Before the Academy: Conservation of two 100-year-old film posters

The Lincoln Motion Picture Co. was founded in 1915 by brothers Noble Johnson and George Perry Johnson as America’s first producer of “race movies”—films specifically made for Black audiences and starring Black casts. In an era characterized by blackface vaudeville and racist slapstick, the Lincoln Company showcased the talent of Black artists and technicians through storytelling which portrayed the Black American middle class on-screen for the first time. The Lincoln Company’s films were largely only viewable in racially-segregated theaters, despite the company’s desire to promote their message to a larger audience. The entirely Black-owned and -operated company produced only five films before ceasing operation in 1923, but as a forerunner in its treatment of minority artists, its influence on the film industry was significant.

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When the Lincoln Company ceased operation in 1923, it would be another four years before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was established in 1927, and another two years before the first Academy Awards were presented (in-person and without radio or television broadcast) in 1929. George Johnson continued writing and established the Pacific Coast News Bureau in 1923, while Noble Johnson remained in Hollywood, acting in more than 130 films between 1916 and 1950, including the 1932 adaptation of Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” Buster Keaton’s 1924 comedy “The Navigator,” and the widely-acclaimed 1933 adaptation of “King Kong,” considered one of the greatest films of all time.

Treatment began on two copies of the “By Right of Birth” poster in January 2024 in UCLA Library’s Preservation and Conservation department, situated on the ground floor of Powell Library. The posters are printed via chromolithography in 5 colors (yellow, red, blue, brown and black) on off-white, machine-made paper and show two men fighting in an office setting with a woman and a typewriter behind them. Promotional text in the top left corner of the image reads “It’s a LINCOLN PRODUCTION”. A 3” margin of unprinted space is present on the top, right, and left edges of the posters, plus a ½” bottom margin which is unprinted except for identification information “BY RIGHT OF BIRTH . 3 SHT TOP 10096”. “Three-sheet” is a standard size for large film posters which were historically made up of two to three individual sheets and needed to be aligned during presentation outside of theaters and subway stations; “10096” might refer to a Manhattan area code where the posters were meant to be displayed.

When the posters were retrieved from off-site storage for treatment, both were heavily torn, creased and curled from years of folded and rolled storage. Both posters show evidence of previous interventions with pressure-sensitive adhesive tape, and one of the copies has strips of a 20th-century block-printed wallpaper adhered to the reverse to reinforce tears. The two posters were stored together, loosely rolled around a single tube support. While the sandwiching layers of archival paper and mylar (a transparent polyethylene film) made handling slightly more manageable, they were still far from an accessible state.

After documentation, the less heavily damaged of the two posters was cleared of surface grime with soft cosmetic sponges, at which point the tedious process of humidification, flattening and mending the torn and crumpled portions of the sheet began.