Over the past month, “Matt About Town” has shined a bright, Hollywood-sized spotlight on a Library of Congress outpost in Culpeper, Virginia.
The library is working to preserve 135-plus years of physical media on its 45-acre Packard Campus.
We’ve visited a nitrate film vault containing thousands of Hollywood’s most popular classics, a state-of-the-art theater capable of playing movies in any format, and a public digital repository that provides online access to some of cinema’s most important works.
And one thing from our tour has become clear: there’s no place and no operation quite like the Packard Campus anywhere else in the world!
In today’s episode, WTOP’s Matt Kaufax concludes his visit to the wondrous space where it all started — in the heart of Packard’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.
Here, he got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine one of the rarest reels of film on earth: a nitrate negative of the 1903 film that changed cinema forever.
The last person to examine this reel before Matt? Oh, just Oscar-winning director Quentin Tarantino. No big deal.
Enjoy this behind-the-scenes finale from a perspective hardly anyone else gets to see.
Hear “Matt About Town” first every Tuesday and Thursday on 103.5 FM!
If you have a story idea you’d like Matt to cover, email him or chat with him on Instagram and TikTok.
Check out all “Matt About Town” episodes here!