(CAMERA ROLLING) (SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)
(INAUDIBLE)
(CLOCK TICKING)
LOU NOBLE: I think Polaroids are made with magic,
with tiny little elves that live in the camera.
I don't know where they get food or how they breathe in there,
but, uh... But I thank them.
TOD BRILLIANT: The great thing about Polaroid is this cultural resonance that, uh...
...I find pretty profound, in that it transcends cultural boundaries.
I was in Belize for a honeymoon a few years back,
and a lot of Polaroid people have had this sort of experience.
It's pretty common.
But in Belize there were a couple of girls
in this Mayan village we were staying at,
I mean it's not like it's 1542 or anything.
I pulled out the SX-70, took a picture of them
and then held it in front of them.
The whole drill, just like in a commercial.
They watched it, they smiled, they were, like, amazed,
and so of course then I took another picture of them watching it
because now their faces were even more lit up.
And that picture was the real winner.
So I kept the picture of them looking at themselves,
and they kept the photo of themselves,
and that transcended everything.
I didn't speak their language, they didn't speak mine.
This photo,
although they'd seen digital cameras and digital photos before,
this was a technology that was much warmer and much more interesting to them.
And in that way Polaroid, um...
To be totally cheesy and trite, it speaks every language.
You take a Polaroid photo, you hand it to the person you took the picture of,
and they immediately love it.
Not to sound like a world traveler, but I was in Paris a few months ago,
and there was this lavish wedding.
They were clearly very well-heeled by the entourage and all the people.
But they had been passing through this park...
And they had a photographer there. Very well-dressed, beautiful.
I get jealous of his equipment
and he was there shooting them and they were both beautiful and handsome
and rock-jawed, and she was gorgeous.
And I couldn't resist but just going up to them
and taking a Polaroid of them,
and giving it to them.
And they were thrilled!
And the beauty of that was that was the one picture on their wedding night
that they were gonna see of themselves, you know?
All the pictures taken by the other photographer,
they weren't gonna see those for weeks.
They had the Polaroid, he tucked it in his pocket
on his jacket and that night when they started their honeymoon,
they were gonna have that picture with them.
You can only do that with the Polaroids.
And that's what's so great about them.
Instant artifact, instant memory and they're so much more profound
because people are enjoying them in the moment.
And so later on when they have their memories,
they're gonna remember enjoying that photo at the moment
that they were in and in that moment.
So there's something that's sort of doubly significant
about a memory provoking artifact that is actually part of the memory,
if that makes sense.
It makes sense if you've experienced it, obviously.
DAN WEISSMAN: In the autumn of '89 I went to Prague.
And I was shooting on the main square, Wenceslas Square,
and I started taking pictures, Polaroid pictures.
And these kids had never seen a Polaroid in their lives.
And I was mobbed by kids!
And I just blasted through all of my rolls. (CHILDREN LAUGHING)
You ever seen one of these?
No? I'm not surprised.
Thank you. Sure.
If you look at the side, in a minute or so,
you'll see a picture of yourself.
You probably haven't seen that before.
How old are you?
Five? Seven?
That's right, you're not supposed to talk to strangers and I am a stranger.
But you can go away and show that to your Mom or whoever you're with.
Okay. Okay? It's a camera.
Bye.
(LAUGHING)
What makes Polaroid different
from any kind of image capturing that occurred before it,
or since, including digital,
um, is the production of this physical object
that you can share with people.
And if you're all by yourself in the middle of nowhere shooting Polaroids,
it is still a social experience.
It's a social experience you are having with yourself with this thing
that you've just created that is appearing in front of you.
That is not just the picture,
but the picture within a framed, already a framed, matted object and...
Digital, as far as I'm concerned,
you know, there's a lot of overlap.
There's tons of overlap between Polaroid and digital.
But it's the areas that are not overlapped that interest me the most.
You can shoot all the pictures with your iPhone you want.
Show them around with your friends,
e-mail them, whatever,
but you're still not holding onto something.
And there's something about the tangible
which, dare I say, is the analog in the same way that vinyl
has sound impressed on it.
You can look at it closely and see sound waves.
Similarly, with a Polaroid image,
you get it right there.
You see the analog of what has just happened recorded
by light on silver with dyes.
It's amazing and there's nothing like it.
There never was before,
and there has only been that since.
And they improved it and improved it to the point that
when the SX-70 and then the 600 film came out,
these were sort of the pinnacle achievements
of a process of thought that began in the '40s, the 1940s.
And to this day, that experience hasn't been equaled.
BARBARA HITCHCOCK: In the '40s, I think 1943,
Dr. Land and his family were on vacation in Santa Fe.
His daughter Jennifer and Land were walking around town
and he was taking pictures,
and he took a picture of her and she said,
"Why can't I see the picture now, Daddy?"
And he thought about it and said,
"You know, that's a really good question."
So, he took his daughter home
and then went off for a walk by himself
and he was reported,
I think, in Life magazine in the '70s,
as saying, within the hour of walking around Santa Fe,
thinking about how that could possibly happen,
he'd figured out a way to make an instant photograph.
Now, it took him four years,
I believe it was, before they actually had something that they could show
and announce to the public that they had figured out
how to make instant photography.
Let's see, I first became involved with Polaroid in 1971.
Polaroid was a very, very exciting place to be.
Um, innovation, imagination, creativity,
they were really kind of mantras of the company.
Dr. Land was at the helm.
He was the founder and the inventor of instant photography.
And Land, in many ways, he was many things.
He was an educator, he was a leader, he was a scientist,
he was a physicist, he was a Renaissance man.
He believed that in his heart he was an artist,
which was a very interesting take
on someone that founds a Fortune 500 company.
You know, you think you're going to go work for a technology company,
and you find out that you're really dealing with the art and the artist,
both the art of the science and the art of the image.
It was...
Uh...
Magical in a way,
and I think that you would hear that from so many people
that worked at Polaroid in...
You know, those first 50 years, let's say.
It was a family.
Everybody did whatever they could to please
Dr. Land, "the boss."
And there was just so much energy and excitement,
and everybody loved to go to work.
GENE DONOVAN: It was a fun place.
Everyone loved the man in charge as almost a father figure,
and he knew everyone by their first name of the local people in the Cambridge area.
We were on first-name basis ourselves.
He called me "Geno." And I called him Dr. Land.
My name is Gene Donovan.
I worked at Polaroid from September 4, 1968,
at 12:00 p.m.,
until July 18, 2008,
at 3:30 p.m.
Almost my entire adult life was spent at Polaroid.
During that time, I was fortunate enough to know all of the big people
in the company including the man himself, Dr. Land.
Dr. Land was a private person on the outside.
A lot of people thought he was a grouchy old man
because of the look on his face quite often.
