How My Friends And I Rescued Hours Of Long-Lost American Motors Footage

Thanks to the kind folks at The Autopian, I’m back with a second behind-the-scenes installment on how we made The Last Independent Automaker, a new six-part documentary series on the history of American Motors Corporation.

Last week I talked about how we tracked down all the vehicles we filmed. This week, to coincide with the release of Episode 2, I’ll explain where we got all those historic TV commercials, film, and video clips that appear throughout the program.

And I can’t think of a better episode to highlight this topic, as Episode 2 features lots of great commercials from the 1960s. As you’ll learn in this episode, clever advertising played a big role in helping change the public image of American Motors during that time.

Frame by Frame

The historical footage for The Last Independent Automaker came from a wide and sometimes unexpected variety of sources, as Stellantis doesn’t really maintain a robust AMC archive, and there is no official museum devoted solely to American Motors history, either. (Though the Rambler Ranch comes close.)

I ran into this same problem a decade ago when I produced The Unfortunate History of the AMC Pacer, which led me to Todd Ruel, a collector of vintage car films. Today he runs MemoryHouse.TV, which digitizes and transfers old tapes and films, but he also runs a side business of collecting, digitizing, and selling historic automotive footage that has since lapsed into the Public Domain.

Ruel began collecting car films almost 30 years ago when he bought a stock of material from former AMC Public Relations Director, John Conde. From there, he expanded to collecting films from other orphan car companies, and later, all brands. His impressive archive features material from Studebaker, Packard, Ford, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Datsun, and thankfully, lots from Nash, AMC, and Jeep.

He primarily collects TV commercials and longer so-called “industrial” films. Ranging between 10 to 30 minutes, industrials can be anything from an engine repair training film to a promotional new car announcement.

While Ruel finds some of these films “through the grapevine” of his car-enthusiast contacts, most actually come from eBay, which has a surprisingly competitive market for these old movies. But buying them is only half the battle, as Ruel explained the rest of the digitization process to me via email:

“I clean each print with 99% isopropyl alcohol and PEC pads, which are lint free and leave no dust on the film. Then I load the film onto a Lasergraphics Archivist, which is a very high-end film digitizing machine. It https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolvedavtakes individual pictures of each film frame and assembles them into Quicktime movies. It also reproduces the audio track…”

The frame-by-frame digitization is particularly important for maximum quality, as cheaper methods are akin to projecting a film onto a screen and filming the screen with a digital camera, which results in much sloppier product. But, the work doesn’t stop there, as Ruel continued:

“Most color films have faded with age, so [my partner] Gary Templeton uses a piece of software called DaVinci Resolve to color correct films. Then he uses a high-end piece of software called the Diamant Film Restoration Suite to eliminate dust, vertical lines, film splices, etc. The process is very time consuming. Often, there’s a lot of painstaking frame-to-frame restoration of these films. Anyone who has ever restored an old car knows what I’m talking about. However, we don’t restore old cars. We restore old car films.”

Todd specifically seeks out movies on 16mm film with an optical sound track, as smaller 8mm film–which was more common for home movies–generally doesn’t have great image definition. With modern equipment, 16mm film can be scanned all the way up to 4K resolution and still look good. 35mm, which was common for feature-length movies, can go even higher. (Fun note: Director Christoper Nolan once said that IMAX film is equivalent to 18K resolution!)

Of course, the quality of the footage depends not just on the scanning equipment and film size, but on how well the film survived. As Ruel explained, most TV commercials and industrial films were meant to be thrown away after a year. Thus, the filmstock that most were printed on was not designed for long term storage. Issues like color fade (where the blue and green pigments fade, leaving overly-red images) and vinegar syndrome (where the film warps as it chemically degrades) can make digitization and restoration significantly more difficult.

Ruel and I encountered these problems firsthand, when I requested a clip of a bunch of dancing teenagers from his 1969 Javelin film. He had already digitized it two decades ago in standard definition, but I requested he rescan it with his new equipment in 4K. Unfortunately, the color had faded so badly in those 20 years that I ultimately decided to use the older, lower resolution scan, because the colors were more accurate.

Through it all, Ruel was very accommodating to our team, and we ended up purchasing over 60 different clips from his collection, which made it into 5 of our 6 episodes. Some of my favorites include:

Episode 1:
1954 Nash commercial with the animated elf, Herman

Episode 2:
1968-69 AMC Trans-Am racing footage

Episode 3:
1970 AMC Gremlin introduction commercial

Episode 4:
1975 AMC Pacer “Sandwich King” commercial

Episode 5:
1978 Jeep Cherokee commercial

Tapes for the Memories

In the late 1970s, thousands of TV stations and businesses transitioned from 16mm film to various new videotape formats. While high-end productions like TV commercials were still shot on film, most were transferred and delivered to the end users on tape. Cheaper projects, like instructional or promotional videos, were often done entirely on tape. Since Todd Ruel specialized in film, this meant we had to look elsewhere for late-70s / early-80s footage. Thankfully, we struck gold at The Kenosha History Center.

