James Cameron’s original “Terminator” is one of 25 films that will be placed into the National Film Registry for preservation according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The original, low-budget epic made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star and launched a new science-fiction franchise that is still going strong today on both TV and next year in theaters. It also included the iconic line, “I’ll be back.”
That line and the rest of the film will be preserved for generations to come. “Terminator” joins 500 other films in the National Film Registry library. Other inductees this year include “Deliverance” and the 1967 adapation of “In Cold Blood.”
The new inductees were announced this morning in Washington D.C.
“The registry helps this nation understand the diversity of America’s film heritage and, just as importantly, the need for its preservation,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in announcing his 2008 selections. “The nation has lost about half of the films produced before 1950 and as much as 90% of those made before 1920.”
As time passes, older nitrate- and acetate-based films begin to deteriorate, Billington said. The Library of Congress is working to digitize and preserve endangered film and audio files at its new Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, an approximately $250 million facility built in a bunker in the hills near Culpeper, Va.
The registry, established by Congress in 1989, works with film archives and movie studios that own the rights to the selected films to ensure original copies are kept safe. It also acquires a copy for preservation in its own vaults among millions of other recordings.
Curators select films based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic significance, saying their picks wouldn’t necessarily overlap with those of a movie critic. And some aren’t feature films at all: This year’s list includes a family’s home movie, “Disneyland Dream,” which documented a trip to the newly opened park in Anaheim, Calif., in 1956.
Below is a full list of the films inducted this year:
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Deliverance (1972)
Disneyland Dream (1956)
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Flower Drum Song (1961)
Foolish Wives (1922)
Free Radicals (1979)
Hallelujah (1929)
In Cold Blood (1967)
The Invisible Man (1933)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
The Killers (1946)
The March (1964)
No Lies (1973)
On the Bowery (1957)
One Week (1920)
The Pawnbroker (1965)
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
Sergeant York (1941)
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
So’s Your Old Man (1926)
George Stevens WW2 Footage (1943-46)
The Terminator (1984)
Water and Power (1989)
White Fawn’s Devotion (1910)