He's always in with thinking.
He wasn't open with anyone
on my level because we were his employees.
I sat outside his lab and office
at night, 4:00 in the afternoon
until whenever he decided to go home.
And he would come out every single midnight,
bring me a cup of coffee and shoot the breeze
for 15 minutes to clear his head.
Quite often, when I'd be sitting there, he would walk by me
with one of his executives and be...
If he was Einstein, he'd be giving the Theory of Relativity.
He was doing the Dr. Land thing,
saying things in front of me
that never should have been said in front of anyone,
him knowing that I would die before I would betray him.
I personally loved it. All of my friends,
who I still see occasionally, they all loved it,
and there's no other way to explain it than true love for a family atmosphere.
Nobody knew what I really did there at Polaroid except those who were supposed to.
(KNOCKS ON TABLE)
End of story.
That's the truth, too. (LAUGHING)
And I won't even tell you what I really did there,
because no one knows, except me and the people who were supposed to.
The fact of the matter is the man would look at me
and hand me a cup of coffee at midnight
and stand there and talk about nothing.
That, to me, was the most important thing that he ever did,
was to become personal with me.
And to this day,
even though he's gone,
I still think of him frequently.
That's enough, 'cause I might start crying. (CHUCKLES)
DAVID HALE: Working for Polaroid,
when I first started and for 20, 25 years,
it had a tremendous amount of prestige.
And it was very, very aggressive, competitive and fun.
It was a lot of pride in being on the A Team,
but there was also a lot of passion
for the product, for the company.
You wanted to do well.
When I joined Polaroid, it was probably very, very late
in Dr. Land's active career.
He wrote an open letter to the company.
Before I started, someone had given it to me to show me
what the culture of Polaroid was.
And the basics were that the union had tried to integrate Polaroid
in probably the early '70s, I gotta believe or maybe it was the late '60s.
And he hand wrote a three-page letter to the entire population,
apologized for the, uh... The intrusion.
It could almost bring tears to your eyes when you read it.
I kept it with me in plastic,
for all the years that I was there after someone gave it to me.
And every time I interviewed somebody,
every time someone said to me, "What's it like to work at Polaroid?"
I pulled it out and I said, "Here. Read this letter."
"This will tell you little bit about the company and its legacy."
PAUL GIAMBARBA: Polaroid in the '60s and '70s
was the Apple of today
because they were unique.
Um, I think Apple is unique but they are not really as unique as Polaroid was,
because nobody had instant film.
There wasn't anybody producing a camera
that would take a picture in a minute.
The really original conception was when Land's daughter
asked him while they were vacationing in Santa Fe, that old story,
"Why can't we have a picture in a minute?"
I think then he was thinking of just getting a photograph.
But Ansel Adams was one of his first hires as a consultant.
And so, Land was looking for quality.
I think Polaroid was a big piece of American culture during those years.
When I started working with them,
they were a 50 million dollar company,
and when I left working with Polaroid,
they were over two billion dollars with a "B."
I would say I'd be most known for the package design.
What I did was a big deal at that time because it gave the consumer
the first chance to be able to pronounce the name.
I mean, when I tell people
that a lot of people couldn't say "Polaroid," they can't believe it.
But I heard somebody just the other day say "Poylaroad."
People would actually say "Poylaroad."
And the package designed at the time
didn't differentiate between the O and the A
because it was a typeface called Memphis
that they dickied up a little bit, you know,
and made it even worse to be able to tell the difference between the O and the A.
So I went for a black end panel with "Polaroid" in News Gothic in caps,
and that stood out.
And it was very visible particularly in black and white television
because Polaroid was advertising on TV at that time.
They bought The Steve Allen Show,
which I loved because I used to watch it anyway,
and it was wonderful because he could never figure out how to use the camera.
And he had that cackling laugh,
you know, get hysterical,
pulling tabs and so on.
But at least he held up the box and you could see "Polaroid."
MAN: Today will be a turning point in the history of photography.
Photography will never again be the same after today.
GIAMBARBA: The introduction of the SX-70 in 1972 was a huge deal.
HITCHCOCK: Dr. Land, with great fanfare and to, I think
5,000 shareholders in a warehouse in Needham, Massachusetts,
showed the SX-70 to the people that assembled for that purpose.
DONOVAN: Dr. Land came up,
got on to the stage,
surrounded by all of the shareholders.
I was standing below the stage,
next to him, because he was...
He considered me his "good luck charm."
He reached in his pocket, took out the SX-70 camera,
unfolded it, sighted, took a picture.
He held the picture up face-forward to the crowd
so it would develop and they would see it.
He looked down at me and he said,
"Ta-da!" As if saying, "I told you so."
HITCHCOCK: He was very, very much excited
about this new camera and film.
And one of the reasons he was excited about it
was because it was what we call "integral film,"
and that means that all of the chemistry and magic
happens in a small sandwich or container.
You don't have any detritus to throw away,
which was one of the things that he really, really, really wanted to make happen,
because he was very sensitive to the fact
that people would take pictures with the older peel-apart film,
you've got this stuff, you have to throw it away,
and it would litter the landscape.
And he wanted to stop that.
So it was really important for him to create a more user-friendly,
green film.
Dr. Land's real love
was with the ability
of anybody to pick up an SX-70 camera, for instance,
and take a picture and be an artist.
Because he believed that there was a kernel of creativity
in every single human being,
and that he was creating tools
that would make it easier for you
and everyone to become an artist.
This camera and this film,
it took off like wildfire.
This camera was seen almost everywhere and anywhere.
It had an enormous impact
on how people interacted with one another,
communicated with one another,
for parties for sure, but it was really a tool of communication.
NOBLE: I think I've taken (SIGHS)
somewhere between
4,000-5,000, maybe?
There's 1,100 on the wall,
give or take. Um...
And I've got another, maybe like 2,000 or 3,000 in boxes,
so again, probably around 4,000.
I've been shooting Polaroid film since 1996.
Uh... I read a Stephen King story,
The Sun Dog that had a Polaroid in it.
So I went and found my mom's Polaroid and started shooting with that.
Uh, I don't know how often I shot back then,
but it was enough that I kept carrying a camera around
pretty much from then until now.
Part of the reason I started taking pictures
was to have something to do socially, like at parties and stuff like that.
And it's made me a more social person.
So... I think for me,
photography in general, is very social
and Polaroid is just an extension of that for me.
I think that as it stands today, I could take Polaroids today
because it's utterly unique among any kind of camera.
And you get... And especially if you use,
you know, a good Polaroid camera,
you get an amazing image with a unique color palette and a print
in your hands in, you know, minutes.
No other camera does that.
The Polaroid experience, for me was exactly what I wanted from photography.
You got a unique interaction with your subject
because people weren't used to seeing a Polaroid camera.
