Jeff Spevak

@jeffspevak1

Foundations of the ancient city of Troy, buried beneath mounds of dirt and rubble in western Turkey. Terraced temples of the Maya, overgrown with sapodilla trees in Central America. Bones and primitive tools of the earliest humans, trapped in the red sedimentary layers of Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. The detritus of civilizations. Lost culture, rediscovered.

Twentieth-century America’s archaeological legacy? Abandoned strip malls. Commercial enterprises no longer economically desirable.

As 2014 drew to a close, a co-worker rushed into the office of Deborah Stoiber, collection manager at the George Eastman Museum, with news that a treasure had been discovered in one such mall in Lakewood, Calif. A string of businesses — including a multiplex movie theater that had been unable to convert to digital projection — that would soon be leveled to make room for the 21st century. Time was of the essence. Valuable artifacts were threatened.

“It was December,” Stoiber says. “Going to California sounded real good.” She immediately organized an expedition into the wilds of suburban Los Angeles. Having grown up in Fresno, she knew the challenge: “The joke is,” she says “there’s more culture in yogurt than there is in Fresno.”

Three days later, Stoiber was on a plane. She was met at the Naz 8 multiplex by University of Southern California film archivist Dino Everett, who had first alerted the Eastman Museum to the cinema cache, about 10 film students from USC and UCLA and her parents, who had driven in from Oregon to see their daughter.

Behind the theater’s locked doors, Stoiber uncovered a vast lobby with bags of popcorn still sitting on the countertops and file cabinets filled with old tax returns. Taking the stairs up to the projection rooms, the machinery there was still threaded with the last films shown, “as if people were expecting to come back the next day,” she says.

And behind the projection rooms, a storeroom, where she found what had been promised. An estimated 600 boxes of films from India. A daunting task, one that Stoiber had originally figured would be a day’s work of packing to prepare for the move to Rochester.

Stoiber shined her flashlight around this unlighted storeroom filled floor to ceiling with burlap boxes, some propped up with boards to keep them from toppling. Boxes of film reels, their contents haphazardly scribbled on the outside in black magic marker. Stacks of posters and more boxes of soundtrack cassettes to be handed out to film patrons. She was startled by a figure in the shadows of the narrow spaces between boxes, caught in the narrow beam of her flashlight: a life-size cardboard cutout of one of the stars of the India cinema, a face unknown to most American moviegoers.

What else was here? Stoiber played her light around the room. “Behind that wall of film was a door,” she says. “And behind that door was another room filled with film. And behind that film was another door, and another room filled with film.”

This archaeological expedition had been grossly underestimated. Stoiber begged the new owners of the property for more time. Three days, no more, they said.

It was finals week, so most of the students were available for only the first day. She hired a pair of movers for the second day and bribed one of them and his brother — “Their names were King and Prince, I’m not making this up,” Stoiber says — with two pepperoni pizzas and $100 in cash each for the third day. And she put both of her parents to work.

The haul was amazing. Two tractor-trailers filled with 1,300 boxes: 57,355 pounds of Asian pop culture that included 6,000 posters and 597 movies, 776 prints in all if the duplicates are counted. All now are safe at the Eastman Museum’s storage space in Gleason Works on University Avenue.

It is the world’s largest collection of cinema produced in India. And it all very nearly ended up in a landfill.

After being alerted by her co-worker about the film cache, and after Stoiber had pieced together not only the breadth of the discovery, but also the impending threat to it, she had called Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator of moving images at the museum. By then, it was 9:30 in the evening. “I was at home, I may not have picked up the phone, I may not have responded to an email,” he says. “But I did. And it was a flurry of exchanges that went on until 1 in the morning.

“This was a no-brainer, I could not let this happen. Had we not acted quickly, we would have lost the films. Normally we have a little more time to think about logistics, strategy, the financial aspects of a rescue operation. There was no such possibility in the case of this collection. We had to act immediately.”

And had the Eastman Museum not done so? Had it paused, balking at the cost when art organizations are fighting for economic survival?

“I would have spent the rest of my professional life mourning how I could have saved 15 years of Indian film heritage, and I didn’t,” Cherchi Usai says. “It is by far one of the most important film acquisitions in the history of the museum.”

The trucks arrived in Rochester on Dec. 31, 2014. For the past year, the Eastman Museum has been working out exactly what it has here. Cleaning and organizing the reels, checking to see what conservation might be needed.

“The process of preserving this massive an amount of films will take years,” Cherchi Usai says. “But this is a story with a bright, happy ending.” He hopes that one of these films will be ready for a screening at the Dryden Theatre this spring.

But building the catalog and addressing copyright issues for what the museum hopes will be a full exhibit in the fall of 2017 has been no easy task. The films are subtitled in English, with English translations of the titles sometimes written on the reels or film leaders. But more often, the reels are often labeled in the many languages of India. Tamil, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam...

Stoiber was finally able to offer a glimpse of the trove earlier this month. Standing behind a lectern before an almost-full Curtis Theatre at the Eastman Museum, she described her adventures much like Arthur Conan’s Doyle’s Professor Challenger lecturing the Royal Geographic Society about the dinosaurs he’s seen upon his return from The Lost World.

