{"id":8480,"date":"2017-02-08T12:25:05","date_gmt":"2017-02-08T18:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ragtagcinema.org\/blog\/?p=8480"},"modified":"2017-02-08T12:25:05","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T18:25:05","slug":"farewell-to-film-preservation-hero-david-shepard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/farewell-to-film-preservation-hero-david-shepard\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell to Film Preservation Hero David Shepard"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cIf you\u2019ve seen a superior print of a film by Chaplin or Keaton, Griffith or Murnau, chances are David had a hand in restoring it.\u201d --<\/strong>Leonard Maltin
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Farewell to Film Preservation Hero David Shepard (by Gary Meyer )<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of David Shepard on January 31. He was with family and friends and especially important having his beloved dog at his side.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He was one of the heroes of film preservation whose work has probably touched everyone who loves cinema.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of us started collecting or showing Blackhawk Films<\/a> as teenagers. David worked there, encouraging the owners to preserve their silent classics, in the 1960s and eventually bought the company in 1987. In between he became a preservationist at the American Film Institute (in1968) and started his own company, Film Preservation Associates.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Here's a brief Wikipedia bio and partial list of the films he restored<\/a>, for many years in association with Kino and more recently with Serge Bromberg and Flicker Alley.<\/div>\n
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I am not sure when we became friends but probably in the mid 1970s. I remember reading in Classic Collector about his legal battles with Raymond Rohauer (some stories here and here <\/a>but through my various ventures David was always there to offer advice, lend rare prints and guide the way to films I was seeking. And what a joy to discuss films with him, mostly classics but he knew the new ones too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Film festivals, especially silent film festivals like San Francisco and Denver and the Niles Essanay Film Museum are a few of the recipients of his great generosity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here are two excellent interviews from 2000 in Digitally Obsessed<\/a> and 2006 on Silents Are Golden. And for insight into his process read David's own \"Polishing the Stoneface<\/a>\"article discussing his Buster Keaton restorations. (Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for posting this hard-to-find article).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The tributes are coming in. A sampling on Nitrateville. <\/a><\/div>\n
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We will miss you David.<\/p>\n

Gary Meyer, Landmark Theatres founder and former programmer for Telluride Film Fest<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf you\u2019ve seen a superior print of a film by Chaplin or Keaton, Griffith or Murnau, chances are David had a hand in restoring it.\u201d --Leonard Maltin   Farewell to Film Preservation Hero David Shepard (by Gary Meyer ) It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of David Shepard on January […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}