You got very quick response.
You got to see your image and your subject got to see the image.
And if they wanted, they could keep the image,
you could give the images away.
You could keep them yourself and then you'd have,
if you wanted, a wall of Polaroids.
It's a whole process.
It's that opening the camera,
marveling at how it works,
engaging with your subject,
taking the picture,
having that end result in your hands.
No, it's good. Yay, it came out.
For me, the perfect photographic experience.
That nothing, I doubt in 30 years they'll be able to
come up with anything to replicate that.
KIM VAN GROOS: There is something about the film,
that white border coming out and watching it develop,
that no one else has.
That pause until you see the picture you took,
um, there's nothing else like it.
The picture is what it is and there is no way to change that.
So, when you see the standard Polaroid picture
with the white border around it,
you know that's the image the photographer saw
and that's the image they took.
There's no editing,
there's no manipulation, there's no darkroom involved, there's nothing you can do.
Once you've hit that button, it's out of your hands.
And you know that by seeing that border on the photo.
'Cause if it has been scanned,
and then manipulated and reprinted,
you'll know right away that it's not an original Polaroid.
And no other...
...photograph medium has that because even film can be scanned,
and edited, manipulated,
and then reprinted on photographic paper and you'd never know.
But with Polaroid, you know if it's altered in any way.
So I think it has that sort of integrity, to understand that
in this digital age where Photoshop is out of control,
and you have no idea how good a photographer actually is
or if they're good at computers.
Polaroid sort of brings it back to the core of photography,
like, "This is the image I saw. This is the image I took."
I'm looking for pictures of the Polaroid House,
but um... I'm not very organized.
All those were scanned and now I can't find them.
MAN: You also learn that just because you have them scanned
doesn't mean you actually have them.
So it's a good thing I have the pictures themselves somewhere.
I don't know where it is.
It would be somewhere in this disaster.
My name is Dag Spicer,
senior curator at the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, California.
I think this generation and young people today
are taking thousands and thousands of pictures and videos,
which are another big space hog, as we call it,
and that is it requires a lot of space on your disk.
And it's almost of an ephemeral nature.
It seems like in the past we maybe took
more care in taking pictures.
We had, for example, film.
We only had a certain amount of photographs available,
maybe 24 or 36 photos that we could take
at once before changing the film.
And I think people took more care
in taking photographs because the film was actually expensive
and you didn't want to waste film.
It seemed like a bigger deal to get people together for a photograph.
It seemed to be more of a social marker
in terms of marking the photo as a special event.
Now, with everyone having cell phones and cameras built into cell phones,
the most trivial concerns of our civilization are being photographed
and videotaped and distributed widely.
A lot of people compare today's media with what has come before.
And there are various camps
that maintain that old media are actually superior.
The tapes behind me, for example,
which hold about 150 megabytes each,
can still be read even though they're nearly 50 years old.
I doubt very much that CDs will be read 50 years from now.
Another example is vinyl LP records.
Compare them again to CDs.
CDs may last five to ten,
maybe 20 years,
especially if they're professionally mastered,
that is, from a record company as opposed to CDs that you make yourself,
which have even lower life spans,
and compare that to a vinyl record,
and people can still play vinyl records from 100 years ago.
The differences, I think, between old and new technologies is that
older formats, which tend to be analog in nature,
actually rely on far simpler mechanisms
for the reproduction of the information,
uh, compared to today's technology,
which is digital and requires essentially a computer system
in order to get any information off that media.
Well, right now, the most reliable archival medium is probably still paper.
If you use archival quality paper,
which is just paper that has a low acid content
so that it won't yellow and deteriorate with age,
that stuff lasts for at least 100 years,
maybe several hundred years.
Now, obviously, you can't put everything on a piece of paper,
but I do think that if you are serious about preserving texts,
for example, like essays and things you've written,
or letters from your grandparents and that kind of thing,
there's something to be said for printing those out
and keeping them in a file folder.
It sounds counterintuitive,
it's very old-tech,
but it's what we have experience with
and we can still read paper that was written
or that had information put on it thousands of years ago.
We have no similar track record with any technology.
If you consider that the computer revolution is only about 50 years old,
we're just taking our first baby steps
towards a long-lasting archival medium.
JACOBSON: It was magic. I can remember...
I can remember the first time I saw one.
My aunt had an SX-70 and brought it to my third birthday.
And I remember we'd all crowd around to watch the picture appear.
It was so amazing.
We'd just watch and watch, and all of a sudden there you'd see it.
Everyone would say, "Do you see it yet? It's coming in." There it was.
The thing is, when I was a kid I'd get the film
I'd probably shoot only a pack or two a year because I couldn't afford it.
My parents would get me packs of film for my birthday or Christmas.
Then you'd just go out and shoot 'em
and look at your camera on your shelf for months.
But it was always fun to have it.
Nothing looks like them, nothing looks like them.
I can take a digital picture
and spend all day in Photoshop and light room
and try to replicate it,
and you can make it look kind of like it,
but it really doesn't. It just never does.
It doesn't translate to that to me and it's not as permanent.
It's a bunch of zeros and ones on your computer at the end of the day.
You can make an inkjet print of it that'll fade out in five years.
Or you can take your Polaroid
and be done with it and have it for the rest of your life.
Probably one of the nicest Polaroid cameras ever made.
Of course, it's an SLR,
so which means you see through the lens that you're shooting with.
Um, and of course they have this nice feature of folding flat.
They spent ungodly amount of money developing this camera.
And of course, the other nice thing about it is that it has a real
Tessar-type lens and four elements
manually focused and some were automatically focused,
exposure compensation.
Uh, quite a bit different than the plastic lens
and plastic body cameras they later got known for.
So...
Okay, how an SX-70 works.
So, first you open the camera by pulling on the top of the viewfinder
until this strut locks in the side, then the camera is ready to shoot.
To shoot,
you focus with the wheel on the front and then press the red button
when you're ready to take the picture.
What happens inside the camera
is there's a giant mirror lying in the bottom.
And when you press the button,
the shutter closes,
the mirror flips up toward the back of the camera,
and then the shutter makes the exposure very quickly.
When it's done making the exposure,
the mirror flips back down
and a gear-train on the side ejects the print.
As it pushes the print toward the front of the camera,
it pushes it through the two rollers in the front,
which spread the chemicals across the emulsion.
As it goes through the rollers,
it comes out the front and you can grab it.
And then your picture is ready to self-develop.
(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)
(ENGINE STARTS)
Hi, how are you? Good, how are you doing?
I'm doing great. What can I do for you today?
I'm looking for Polaroid 600 film.
We are all out of Polaroid 600.
We sold the last of our stock in July.
Oh, figures.
Do you know anyone else in town who's got it?
