Talk:1965 MGM vault fire

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Disputed Information

While this page seems very well put-together and is even cited on other websites online, I can find not a single supporting source for the claim that there was a fire of any kind at MGM in 1967, let alone one on this specific date which destroyed the films in question. The only link provided, in fact, gives the date of the supposed fire as 1965 instead of 1967 (1965 is also the year given specifically by Roger Mayer, though with no date, in an interview with David Pierce in FILM HISTORY). I can find no references of any kind, anywhere online to any fire on May 13, 1967 which is not clearly recycling the questionable information in this wikipedia article. If no one can come up with a reliable source for this incident, I will be forced to recommend this page be removed. I also note that the page itself was created by a now-banned sockpuppet account, for who knows what reason. Mr Subtlety (talk) 20:00, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

@Mr Subtlety: please RfD this page. It appears to be a hoax. I'll explain further when that happens. -BRAINULATOR9 (TALK) 15:45, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

EDIT: Not really a hoax per se, but still too inaccurate for its own good. -BRAINULATOR9 (TALK) 18:01, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

@Brainulator9: Do you have any sources on this supposed fire? If possible, I'd like to correct and better source the page rather than delete it. But as of now I can't find one bit of genuinely convincing evidence that this happened, or at least that it happened even remotely the way it's described here. Mr Subtlety (talk) 21:13, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

@Mr Subtlety:@Brainulator9: Apparently this University Press article [1] also mentions 1965 as the date. Unfortunately I don't have an acount there but if anybody here has... Yintan  22:51, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

@Mr Subtlety:@Yintan: Nice work. I see the page has since been renamed. I'm just going to brush the 1967 date off as a mix-up of the intended 1965 fire and the different 1937 fire. -BRAINULATOR9 (TALK) 00:11, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Given the above discussion (and the unsourced change from 1965 to 1967, here), I have removed the tag. Prior to those contested edits, the article was just a stub. I'd think we'd need to verify virtually everything changed, back to just before them.[2] It's fairly amazing that so much material was added without anyone challenging the most basic facts in the article. Topping it all off, very little of the article is sourced.

I know virtually nothing of the topic here, but had heard of the fire previously, so I'm guessing the fire is widely known and, as a result, should be very easy to source. We likely have some editors who have a leg up on this. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I'm going to post a note to the film wikiproject and see if we can't get some more eyes on this. - SummerPhD^v2.0

For what its worth I have found online mentions of the 1967 date that appear to be from before this article was even created albeit not from reliable sources. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 21:12, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

From what I myself have seen of a March 13, 1967 MGM fire, it was a separate fire on Lot 2 that destroyed some sets, and it's unrelated to the vault fire. I wonder if there's enough sources to scrape together an article on that one? I should've saved the one source I saw mentioning it in passing. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 03:06, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Between these two notes, I was working on my note "1965/1967" below. - SummerPhD^v2.0 04:23, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Is "Vault and Nitrate Fires - A History" an RS?

This source is written on the subdomain "fan" and is written by "lzcutter", which don't seem reliable to me but it depends upon if we can find the identity of the author. Furthermore this forum post doesn't suggest it is reliable either. It being the only source in nearly ten decades of this articles history makes me a bit reluctant to remove it though. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 17:45, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

The URL starts with "fan" so it's not. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 18:18, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I've removed it as I've pretty much resourced all the material mentioned in that article. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 20:45, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your work here. It was just a case of nobody having worked on the article and not a lack of sources existing. --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 20:53, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm starting to doubt myself about the not a lack of sources, because at least on what's Google-able, sources are very light. I have faith there's something in books not indexed by the internets, but that's gonna take a lot longer to find. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 03:08, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

1965/1967

I'm still not 100% confident that we have the right year and we clearly do not have a date. Emir of Wikipedia's note above had be a bit concerned we might have some basic confusion here to root out, as there seem to be some sources disagreeing on the date.

On a whim, I checked sources from articles on some of the films believed to have been lost. Many of them do not indicate the last known copy was destroyed in an MGM fire or cite a source that does not backup the claim. Here's what I came up with:

• London After Midnight
  • May 1967
  • 1960s
  • mid-1960s
  • May 13, 1967
  • 1960s
  • 1960s

• Married Flirts
  • 1960s

• Hello, Pop!
  • 1967
  • 1967
  • 1967

I have also run across various forum postings indicating others have been having problems researching the event. Others have been unable to find a specific date, have found conflicting dates, unsure if it is 1965 or 1967, hinting one of the dates may refer to a set fire at Universal or that there may have been two vault fires.

The reliability of the sources varies. Most of them are deliberately vague (even the best sources). - SummerPhD^v2.0 04:21, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Isn't there a way to contact MGM about this? They would surely know. Yintan  11:09, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Wrong date and location?

I found this NY Times article which reports on the fire. It dates to 1978 not 1965. In addition, the fire took place at the George Eastman vault, not MGM.