The collection, she says, is a mix of genres, all films ranging from 2000 through 2013. Dramas such as Black, a 2005 release directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali — one of many major directors from India whose films are included in the collection. Black opens as the story of a deaf and blind girl and her teacher. But this is Helen Keller with a twist: As the caregiver begins to succumb to Alzheimer’s, the roles are reversed and it is the deaf and blind girl who now leads the pair’s way through an increasingly incomprehensible world. Time magazine named it one of its Top 10 international films of the year.

And there are the over-the-top musicals known as “Bollywood.” A scene from Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi that Stoiber plays for her Curtis Theatre audience uses a device similar to Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo: A woman in a movie theater falls asleep and finds herself transported onscreen. It’s a dream sequence, like something Michael Jackson would stage, with dozens of dancers in a medley of sequences inspired by Busby Berkeley, Vegas shows, Italian cinema, animation and disco cheerleaders.

Spectacular and celebratory, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi arrived in Mumbai theaters at the right time, Stoiber points out. The 2008 terror attack by Islamic militants followed shortly afterward, with 163 people killed and twice as many wounded in four days of shootings and bombings in Mumbai hotels, a hospital, a café, a train station, a community center and an elegant, art-deco movie theater. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi was encouragement for a stunned city to shed the fear of going into public spaces, to go out and experience culture.

“It is a big part of the culture, although it isn’t the essence of the culture, just as you wouldn’t take Hollywood or CNN as the essence of culture in the United States,” Rajeev Ramchandran says. An assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Rochester, he’s working with the George Eastman Museum on an initiative that would launch a scholarly study of cinema in India.

While he was born in the United States and grew up in Chicago, Ramchandran spent his childhood watching the films of his parents’ native country on a VCR. “It’s escapism,” he says. “In the past decades, when India was barely independent, there was a lot more of a struggle, especially in terms of economics.There’s dance and music and a good, compelling story. With romance as well, and family elements.

“There are so many clichés surrounding Indian cinema,” Cherchi Usai says. “These clichés need to be expelled. Indian cinema is similar to what Hollywood does. It is the joy of creating. The joy of unconventional ways of telling a story. What the casual filmgoer sees as flaws or eccentricities is, for us, an asset.”

One flaw — or asset — is that these movies are often longer than what an American audience expects. Cherchi Usai compares them to an 800-page novel. Close to three hours is not unusual. "People get their money's worth," Ramchandran admits.

And as Cherchi Usai points out, “If we really believe in cultural diversity, then diversity needs to be embraced. We can’t do it just to give ourselves a pat on the shoulder. These films are a different perspective, different values. Let’s discover this culture.”

How such a haul ended up in an obscure, dying theater isn’t a mystery. “India is one of the largest, most dynamic, creative and innovative producers of cinema in the world,” Cherchi Usai says. It is such a deluge of creativity that there is no organized effort to preserve these films, no money to do so, and they are lost, settling like driftwood in back rooms like those of the Naz 8.

The subtitles added for audiences in America made the films useless for audiences back in India. “No one wanted to pay the shipping costs for subtitled movies,” Stoiber says. And the stacks of burlap boxes grew ever higher.

Until the developers showed up. And the race to save these films was on, in scenes worthy of a movie themselves.

The Eastman Museum had originally budgeted $6,000 for this project. Once Stoiber saw what she had to deal with, she called Cherchi Usai with a new estimate. Ten thousand dollars. “I didn’t have this money right away; it has not been budgeted,” he says.

He placed a call to the Louis B. Mayer Foundation, which has helped the Eastman Museum on other film-preservation projects. “I told them it’s an emergency. We would normally have to send a grant application, a letter, a text. There was no time to create such a document. But they told me to go ahead.

“Just as I hung up the phone, Deborah called back. She said, ‘Paulo, $10,000 is not going to be enough.’ I said, ‘But I just got off the phone with them, asking for support.’

“What could I do? I picked up the phone and called the Louis B. Mayer Foundation again and said, ‘Houston, we have a problem.’”

OK, so the Mayer Foundation is in New York City. But this was the Eastman Museum’s trip to the moon. The storyline was set. The conflict was only in need of a resolution.

“They said, ‘Go ahead,’” Cherchi Usai says. “‘We’re committed to saving this collection.’”

Stoiber’s final estimate for the move was $15,000. With the last of the bills now paid, the total was $14,980. She missed by one Andrew Jackson.

Returning to her mission, “We would open a closet and movie posters would fall out,” Stoiber says, describing suspended ceilings giving way, and signs that mice had been feeding on abandoned popcorn and candy.

She sent her dad to Home Depot for 10,000 feet of shrink wrap, while her mom coordinated: “She’s pretty good at telling people what to do,” Stoiber says. “She was a first-grade teacher.”

Moving boxes from the storerooms — accessible only by staircase in the elevator-less building — had been a time-consuming task until one of the college students came up with the idea of taking the polished-wood benches from the lobby, lining them up on the stairs like the ramps of an assembly line, and sliding the boxes down them.

Throughout the three days, Stoiber and her small crew stacked dozens of pallets on the sidewalk outside the theater, working until the final moments of the developers’ deadline. “They were literally pushing me out the door and locking up behind me,” she says.

“I’d used all my Aleve at this point. But we knew what we had was unique and worth keeping.”

JSPEVAK@gannett.com