Have you tried, um, Freestyle or Mel Pierce?
No. Sammy's?
They're all gone.
You guys had it the longest.
You were my only hope, really. I'm sorry.
(LAUGHING) That's all right.
Do you have 669?
We are all out of 669 as well.
The only Polaroid that we have left is 664.
It's the 100-speed black and white...
We've like five twin-packs.
You're not getting any more in, right? No.
No.
All right. Well, thanks so much anyway.
No problem. Take care. You, too.
JOHN WATERS: Now what the hell am I supposed to do?
Polaroid stopping making film ended, for me,
a project that I have been working on since...
Well, 1992, which is where every person
who comes into my house for no matter what reason,
I snap one Polaroid picture of them, I date it,
and vaguely say the reason for the visit.
I'm saying everybody from the worst one-night person I'd maybe like to forget,
to the telephone repairman,
to every person that's ever been in.
And it's an incredibly revealing diary
that really nobody can look at till after I'm dead
and the people in the pictures are even dead,
because it all goes to Wesleyan Film Archive that has all my stuff,
and that's part of the rules.
So I thought, "What am I going to do?"
You know? I have to take these Polaroids!
I've been doing it for 20 years!
Not only in my Baltimore home,
but in my New York home, my San Francisco home,
my Provincetown summer rental.
So, it's been a huge project that I've been working on for years.
So that's why I panicked.
Okay,
here we have decades of Polaroid pictures.
I will select the only random one that isn't taped shut here,
because I don't want people snooping in these when I'm gone.
All right, let's look through and see what we come up with here.
(SIGHS)
Well... God.
Um... God, here's my ex-producer,
she produced Hairspray, the movie,
Rachel Talloway and her little daughter who's now a teenager,
you know, it makes a lot of difference.
1995 to today is quite shocking.
Oh, God, here's people that have gained so much weight,
lost weight... It's kind of amazing.
There's somebody I don't even like anymore.
Oh, there's someone I like a lot.
(LAUGHING) See, these are incredibly revealing.
There's a... Oh, here's a sad one.
Here's what I mean, "sad".
This is my dear brother Steve who died of a brain tumor.
There he is. See? Nobody knew it then.
It's very sobering to look through these pictures in a way.
Um... So that's it. It goes from happy to sad to melancholy to a...
This is probably,
I'd say, two years' worth in here.
Shut, and that's it.
And now it's time to take your Polaroid.
One... And a two... And a...
Ah!
DAVE BIAS: In February of 2008,
Polaroid announced they were going to stop making film,
and there were a lot of us who were kind of up in arms about that.
It sort of happened in what we thought was
sort of in a passive aggressive kind of way.
In an article in the Boston Globe
that was ostensibly about other things.
Um... It's like, "Oh, yeah,"
"and we're going to stop making film."
And I think a lot of us, especially in the Flickr community,
who were communicating with each other a lot, we really got upset about it.
And I had been in pretty close communication with Sean Tubridy,
uh, a friend on Flickr and other social media,
who I'd never met in person at that point in time.
And he and I,
over the course of a couple of chats and then an actual phone call,
decided that we felt like we should do something about it.
TUBRIDY: Oddly enough, Polaroid announced
that they would stop making film on my birthday,
which was kind of a bummer.
(LAUGHING)
Uh, so, it was interesting. I, um...
I think I read the announcement either in the New York Times,
or online, in some magazine,
I can't remember exactly where it was.
And I immediately went on to Flickr.com,
the photo sharing site where I post a lot of my photos,
and, yeah, sure enough, people were just really upset.
They were posting in the forums on there.
I've never seen anything of this magnitude where people were
so upset by the discontinuation of a film
or by the discontinuation of a product.
Um, at the same time, I can't think of a company
that just decided to discontinue
everything that they make and what made them special, in one big swoop.
BIAS: So, we got "Save Polaroid" together,
we, of course, contacted Polaroid.
That was the first course of action,
was to try to get someone on the horn at Polaroid
who could at least clarify their position
about why they were getting rid of the film,
and maybe give us a timeline when the film would be disappearing.
Um... Their response was, you know, crickets.
It was just silence.
The more we learned over the weeks that followed
about what had happened at the Polaroid Corporation years prior,
with the new owners and their intentions,
and how they had, sort of, closed down some of the factories already,
and you know we understood clearly that it was actually
uh, already well in progress.
TUBRIDY: I don't want to say I was entirely surprised.
I knew that they were going to start phasing out film eventually.
Uh, I just never thought that they would just do a clean sweep
and just end it all, all at once.
Uh, they had plans to keep making it for another year
but as it turns out,
they had already been tearing down the factories at that point
and they were pretty much already done with production,
so this wasn't something that they had just decided to do,
it had probably been years in the making.
It was kind of like standing on the deck of the ship and waving the flag.
It's like, "Hey," you know, "We're here!"
There are a lot of people who still use this stuff
and we don't really want it to go away just yet.
TUBRIDY: You know, it's just film, it's just a product.
But at the same time it's a product that creates something special
when people use it.
It's not a car, it's not a computer,
it's not something you just use and then it wears out
and you throw it away.
We're talking about pictures here.
We're talking about real life and experiences and memories.
So,
I think Polaroid really made an error in judgment there.
I think they thought they would end it and that would be it.
And, gladly, I'm not the only one,
a lot of people out there are really upset
about the discontinuation of instant film.
The day I heard the news that they were gonna...
...stop making Polaroid is very clear in my mind.
I was sitting here and immediately I actually went online to talk to Tod,
and I told him I was just going to stop using Polaroid altogether
that very day, that I was going to sell my camera.
I put up a listing on eBay.
I was like, "All right, if it's done, then I'll just stop."
So I don't have to go through the pain of watching it dwindle
or beginning to hoard my film.
I was very afraid of it changing how I took pictures,
how I shot Polaroids because there were only so many left
and fixating on that aspect when shooting.
I went through all the stages of grief and arrived that,
I'll just use it until it was gone
and then devote myself more to medium format.
That's how things went.
With a lot of the good things that you love, they leave you.
The feeling was worse than getting dumped.
It's more like something dying, which it is.
It's a death of a format.
And, for me,
at this point, Polaroid is my...
Well, photography, is my passion.
That being the center of my photography at the time.
You know, it was the end of being able to take a certain kind of picture,
the only kind of picture I wanted to take at the time, for the most part.
Polaroid matters because it matters to me.
That's the real answer for me.
It matters because it matters to me.
It matters because it matters to a lot of the people that I know
and whose creative work I really, really respect and admire.
It matters because, um...
A lot of the world's best photographers cut their teeth on Polaroid.
So if you ask a painter, "Why does painting matter?"
It matters because it's how I interpret the things around me.
