From the late-1920s to the mid-1960s, the major American sound newsreel companies documented all kinds of people, places, events and things around the globe. These newsreels typically appeared twice a week at the local movie palace and averaged eight minutes in length. They were usually part of the entertainment package that accompanied a cartoon and the featured movie. These news segments were crucial in an era when television news had not yet been born and many people relied on cinemas as a primary source of visual news and information.
The Universal Newsreel can trace its beginning all the way back to 1913, when “The Universal Animated Weekly,” a silent single-reel news film, was introduced. In 1918, newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst began “The International Newsreel” and released it through Universal. This business relationship continued until 1929. Universal Pictures then started to produce their own sound newsreel starting in July of that year. After years of success, this newsreel went dark 38 years later in December 1967, a victim of declining theater admissions and the popularity of television news.
Nationally released stories, together with the occasional regional and Canadian story, and their associated out-takes, make up the Universal Newsreel archival library today. This treasure trove of motion picture film is part of the MCA/Universal Pictures Collection, which was gifted to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 1970. It consisted of 6,350 reels of edited stories and 8,501 reels of out-takes, approximately 550,000 subject catalog cards (now microfilmed), 3,400 rundown sheets, and 445 large boxes of associated production files. In March, 1974, all use restrictions and copyright claims were abandoned. As a result, the entire library which consists of approximately 15 million feet of 35-millimeter film is in the public domain.
As great as it is, this collection is not a complete historical record. The newsreels did not cover every event that happened during their years of operation. Due to limitations in staff, equipment, and the competitive nature of the news business, the management of Universal Newsreel exercised their editorial rights to pick and choose the stories they thought were important or entertaining enough to pass along to their audience.
Conforming to common industry practices at the time, Universal disassembled the film negatives of the individual stories soon after the release was sent out to theaters.
The narration and music tracks were usually destroyed for silver recovery. Universal kept a couple of complete release prints with the sound track intact for reference purposes, but few of these survive today. As a result, the Universal Newsreel stories held within the NARA prior to the mid-1950s are usually silent and missing the narration of Graham McNamee, and later, Ed Herlihy. The only noise you may hear in the newsreels of the 1930s and 1940s is the “sound-on-film” of speeches, statements made directly to the camera, and the occasional story that had “wild” or “natural sounds.”
After the National Archives took custody of the collection, it made the decision to discard a significant number of out-takes that they deemed not to be historically significant. In December, 1978 there was a disastrous fire at the National Archives that destroyed about 73% of the out-takes from the 1930-1950 time period and almost three years of releases.
The surviving Universal Newsreel stories contain almost 400 hours of edited stories and 800 hours of out-takes that cover most of the key events of the 1930s through the 1960s.
The primary sources for the information here are from the National Archive. Unfortunately, Universal Newsreel’s original documentation is not as detailed or complete as it might have been, particularly during the first 25 years of its existence. In some cases, a story title cited on the synopsis sheets is different from those used in the final newsreel film release. As such, they are shared as a general reference work and are not intended as a substitute for independent verification of historical facts.
The Universal Newsreel collection is a remarkable visual time capsule, well worth exploring for anyone interested in seeing the history of the 20th century captured as it happened.
Phil Stewart