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/31/archives/fire-loss-at-film-museum-less-than-was-feared.html

There apparently was a 1967 fire on the MGM backlot, be it didn't destroy films. LittleJerry (talk) 00:57, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

While there is an open question (see above) as to whether the fire discussed in this article was in 1965 or 1967, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the 1978 George Eastman fire in New York was unrelated to the 1965 MGM fire in California. - SummerPhD^v2.0 01:07, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Totally different fire, probably. There's sources stating that a 1965/7 fire occurred and destroyed the entire contents of Vault 7 on the MGM lot. I don't doubt that an Eastman fire in 1978 happened. There's been a lot of fires. The original cut of Nanook of the North was lost in a fire accidentally set by the director, Universal fire in 1924, 1937 Fox vault fire, apparently there was a fire at the Harold Lloyd Estate in the 1940s destroying much of his catalogue. Printing the stuff on highly flammable material caused a lot of fires. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 01:11, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

More than likely the "sources" got the two fires mixed up. The 1978 fire is the one that destroyed the MGM nitrates, while the 1967 fire destroyed studio sets. Also the sources cited in the article do not mention the year. LittleJerry (talk) 03:34, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

The article states that the 1965/7 article destroyed one vault of MGM nitrates. There were a lot of nitrates in a lot of vaults, and many of them started going to Eastman starting in 1965, as reference 2 points out. The fire in 1965 destroyed just ones in Vault 7, so there would still be other MGM nitrates to be destroyed at Eastman. It's still very likely that there were two separate nitrate destroying fires. Reference 1, an offline source, "The Legion of the Condemned - Why American Silent Films Perished", indeed does give a year of 1965. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 03:55, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

I find it highly unlikely that all of the reliable sources are confusing two fires -- one at a studio vault, the other in a film preservation org -- over a decade apart, on opposite ends of the country. Unless there are sources for this claim, I consider the issue closed. - SummerPhD^v2.0 15:29, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Possible source to check

Has anyone checked VarietyInsight.com? It has a complete archive of Variety/Daily Variety and there is no way an event like this could have happened without them reporting on it. The archive requires a fee that I personally am not prepared to pay right now, but if someone else wants to dive in, this could provide a source. There is also a complete archive of Billboard on Google News Archive; although they don't focus on film they might have covered it too. 136.159.160.122 (talk) 18:48, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Okay, when did this happen?

So far with all these discussions, I’ve seen people debating whether this fire happened in 1965/7, and all of them come to inconclusive results. So I only have one question: when did this fire occur? Or maybe I have two; did this fire even occur? Fakescientist8000 (talk) 16:05, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I mean, as you've seen in the above discussions, nobody's really sure. Most of the academic sources I pulled up and included in the article say 1965, but also you've read the discussion. The fire did indeed happen, though. That's not in disagreement at all. The fire indeed happened. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 16:22, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I've returned to doing some digging on this, and I've found that there was indeed a set fire on Lot 2 on March 12, 1967 and reported about on March 13 (hence my comment above and why I couldn't relocate my source). I'm pretty sure the source I was referring to in the prior discussion I couldn't find again was, MGM: Hollywood's Greatest Backlot, page 209, as the cover looks familiar. It remarks that Lot 2 sets were destroyed on March 12, 1967. It sources this statement to an article in the Los Angeles Times published the next day. I've looked at this newspaper article, which indeed states that the fire was of three sets, including one then-currently being used for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. There was also an AP report of that fire, which was republished through The Times in Louisiana and The News in Maryland. I did see something covering it using a photograph from UPI from The Times Herald Record, but I cannot verify it at this time. At this point, I feel reasonably confident that the 1967 fire was of sets on Lot 2, not of a film vault.

By the way, not to be confused with a March 15, 1967 set fire that happened at Universal Studios. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 18:44, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Is this the fire in question?

I happened to find an old newspaper clipping from August 11, 1965, mentioning a fire in the MGM vault at Culver City. (https://www.newspapers.com/clip/89801403/evening-vanguard/) Aside from some minor differing details (the clipping says the explosion occurred in Lot 1, not Lot 3, and mentions no fatalities or injuries), it seems that this could be the same fire that this article is about. If this is the case, the date of the fire would be August 10, 1965.

However, despite extensive searching, this was the only contemporary article I could find mentioning the fire. It's possible the fire wasn't widely reported on due to it being contained to only one vault.

Gdeblois19 22:56, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

L.B. Mayer's ghost

"...in the early 1960s, it began a preservation program led by Mayer..."

How's that possible if L.B.Mayer died in 1957? 2A02:AA1:1009:DE37:C8BA:83:A243:AB24 (talk) 18:31, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Ah, it's Roger Mayer. But "Louis B. Mayer Productions" is mentioned. Confusing. 2A02:AA1:1009:DE37:C8BA:83:A243:AB24 (talk) 18:33, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

What movies were destroyed

How many movies were destroyed and what were their titles 2604:2D80:DC84:D200:D14E:255C:2246:DB57 (talk) 04:46, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Suggest go to perplexity.ai and ask "what films were lost in the 1965 mgm vault fire". It says "While the full extent is unknown, it's estimated that the fire destroyed over 300,000 negatives and prints". -- GreenC 21:54, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Two fires

Based on discussions above, it seems more than reasonable there were two MGM fires, in 1965 and 1967. According to this source:

Another fire at MGM is sometimes confused with the 1965 film vault fire, but this one took place on Lot 2’s standing sets, where a fire started March 12, 1967 in a chapel and spread to Brownstone Street, where scenes from “The Easter Parade” had been filmed among other movies and TV shows.

-- GreenC 00:01, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Mystery of few sources

It is mysterious why there are so few sources about this fire, and I want to offer a theory. The fire happened, but there was a "coverup" The studios back then had fixers who could make bad stories about talent or shows disappear: bribes, threats, carrots, sticks. They used every method. Bad news did not benefit the studio, they were dream makers and narrative creators. Telling the world their favorite films and actors went up in smoke because the studio neglected to install sprinklers was not good story. And so, this story was rumor and faded memory and obscure news. It's why we don't know what was lost, or even sure when it happened, the cause, and who was injured if anyone. Not for lack of trying, the sources never existed, with some exceptions. -- GreenC 04:45, 22 May 2024 (UTC)