This is the camera that I use to interpret the things around me and, damn it,
it has to have Polaroid film to work in it.
So it really matters to me.
I'll take one decent Polaroid
over 100 good digital pictures any day.
Just because I can carry it around with me in my pocket and show it to people.
And it just has physical, real world weight.
It doesn't mean that digital pictures aren't great.
They're fine. They just leave me cold.
Digital things are inherently pretty darn sterile.
It's just fact of the matter. There's no warmth to it.
I like real things. I dress in real clothes.
I wear real shoes. I drive a real car. I want real photographs.
It's all part of the real world.
I don't want to spend that much time on the computer.
I already spend too much time on the computer.
I don't want to have to be on my computer to look at photographs.
I want to look through photographs, not images.
It's a big difference!
I use Polaroid to take photographs,
not to make images.
And I will miss being able to take photographs if I can no longer do it.
I will miss it a lot. The world is going to miss it, just doesn't know it yet.
But it will.
And if the world doesn't miss it... Ah, fuck 'em.
BRADLEY JOHNSON: I was really disappointed when I heard that Polaroid
was going to stop making the film
because I use it on a regular basis.
I use it almost every day.
It had always been fairly easy to get the film even though it is quite expensive.
When it was discontinued, the price shot up.
And immediately people were buying out stores
probably just to resell it on eBay and make a profit,
which is unfortunate for all the artists like us.
But I found some here and there,
but it was really disappointing.
Well, when the film is all gone,
I guess I'll just keep shooting regular film, roll film.
But...
I don't know, that's a good question. (LAUGHING)
I'm definitely going to try to get film from wherever I can
and if eventually it runs out and nobody keeps it in production,
I guess I'll have to bear it and move on,
but I'd rather it didn't come to that.
I really do enjoy it and I think that there's nothing else like it.
The instant film thing was just really what set them apart
and really grew the company.
And they just kind of seemed to have forgotten that.
I know that they have one of the biggest collections
of original Polaroid instant film
from all the huge artists,
like Ansel Adams and everybody.
And I don't know what they're going to do with all those photos.
Probably just sell them off.
But it's kind of a shame that the new management
doesn't really appreciate what the company was founded on,
and what they were all about,
what Mr. Land cared about.
The last picture?
I don't know, that's hard to say.
It'll probably be either of me or my girlfriend.
Probably my girlfriend, I like to shoot her a lot more than I like to shoot myself.
(LAUGHING)
VAN GROOS: I think when the announcement came
that Polaroid wasn't going to make instant film anymore,
it was like a culmination of the inevitable.
(SIGHS)
I mean, that's the unfortunate part of our society moving into the sort of Digital Age.
People don't have a lot of respect or value for things
because they love them or because they are artistic.
They just want what's easy and convenient.
With all these digital pictures, they're not...
99% of them, I would say, are not being printed out.
They are not becoming photos
that will be put in an album or a box somewhere.
And it's like losing a piece of your history.
I mean, there's pictures I found of myself,
my mom was way into Polaroids in the '70s and '80s,
pictures I found of myself as a little kid,
and thought, like, "It's amazing that I have this."
Like there's a picture of me at Easter all dressed up
when I was five with my sisters.
It's something to really treasure, and to not have that
would be losing a piece of my history.
Because I remember that moment...
But I'm holding a concrete reminder of, you know, Easter, 1983.
(LAUGHING) So that's amazing,
and kids growing up in the digital age won't have that.
They won't find pictures of themselves,
they'll lose these memories that they didn't...
No one cared enough to print out.
It sounds really melodramatic,
but it's sort of like the death of a friend.
Maybe not that tragic, but certainly that final.
I mean, this is something that
anyone will recognize a Polaroid photograph. Anyone.
You can hold this up and say, "What is this?"
Um, and our kids won't have that.
We're letting part of our history,
part of our, um, society,
part of who we are is... is disappearing
and nobody is doing anything about it.
Tragic.
JACKIE NEALE CHADWICK: The thought of losing Polaroid film just is,
um, to me is throwing away
one of the most important inventions of our time.
I find that it's part of the fabric
of our memory in the 20th century.
Um, I feel that
to consider important inventions like that disposable,
is like a travesty.
Um, it was...
Polaroid was a creative outlet
for many famous photographers
and I know that when they...
When they said that they were closing the lab,
that it was, like, devastating to their entire career.
So...
It's hard to imagine some of that work
even being produced without Polaroid.
I... I almost counted on them
for being the voice of artists
who insist on Polaroid continuing, in a way. (CHUCKLING)
The idea that somebody won't have a shoebox of photographs in their...
To reach back... Like, reach back on their childhood with.
It just makes me so sad.
I just don't even know what to say about that.
I just don't even...
I don't even want to think about it
because the prints that come out of a consumer printer,
that my mom prints or my brother prints for me,
they look horrible.
The colors are so wonky
and then they begin to discolor over age
and it's just...
I almost feel like it's going to disappear from the page
before they even turn 17.
You know how you sit there with the Polaroid?
And this motion means something to every person I know
that's, like, 20 and older.
Polaroid was always associated with being a fun...
A fun moment.
A fun, "Let's show each other what we just produced."
Um, "Look how I saw you. Look how I saw this" moment.
It was tangible, it wasn't on the back of a camera.
It was something that I thought was important, that I loved.
I just remember, like, it coming out of the camera
and waiting for it to develop, and it coming...
It was like a ghost appearing before your eyes.
It was pretty cool.
It's pretty... It's pretty neat.
(VOICE BREAKING) I don't want to do this.
It's what photography has always meant to me.
It's always something
that is part of my identity.
It's part of the fabric of who I am.
It's... You know what?
I'd, like... You know, digital has really taken...
Digital photography has taken that element out of
creating photography.
It's completely taken that sentimentality out of it for me.
I'm not sure I'm so excited about the future of photography.
You know what I feel really sad about is that
we often have to defend ourselves and our interests.
And it's seen as this, like,
archaic dinosaur life.
And that makes me more upset than...
It makes me more upset about that
than even the challenge of trying to get Polaroid to be part...
Like, to be a choice or something that we can, um, buy anymore.
I just don't like the idea of it becoming history.
You know, that makes me really upset.
And I hate crying because it's so stupid. But...
Haiti is, like, in dire straits right now
and I'm crying over Polaroid! (SNIFFLES)
I hear a lot from people, um,
when they see me on the street with my SX-70, um...
Using film.
I have people who just randomly come up...
I guess they think I'm silly
or mental or something,
and they come up to me and they're like, "You know",
"digital cameras are much easier."
And I thank them and send them on their way,
because, you know,
anything I would say would kind of be lost on them.
I believe that
because digital and analog photography
are two different kinds of tools,
that you can use them both.
