It’s no secret that restoring old films involves attention to detail. In some cases, it also requires old-fashioned mystery-solving.

When Lewis Milestone’s 1926 silent film The New Klondike was donated by Paramount to the Library of Congress in the 1970s, it was deemed incomplete, based on black-frame cuts in the film that typically indicate missing footage.

Yet when film archivist and the founder of The Maltese Film Works James Mockoski sat down to restore the film at his home office in Martinez, California, he saw that the frame count actually did match what was reported in 1926 – there was nothing missing.

This led to the discovery that those little black frames, which Mockoski refers to as slugs, had words like “amber” and “orange” etched into the emulsion of the film. These wer

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