This lovely museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin is located just minutes from the former sites of AMC’s two largest factories. When we visited in 2017 to record our first round of interviews with former American Motors workers, we discovered that the History Center had a massive collection of AMC-related video tapes in storage. But there was a big problem: nobody knew what was on them!

The tapes had been salvaged from the factory by the late Gilbert “Gibby” Ebener, a former AMC plant superintendent. Nobody remembered exactly how Ebener acquired the tapes, but in the years since he’d donated them in 2002, the museum hadn’t been able to afford the thousands of dollars required for professional digitization. Desperate to see what was hiding on those tapes (and use it for our documentary), I volunteered to help.

The collection was primarily on four formats:

• VHS, the home videotape most of us are familiar with;
• Betamax, VHS’s main competitor with slightly higher image quality;
• Umatic, the first common “portable” broadcast format;
• EIAJ-1, a reel-to-reel format that wasn’t quite good enough for TV but was popular with schools and businesses.

Knowing I was in over my head, I roped my friend and fellow AMC owner, Matt Steck, into helping me. A born tinkerer, Matt’s love for vintage electronics is so strong that his friends literally nicknamed him “Tapes.” He also happens to own and repair all kinds of VCRs, Betamax machines, camcorders, Hi-Fi systems, tape decks, and more.

So in the summer of 2018, we left for Kenosha in a VW Golf SportWagen loaded with snacks, tape decks, computers, and video converter boxes, intent on digitizing the Kenosha History Center’s tape collection. What we discovered was incredible.

The American Motorshow

As we began watching some of the tapes, we pieced together that sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, American Motors Corporation launched a daily radio local radio program called American Motorshow with Jim Bradley, which aired during workers’ morning commutes and shift changes.

In 1974, that expanded when AMC built a revolutionary closed-circuit TV system at its Kenosha factories called WAMC-TV or The American Motors Employee Communications Network. The system broadcast news, announcements, and educational programs to TV sets in lunch rooms and break areas throughout the plants. Roy Chapin Jr., who was CEO at the time, hailed it as something completely unique for the auto industry.

Most of the old tapes at the Kenosha History Center had been salvaged from WAMC-TV, and contained goldmine of employee interviews, TV commercials, quality control updates, factory robot installations, charity events, CEO interviews, drug awareness programs, work anniversary celebrations, new car announcements, stockholders’ meetings, factory tours, employee training videos, an AMC Eagle playing tug of war with a Chevy Citation, a Wheel Horse lawn mower giveaway, and even a full-blown 45 minute stage musical promoting AMC’s 1977 product line. (Which I strongly suggest you watch.)

Unfortunately, actually digitizing the tapes turned out to be far more difficult than we’d hoped. Just like film, years in storage hadn’t done them any favors, and Matt and I found ourselves mired in technical difficulties. Tapes jammed, signals cut in and out, and sticky shed syndrome caused the ferric oxide particles that held the precious video data to fall off the tape and gunk up the insides of our VCRs. The only respite was to constantly clean the machines with rubbing alcohol and stick the tapes in a food dehydrator for several hours to ensure they were bone dry before we played them.

We soon realized that a week in Kenosha wouldn’t be enough time, so we piled our Golf SportWagen with as many tapes as we could carry, and headed home. Over the next three years, we slowly worked our way through hundreds of hours of old footage.

As we watched the tapes, I gained a better appreciation for the American Motors Employee Communication Network, which seemed to be a rag-tag team with Jim Bradley as host and interviewer, Bob Kermgard as cameraman and editor, and maybe one or two other people. For around 10 years, they covered as many happenings around the plant as they could, and occasionally traveled to AMC’s headquarters in Detroit, too.

Somewhere along the line, I actually managed to reach out to Jim Bradley, who had since moved to California. During a phone call he reminisced about his time at AMC, and remarked that during the early 80s, he fought hard to keep management from closing down the TV operation to cut costs. Eventually the money ran out around 1984 and the station was closed, although somehow the tapes miraculously survived. I regret not having the chance to interview Jim in person for the documentary, as I’m sure he would have some great stories.

Although Matt and I did not make it through the entire archive, we probably transferred over 100 hours of video. Given the nature of filmmaking, our team probably only used 20 minutes of that in the final edit, but I’m thrilled that the Kenosha History Center has begun sharing the raw footage on their YouTube channel.