And you use digital for one purpose
because it satisfies a need,
and you use analog for another purpose
because that's more appropriate.
And so I think that
if people are open enough,
then they can find characteristics in digital
which work perfectly
and others in analog that work perfectly
for the particular product that they're attempting to create.
So from that kind of perspective,
why not use them both?
Now there may be reasons
that an individual doesn't want to
because they hate computers
or, you know, whatever it may happen to be.
But certainly, they are two great tools
that will help people
um, be creative and be expressive
and be able to communicate something to somebody.
I've never really felt like
digital anything needs to replace
what has come before.
The perfect example for me is books.
I like books.
I like to put them on my shelf.
I'm sorry that we have to use trees to make paper,
but, you know, it's kind of the way it is.
I like books.
I'm not completely against the digital readers.
Um, I definitely see the convenience factor, but I like books.
It's like an aesthetic choice.
It's like why someone chooses painting over sculpting.
Just the idea of spending more time at a computer,
trying to organize my photographs?
I would go bananas.
We take thousands and thousands of pictures,
and many of them never see the light of day,
um, from your monitor.
You know. It's probably even more important now,
when so many people spend so much time
at their computers or tweeting or phoning.
People, for heaven's sake, phone each other when they are
two rooms apart,
instead of actually talking to people.
It was much more fun to sit in the middle of the floor
with the photographs that I took on my vacation,
and lay 'em out, and figure out what I like best,
because I can see 'em all side by side,
and they're big enough so that I can see them.
"Okay, I want these in my album."
And I put them in, and the rest, you know,
they go in the shoebox or they go in the trash.
TUBRIDY: Recently a company called Polapremium has come into the spotlight
and right now what they are is a company that worked with Polaroid
basically to convince them to take what was left of the chemicals
and the components of making film
and kind of squeeze every last drop out of that
and make some special films
to sell to the public.
BIAS: Polapremium was sort of the partnership with Polaroid
to sell all the last film.
I started writing Doc.
You know, I knew he ran the company.
I knew he had some sort of relationship with Polaroid.
And I just started lobbing the e-mails out there.
And I didn't get a response from him for the longest time,
but I was persistent.
And I just kept saying,
"If you know anything, I'm the guy from Save Polaroid.
"We've got some ideas. We'd love to help.
"We'd love to do whatever we can to,
"you know, to spread the word."
"We know that you might know a little bit more"
"about the inside of what's going on"
"in this situation than we do."
And Doc, for his part,
gave me just enough response
over the course of about a year
that it kept me sending those e-mails.
Like the occasional, like, "Hey, what's up?"
"Anything new going on? Anything you want to tell us?"
I think it was that persistence that ultimately
got me my, you know, where I am... (CHUCKLES)
You know, working with these guys now for about a year.
KAPS: The whole thing is a big surprise...
Not a surprise, it's, you know, it's...
It changes, basically the market changes every day.
And Polaroid stopped looking at the customers
a long time ago because there was, you know,
it was easy... It was an easy game.
They were the existing big channels
like medicine, dentists, police,
law enforcement and...
Picture...
Passport pictures, everything.
It was in place, it was just not producing and feeding.
And then suddenly this new aspect came along,
this new creative, artistic scenario started.
It was for me a surprise
when I started to
deal with this product that so many young people
start to shoot Polaroid images.
When I started I thought, "Okay."
"Let's talk to the people still using it."
But, in fact, now
the majority of my customers
are people who start using it,
especially because it's the most anti-digital medium available.
I went to market yesterday
and I saw this old Polaroid camera,
which is sold for 15 euros
and I thought, "Why not?"
The idea was that because me and my friends are on InterRail,
we're going from country to country in Europe,
and I wanted to take a picture of every person
or group of persons we met on our trip.
And I thought
a Polaroid would be a fun way to do it
because you only have one chance, and...
It's a fun way to keep the memory.
What's interesting is the colors,
and the way it looks like
it's another universe than what we usually see.
You don't get...
Normally, with photography, you want to get something real
and capture that exact moment,
or, not moment, that exact feeling or...
Or something, just what you see,
but here, you get something else.
You get, like, your own universe.
There's no more left?
Yeah, I guess that makes it even more special.
While Polaroid did enjoy a monopoly
in the instant film business,
there was still plenty of competition
that was eating into our business as we went along.
The first major dent in our business
probably came from the point-and-shoot cameras
as they became easier to use and less expensive.
After that, obviously, the digital phenomenon came
and there was a migration
of people moving to digital.
A lot of people moved to digital
for professional reasons, for personal reasons, and for cost reasons.
Instant film was always profitable.
We had to size the business
around the size of the sales.
So, as the business declined,
it only made sense that we shed expenses
to try to keep the margins, try to maintain the margins.
So, obviously,
at one time we had 23,000 people,
we shed people,
we shed real estate,
we shed expenses, overhead, everywhere we could,
but the business, the film business was always profitable.
It always had a very high margin.
As profitable as the film was,
and as the business continued to decline,
our suppliers, the people who supplied us with the raw materials,
were coming to us at some point saying,
"It doesn't make any sense"
"for us to manufacture this product anymore."
Just like we would if any volume of any product
dropped to a certain level,
it didn't make any sense for us to make it anymore.
Our suppliers were saying the same thing to us.
It was a decision that was taken a long time ago.
Basically, I think, in the beginning of 2005,
when there was a new owner of Polaroid, Tom Petters,
who spent over 400 million US dollars
to buy the Polaroid brand.
His business model was to
use the brand to sell
television, digital cameras, digital picture frames,
printers, whatever.
And he looked
over all the things that he bought
and he found out, okay, there is a huge production area in Boston
where the real estate is worth
about maybe $200 million
and he thought, "Oh, wow! If I can sell this,"
"this would be a nice way"
"to get back a lot of my investment in one shot."
So he asked them, "What are you doing?"
And they said, "Yeah, we're producing negative"
"and components for analog instant photography
"for the Polaroid film."
And then he said, "Okay, wow! That's great.
"What is about the demand of how many films"
"will we produce over the next years?"
And they looked at all this curves going down and he looked
the digital photography getting strong and strong
and then he said, "Okay."
"We do the following..."
We did a forecast over a five-year period of time,
and tried to size where the business was going.
And at that point in time,
we made a purchase of raw materials,
a last ditch purchase, if you will.
A terminal buy, if you will.
And bought enough materials to support the company on a five-year plan.
We built the product.
We shut the factories down and closed the machines,
we laid off the people...
And for the last five years,
we worked on a forecast,
and we sold to that forecast.
And many times we exceeded the forecast.
And the concern was that we were going to be out of film
before the five-year plan.
But we never, ever
hit the numbers of decline
that were put in place for us, the forecast.
The bad thing, or the good thing for Polaroid was
that they sold a lot more films than they expected,
so, basically, in the middle of 2008,
they ran out of components.
