of that conversation with the Library of Congress, the Harvard Film Archive had reached out to us about donating prints of genre films to us and on that list was Six She’s and a He. We’re going through the list and one of my team members was like, “Wait a minute. They have Love Goddesses of Blood Island, but under the original title Six She’s and a He!” So we write the Harvard Film Archive back and we go, “Oh my gosh, can you send us that print first? We want to look,” and that had the missing footage on it! We were able to – literally in the 11th hour of restoring it – put in the lost footage, thanks to this miracle that happened of the Harvard Film Archive. We also want to thank the Library of Congress because we used that print as well, but it’s crazy. That’s one of the reasons I love this job – because it’s a lot, it’s stressful, of course – but we have to have those conversations. When we got the Library of Congress’s print, we’re going to restore it, but it didn’t have the missing footage. Oh, darn. Okay. But then all of a sudden, a miracle like that happens!
It’s a kooky film. It’s a great underseen Blood Feast rip-off that’s going to be in a collection of Blood Feast Florida rip-offs! Florida-‘esque’ rip offs – they’re not all set in Florida, because we’re doing Undertaker and His Pals, which is California, but it’s like, “brightly-lit Blood Feast rip-offs,” we’re calling it. Yeah, Love Goddesses of Blood Island. We’re very proud of that restoration.
Given the sheer amount of material that must be in your archive, what are the challenges in making sure that everything remains intact. You do regular inspections and those sorts of things get posted to Instagram, but what are the unique challenges, especially when you’re talking about genre film, which traditionally haven’t been treated as well as it might’ve been?
No, you can say it – “Some of those prints are beat to shit.” I mean, it was called grindhouse for a reason, right? You know, it would just run until it run in the projector and until it was grinded up. How do we assess or how do we determine? We have very thorough notes of what’s in our archive from quite a bit ago. Our head of film restoration has handled a lot of the film and we had great film handlers before him and a restoration artist before him was also a film handler, so there’s a lot of physical inspection that went into place as the archive was being built up, which is great. Also, I think a challenge is that film, unless it’s preserved very well, and our archive is spread throughout several locations in Texas, not necessarily preserved in a way that is on the caliber of the Academy or Paramount, but it’s still doing well, but film fades fast. For us, it’s not just looking at the inspection reports to saying what is good, but also being like, “That was that inspection was done a few years ago so, what is it now? What do we have to get something on a scanner sooner rather than later?” We’re going through that process right now with just reassessing the collection. I think between all of us, there’s a shared knowledge of what films are in good tact and it’s not just the films we want to restore, but also the films that are just in our archive that we want to put out to theatrical distributors. It’s a constant race against the clock with what we do.
Do conditions sometimes move things up in that production/release timeline in order to get them, as you said, on the scanner as soon as you can?
I will say there’s one project – I can’t say what it is, but there’s one project that we will be releasing that we may push up for that specific reason is because we’d been talking about it and then we assessed the materials and said, “Oh my gosh, we have to put that on the scanner sooner rather than later,” So, but, I mean, it’s twofold: either we can wait or we can put it on the scanner and that way, we have a file to work from for the restoration. But then, in terms of keeping that 35mm, we then have to make a decision where, obviously, will keep it in our archive, but we have to make sure that it’s saved and properly stored and treated well, so that if anybody wants that print to use, we can send it out. Otherwise, with the restoration, once it’s on the scanner and digitised, we work from there and we can actually strike a new print after the restoration is done. We can replace the vinegar syndromed print of this film with the new restoration. It’s constantly just needing to check the materials, talk with the people who donated or deposited the film prints themselves. With Something Weird, Lisa [Petrucci], who we work with, she knows those prints, and she knows the state of those prints pretty well, so we always go to her when we want to do something – “Do you remember how this print was? Let’s look at our inspection notes.” That’s been a lot of assessing the collection, but then also putting them on a scanner to digitise them so that, come time for us to restore something in our archive, it’s not beat up, but we already have a digital file to work from
The nature of preservation of any sort of thing, whether it’s books, or music, or film – especially in music, is that you run into what might be referred to as dead formats. Do you have to have machines that you keep running to be able to get them or is everything fairly much within the standard range?
S-VHS, we do have the capability to digitise that. Our gate on our scanner can do 16mm and 35mm so 8mm is something that we don’t really dabble with a lot, although we’re working on the restorations of the complete works of George Kuchar and so there’s quite a bit of 8mm that the Kuchar brothers used. We’re working with other partners who do have the capabilities to scan 8mm on that so I would say 8mm is probably just the one that we we have some trouble with, but there are other partners and archives that have that capability. We’re all one big community and ecosystem, so we’re always talking to each other. But yeah, S-VHS, VHS – we’ve digitised quite a bit of those, especially the Something Weird S-VHS, most recently for Hey, Folks, It’s Intermission Time. We digitised those directly from the masters themselves, which we have to take masters up. I would say 8mm is probably the thing that is our blind spot, but it’s also very unique among archives. A lot of a lot of state archives and government-funded archives, they have 8mm capabilities, but since that’s so rare for a filmmaker to have worked on, that’s not something that our scanner or gate has a capability on.
AGFA is finishing up their 15th anniversary. We’re towards the end of the year. What are the plans for AGFA going into 2025?
Well, one of the big things that we’ve learned about this year is that we’ve known that we’ve had such a great community of film fans, genre lovers, home video collectors, going into next year, one of the big things that we’re going to champion is we’re actually going back into the archive and going back into the collection. We’re going to be literally and figuratively going through the archive and the collection for a lot of stories in the collection, these journeys of filmmakers that we have yet to do. We want to connect the community with the collection; that’s what the next few years is going to be – really highlighting stories of the filmmakers, of the films themselves. Celebrating things like Something Weird. Celebrating the living filmmakers who are in our collection and archive, and really just helping the community understand that physical film is not going away. It will never go away. These filmmakers deserve to be championed. Protecting their legacies and then promoting the power of genre art movies for repertory cinemas and for local theatres who are screening these works.
I think movie theaters are having a moment right now. It’s both a moment of joy and celebration and also, a moment of crisis, but what’s been fascinating is that we’ve found that genre – in particular, horror – has actually been the thing that brings people back into a movie theater, as well as that repertory curiosity for older films, is a key for movie theatres bringing in new audiences; for bringing in younger audiences. It’s no longer the tentpole blockbusters. It’s actually the old thing. It’s actually the the classics. We have the theatrical rights to Donnie Darko, thanks to our friends at Arrow Video who put out that beautiful 4k restoration. And you know, Donnie Darko is always playing somewhere across the country, across the world, and as popular as that title is, it’s a real testament, I think, to the power of these films. That these films will never, ever fade or go away. We want to sort of lean into that.
We also just want to lean into the stories in our collection. Who’s in our collection? What are the BIPOC, queer, trans, feminist Asian, underrepresented filmmakers in our collection who are using or used genre as a way of expressing their identity? That’s sort of where we’re at right now and it’s really exciting. It’s a really exciting place to be!
More information about the AMERICAN GENRE FILM ARCHIVE and its work can be found at their website.
