Broadhead chuckled. "Thalberg called Von Stroheim a 'footage fetishist' before he ordered the editors to cut it to two hours' maximum running time. After months of shooting on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, and part of the cast still in the hospital, the studio scrapped seventy-five percent of the feature."
-- Loren Estleman, Frames (Tom Doherty Associates, 2008)
I've read most of Estleman's excellent series about Detroit private detective Amos Walker; Frames is the first of his series about a film archivist in Los Angeles. In some ways it reminds me of Nicholas Ray's film In a Lonely Place (1950) in that it deals with those on the fringes of Hollywood films: extras, costumers, etc. Valentino is a UCLA film student who buys a very run-down theatre to restore to its former glory, which goes back to the days of silent films. In the theatre he finds an uncut version of Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (1924), originally eight hours of which only the two-hour cut version has survived, a great missing treasure of the silent film era. Unfortunately there is also a skeleton with the cans of film and the police won't release the film until they can find out who was murdered and aren't interested in Valentino's complaints of how valuable and fragile the nitrate film is and how it needs to be immediately transferred to safety stock. There is considerable suspense as Valentino gets help from the younger student Fanta, an internet expert, and the older professor of film history Kyle Broadhead as they try to solve a decades-old murder before the complete print of Greed deteriorates.
One who doesn't know who Erich von Stroheim was might feel somewhat adrift in this book, but Estleman helpfully includes a useful bibliography and filmography about von Stroheim, Greed and silent film.
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