They had no negative left, they had...
They were missing some other components
that are essential for producing the film.
First year, down 18, second year, down 22,
third year, down 28,
you know, 32, 47.
Those things never happened.
Our business declined to a level
and stayed at that level
within a certain degree.
We were running way ahead of forecast.
And so, we were running ahead of the five-year plan.
We worked the plan
and we were very, very profitable.
I dare say we were probably as profitable the last three or four years
than we ever were in our heyday.
TUBRIDY: You know, we've targeted Fuji and Ilford
and they were the primary people
who we thought would, if anyone,
make instant film.
There's certainly a possibility that
a third party might come in
and buy some of the equipment.
It's pretty hard though. I mean,
I've never toured the Polaroid factories,
but from what I understand,
and from what I've seen in photos,
it's pretty big
and pretty complicated equipment,
to move, to maintain,
and in addition,
the chemicals are kind of hard to come by.
They're not something that you can buy in small amounts,
they have to be bought in bulk.
There are a lot of things that have to be mined specifically for them.
So it's no easy undertaking.
And it's for a niche market for sure.
I don't think anyone's going to
get super rich off of making instant film.
But, you know, there's still the possibility.
So, we'll see what happens.
Yeah, they've got to reformulate the whole way that the film is made.
How they achieve these colors, how the dyes work.
It's a huge engineering project
to reformulate
Polaroid film... Polaroid integral film,
because it's something that Dr. Land...
You know, he was... To me...
To many, he was a bona fide genius.
So trying to come up with a different way than he did it?
Pretty significant task.
I think it will be different,
it won't be the same tones
and the same colors that I love,
but different is good.
I'm not opposed to that, I'll support it. Absolutely.
(CLOCK TICKING)
When I heard about the Impossible Project, I was like,
"Yes, there are people out there as insane"
"as they need to be to do that!"
"To undertake, to reproduce the process,"
"so that we wouldn't lose this."
And to me that's like the greatest gift.
(LAUGHING) It's...
What can you say?
This shouldn't disappear.
As I understand, the Impossible Project
is one in which
an entrepreneur
who is absolutely crazy in love
with Polaroid analog photography
wants to create instant photography again
for so many people who are out there
that still want to take Polaroid pictures.
I've read somewhere where they call him
"The Crazy Austrian."
Nonetheless, I think he's a very sane man. (LAUGHS)
A very decent guy who is really trying to do something
that he knows a lot of people love, and that he loves.
And that's to recreate instant film.
Doc flew to the States in November of 2008
and informed us that
he bought the factory and was going to try to make new film.
And at that time,
you know, he was like, "Yeah we can do it. Yeah we can do it."
And at the same time, I think,
we all kind of understood
you know, that we needed the gung-ho attitude,
but we understood that it was an enormous undertaking.
HITCHCOCK: Some people may think that
he's just turning on the machinery again.
And certainly that's not the case at all.
One has to find vendors
that will produce the various components that you need.
The landscape has changed
since the digital revolution.
And many of the chemicals and things
that one used to be able to get more frequently,
maybe they're not available,
so you have to figure out what it is that you can use
that will make things work.
I know the Impossible Project is an aptly named project.
I think it's really ambitious that they're taking it on.
It's definitely an enormous undertaking.
I know when Polaroid invented the SX-70 camera,
they spent more R&D money on it
than had ever spent on any item
ever developed at that time.
I forget what it was, but it was a lot of money.
So to kind of replicate all their R&D work
and to reinvent the film
that works with that is ambitious.
Of the people involved, if they're the people I understand they are,
if anyone could do it, they're the people who could do it.
KAPS: Hopefully my future is that we will be able to...
We, the team of people,
will be able to reinvent
and restart production
of new instant film.
So, especially, we focus on the integral film,
so the film that you can watch developing in the palm of your hands.
And...
We bought the last Polaroid factory
that produced these kinds of films,
in the Netherlands.
And we have a team of,
I think, 14 people right now there,
that, um... (STUTTERING)
Spending all their time and energy
and all their knowledge
to restart and reinvent, recreate
a new kind of instant-film format.
I said, "Okay, I can collect the money and finance"
"and put this on track,"
but then within one year they have to tell me
they can do it or they can't do it.
So it's called the "Impossible Project,"
because everybody said it's impossible to bring back instant film.
Polaroid said, "We tried everything."
"It's impossible to keep Polaroid film alive."
Basically, I think that's true.
But the key idea was not to...
...to reinvent Polaroid film,
but to create a new kind of film,
based on all the experience we had
in creating the Polaroid film.
Creating integral instant film is simply impossible.
(LAUGHS) That's the only answer, it's really impossible.
It's an unbelievable combination
of very difficult chemistry.
The negative has 17 layers
of coated chemicals,
and mechanical things happening of,
you know, taking care that the reagent is...
Don't ask me, it's a nightmare.
And very specialized, very complicated.
It's really, it's a miracle.
So you clearly see that developing this film,
and it was first presented in 1972,
it was, you know, that's a billion dollar thing to develop.
And also the machines, everything is handmade, special made.
It's outrageous.
So it's really impossible to produce it right from the scratch.
This recipe contains many, many very special components
that Polaroid produced
themselves for a long time.
The whole setup was globally, so there was one factory for batteries,
one factory for negatives,
one factory for just one chemical,
one factory for whatever.
So we cannot bring back all of this.
Even if we have the recipe,
we cannot get these special color couplers
that have been developed somewhere else in the world.
We bought the old equipment from Polaroid, so it's ours.
We can basically do whatever we want.
So they don't have any influence on the new product.
It's our recipes, it's our knowledge,
it's our machines, it's our factory.
It's not connected at all.
The last connection we still have with Polaroid,
that's this agreement
based on the distribution of their films you see here.
It's around 450,000 Polaroid films,
all different kind of types and shapes.
This was an important part of the whole project.
By the end of the year,
we know that it will take
at least one year to produce new film,
so we tried very hard to find a solution with Polaroid,
that we will get our hands on a large quantity of film
to keep it on the surface for at least one year.
Basically, the agreement was that
we get the exclusive right to distribute
these last, basically, 500,000 films all over the world.
And as we sell it,
then we have a revenue share agreement with them.
So that was an important thing
that they put in place together with buying the factory.
When you ask me the question
if this would be the very last instant film,
if we will not succeed to restart the production,
then I have to answer, yes, this is basically it.
So if we don't succeed in Enschede,
of reinventing instant photography and instant film,
then it will be over after the last pack is sold here.
But of course we will succeed. (CHUCKLES)
So the team there,
these are all our former Polaroid engineers and chemists.
The average age is, I think, 55.
And my partner, who leads the factory there,
his name is Andre Bosman.