Discovision

Although AMC’s in-house TV station ceased operations in 1984, we fortunately had another source for historic video. Starting in 1982, American Motors began delivering service training, sales training, and product information to dealerships via Laserdisc, which are large optical discs that contain analog video. They were kind of a precursor to DVDs, but with less storage space.

Unfortunately, much like the aforementioned industrial films, many of these AMC Laserdiscs were simply thrown out after the next year’s set arrived, making surviving copies fairly rare. Also like film and videotape, Laserdiscs are not immune to degradation, as laser rot (or more accurately, disc rot) occurs when the disc begins to separate with age, causing the aluminum layer inside to oxidize and become unreadable.

Thankfully, AMC owners are some of the most notorious pack rats I’ve ever met, and I was able to find multiple people within the community who offered to lend me their AMC Laserdisc collections. Armed with a Denon Laserdisc player that Matt found me at a flea market, I proceeded to digitize as many discs as I could find. I wasn’t able to find a working copy of every single disc ever made, but I still gathered some pretty cool stuff.

The best ones contained TV commercials and other promotional videos about specific cars or the company as a whole. The worst discs were filled with boring sales training exercises, where salespeople are taught how to evaluate “customer needs vs wants” and implored to not badmouth the Renault cars they were being forced to sell.

One of the most historically significant videos we found was a message from Lee Iacocca to former AMC dealerships, basically trying to assure everyone that everything was going to be ok after Chrysler bought AMC in 1987. But my personal favorites were an AMC/Jeep/Renault music video set to “I’m so Excited” by the Pointer Sisters and a 4WD comparison between the AMC Eagle and Toyota Tercel, where testers attempted to drive up a ramp covered in axle grease.

Outside Media

Another spectacular resource our team was able to use was the 45-year archive of the PBS show, MotorWeek. Having worked there as a video producer/editor, I had helped with their popular “Retro Reviews” on YouTube and knew that they had some great AMC footage.

Because of MotorWeek’s generosity, our team was able to license some clips from various AMC, Jeep, and Renault road tests, along with rare footage of AMC’s corporate headquarters back in the 1980s. Depending on the year, the episodes were stored on either Umatic or Betacam tapes–which is a different format than Betamax–adding yet another format to our roster.

During our time in Kenosha, our team was also fortunate enough to borrow some homemade DVDs from several of the folks we interviewed, which contained VHS transfers of home movies from inside the plant and historical footage from Kenosha’s chapter of the United Auto Workers union, Local 72.

While AMC-related media made up the bulk of our historic footage, we did occasionally need footage of rival automakers and their products (like the Ford Mustang in Episode 2), as well as just generic historic footage of highways, gas stations, and other automotive-related subjects. Some of these clips came directly from the automakers, others from Todd Ruel, and many came from stock footage services like Pond5, Alamy, Shutterstock, etc.

A Window to the Past

Throughout the production of The Last Independent Automaker, our team keenly felt the pressure of time. Both the people who worked for American Motors and the history of the company were slipping away. Often, I felt like we were the last generation who would have the chance to gather these stories and watch this footage. It might sound silly, but knowing you have the only copy of a videotape and that you could be the last person to ever watch it gives you a strong sense of duty to save it.

By the time we completed all six episodes, our team had processed footage from seven different tape and disc formats, plus the various cameras we recorded modern footage on, plus whatever types of film stock Todd Ruel and our other suppliers had to work with. We could never have predicted how much time, talent, and expertise all this would take.

When we started, I was mostly excited to see footage of the cars–cars coming off the assembly line, cars driving along in commercials, cars being shown off at dealerships… After all, those were the kind of clips that were most useful for the documentary.

But in time, I found myself strangely drawn to the people. As I watched through factory footage that hadn’t been seen in decades, it began to feel like that scene from Christmas Vacation where Clark discovers his old home movies in the attic. People happily waved at the camera. Some would give a nervous chuckle and try to focus on their work; others would tell a joke and then grin. People were smoking, shouting, shaking their heads, smiling, and living out their lives on the assembly line. It was like watching a giant collection of old home movies from one big family.

And I’m proud that our work will help preserve some of those family memories for future generations.

The Last Independent Automaker is available to watch now on Public Television stations, the PBS app, and the AutoMoments YouTube channel.

The series is distributed by American Public Television. Maryland Public Television is the presenting station. The Automotive Hall of Fame provided fiduciary assistance. The Last Independent Automaker is funded in part by Visit Detroit, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and MotorCities National Heritage Area. It is also funded by over 375 individuals and organizations who contributed through the project’s Crowdfunding campaign.