Reelin' in the Years Adds 2,000 Tapes from the Brian Linehan Archive

Reelin' in the Years President David Peck inspects the newly arrived Brian Linehan collection.

For over twenty-five years, beginning in 1973, Brian Linehan interviewed the most celebrated and influential stars and creative personalities in Hollywood. The programs he hosted, City Lights and Linehan, were broadcast across Canada and have not been seen since they first aired. In late 2015, Reelin’ in the Years Productions was honored to sign a deal to represent his archives. As with many collections, trying to get all the material in one place has not been easy and the team at Reelin’ in the Years had to dig through many different vaults in Canada to locate the master tapes as well as many of the raw camera tapes.

Five weeks ago they received over 2,000 tapes that had been sitting in a storage facility north of Toronto and were in danger of being destroyed, and have spent the last five weeks transferring and cataloging over 1,300 of the tapes. The tapes are on many different formats, from 2-Inch quad to 1-inch, Betacam and Umatic, which take a lot of care to ensure that they play correctly and to get the best transfer. Reelin’ in the Years was able to transfer all the material in their office except the 2-Inch quad tapes, which needed to be handled by David Crosthwait at DC Video.

“It’s such a joy to discover footage that has been lost for decades and to make them available for filmmakers for the first time,” said David Peck, president of Reelin’ in the Years. “One of the many unique items we uncovered was an interview with Donald Sutherland, John Landis and John Belushi promoting the movie Animal House in 1978. John Belushi rarely ever did interviews so this was a very special find.”

To date, RITY has transferred and cataloged thousands of interviews with actors, actresses and directors from not only the Brian Linehan Archive but David Frost, Merv Griffin, Rona Barrett, Fred Saxon and many others. If you are doing a doc on anyone related to Hollywood from the 1950s to the early 2000s chances are they have an interview with that person.