*A lot of tall-grass detail here.
https://hometownstohollywood.com/editorials/sights-and-sounds-reunited-the-vitaphone-project/
"Although short subject films have unique importance in film history, film preservation in general was an afterthought for the film industry. Unfortunately, while studio moguls, producers, actors, and actresses reaped the rewards of their screen successes, little thought was given to the preservation of their work. In some cases, studios would dispose of their silent films because they believed that these films had no more commercial value. Moreover, studios actively incinerated film prints in order to retrieve the silver image particles and take advantage of their scrap value or had them “physically axed in two to prevent possible piracy” (Slide, 2001, p. 4).
"If a studio remade a film, it was typical to dispose of the earlier version. To make matters worse, in early cinema, films were captured on nitrate, a material that is notorious for being “chemically unstable” and “in a perpetual state of decomposition” (Slide, 2001, p. 3). Vitaphone shorts were no exception, as the “high silver content and rich tones” of nitrate stock was argued to be the best type of film for black-and-white photography; however, nitrate is highly flammable and can “self-ignite at 300 degrees or less” (Slide, 2001, pp. 1-2). As a result, the storage of this particular film stock was difficult, leading to major studio vault fires that destroyed original studio prints.
"Though it is nearly impossible to quantify exactly how many films are truly lost, it is “often claimed that 75 percent of all American silent films are gone and 50 percent of all films made prior to 1950 are lost” (Slide, 2001, p. 5). To date, there are “more than 100 million feet of nitrate film of American origin awaiting preservation, in American and foreign archives, vaults of producers and distributors, and in the hands of private collectors” (Slide, 2001, p. 5). Over time, Vitaphone playback equipment and discs were sold for scrap and “hundreds of features and shorts inevitably became separated from each other” (Eyman, 2015, p. 371). There was no attempt at converting the shorts or films into different formats. Over the years, collectors and archivists have “assembled a reasonable collection of the picture elements for many films of the Vitaphone era, but the sound discs are considerably harder to come by” (Eyman, 2015, p. 371)...."