He's spent a lot of time there
and really thinking of new solutions,
so he's the perfect guy to make the impossible possible.
I'm Andre Bosman, and we're here in the Impossible Factory,
aimed at recreating SX-70 film.
The natural start for the machines
to take a look at is this machine.
It's a slitter.
Slitting, actually, many people across the world
are into slitting to making small rolls out of big rolls,
but the specialty about this machine is its accuracy.
We actually measure under a microscope,
we look under a microscope for tiny little particles
that are not allowed to be there,
and I don't think anyone else in the world does that.
This part, this foil is used
to make the little pods, the little bags
where the chemical fluids go in.
From... This material is then brought to here.
Here you can see the foil back
that will slit in that machine.
Here it goes in,
through a whole lot of winds,
then it's folded and goes into the web.
In one little pod there is one gram of chemicals,
but it's plus or minus
a ten of a thousandth of a gram per pod, actually,
which is rather accurate. Yeah.
Now we go to the assembly machine.
Here is standing
this five-meter-wide machine.
This is one of them, and if you look down the aisle,
you can't count them,
but you will actually see nine of these machines.
This is the machine that we're doing our testing on,
and we've done quite some testing already.
This is the final product, this is the picture, what it's all about.
If you walk along the machine,
there are some things that you can actually see on the outside.
You can try to film inside, but the door is open,
but it's very dark inside.
You must imagine that people who work here,
this is a true negative material
and there's not something like safe lights.
People often think that you have these red lights on.
Nope, cannot do this with true negative.
This is absolutely pitch black dark.
(CHUCKLES)
You remember
where your body is, basically.
So you have remembrance in your body,
like the way you're able to walk.
You don't think about it.
That's how you operate the machine in the dark as well.
An operator, and we'll need new ones,
in the past we've always said
that an operator with the technical background,
it takes two years before an operator
truly knows the machine inside-out
and can do everything.
This machine runs at 190 frames per minute.
So it's 19 film packs,
there are 10 frames in one pack, per minute,
and it stops and breaks and everything on it.
In 24 hours,
you roughly produce 20,000 film packs.
I would love it if the Impossible Project worked,
but it's called the Impossible Project for a reason.
I don't know if they have a very good chance.
It could very well be that, this is the generation,
this current... The kids now,
anyone younger than a teenager really,
could be the ones who grow up
without having boxes of pictures in the back of the closet.
Absolutely.
The film in itself is a darkroom
and a chemical processing plant and everything
at the same time,
and even the perfect storage place.
And we have to find new ways
than Dr. Land actually took,
because the things he could do,
the chemicals he was able to use,
we don't have access to.
For some reasons they are not there anymore,
and other reasons are they're not allowed anymore.
So many years ago you could use the craziest chemicals,
like mercury or something like... I mean,
people wouldn't care if we used mercury in those days.
Now you cannot do that.
So we have, in that way, a bigger challenge than back then.
Our advantage is, we know it is possible.
Although we're called "impossible,"
we know you can do this.
But we have a very limited time frame, only one year,
to make this happen.
It makes it a huge challenge.
JOHAN VINCENTIE: We are coming to the photo lab,
where I am working for the reagent.
Here are some tests that I am making...
The reagent with the negative and the positive.
And these are the chemicals I need
for making my reagent.
This is the darkroom.
I put the reagent
that I make, I put it here in,
and I do there
in the positive.
The reagent in the envelope, I put it here on.
And I take the negative
and go to the rolls,
and I can make a picture.
Do you see that?
I made the test,
and I want to go
to this picture.
This is the old Polaroid picture, white and black.
And we become...
That's my work today.
MAN: Have you solved this problem?
Uh, maybe. We are behind.
We are getting to the picture.
This was the beginning.
And we are now here.
This is different.
That the Impossible Project was even able to duplicate
the chemical process to create the Polaroid reaction?
Yeah, that's crazy.
They had run out of...
You couldn't use the same chemical process
as you did for Polaroid, because those chemicals weren't in existence anymore.
So, they, 14 people who weren't a big corporation,
who weren't part of Polaroid,
had to come up with another chemical process
to duplicate that same photographic interaction.
BRILLIANT: I think that Doc at the Impossible Project is...
He's probably the most committed person that I know
to getting this off the ground again.
I think that Doc
stands a good chance of pulling it off. I'm hoping so.
BOSMAN: Florian Kaps and I met
at the closing event of Polaroid, in June 2008.
It's the first time we saw each other.
But very interestingly,
we already had the same passion.
And so... I believe that same day that we met,
we decided, "Yes, we want to do this."
Shook hands. Partners.
"We're going to make this happen."
I was the head
of the scrapping unit. (LAUGHS)
I was the cleanup manager.
It was my task, from June on
until December of 2008,
to clean out all these buildings actually
and deliver them back,
broom-sweep clean, to the owner.
So sell and scrap and damage everything basically,
and a lot had been done already.
Just luckily for us, I had not come down
to doing anything to the machines yet, the main machines.
So absolutely, five minutes to 12:00
the next day, on the Monday after the closing event,
I went in the plant,
couldn't discuss this with the director
or with the management or whatever.
I immediately went to my scrapping team
and the people who would start doing it and said,
"We're buying this. Don't do anything."
KEES TEEKMAN: When the...
When Polaroid shut down,
it has been a very
painful experience for all of us, I'm sure.
And for me as well.
But soon after that, I was asked to join the team.
At first it really seemed impossible to me,
so it took some time to make the switch
from leaving this facility
to starting to work here again
on something that I thought was already dead.
I was hesitant to join
because I thought it was really impossible.
I mean, much of what we have
and need to make film is all gone.
As a matter of fact,
I threw away, I think,
half of all the files that I had
in the bin,
and those were things that we might wanna use now.
Yeah, when I started working with Polaroid,
I think we were about 300 to 400 employees.
At the maximum, I think there were 1,000 to 1,100.
And just before we shut the plant down,
we were down to 185.
Now we're at about 13,
and that takes a few adjustments, obviously.
I had been working for Polaroid 30 years.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
And, well, after such a long time
you're kind of, well, doing the same thing all over and over again.
And the attractive proposition in this case was
building on something instead of tearing it apart
and ending something.
This is building something new.
There have been occasions that I thought we wouldn't succeed.
And it will probably happen again.
I think it's like a roller coaster.
Sometimes I'm thinking, "I don't know."
And sometimes I'm thinking, "I think we will do it."
I believe in it.
That we make that story possible.
I believe in it.
That's my dream, to make film.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
It's our dream.
Oh, certainly.
And certainly, I think...
I think it would really, really be a stunt
if we would pull this off.
And I think I would make one of those...
BOTH: To Polaroid.
Yes. Yeah.
That I'm very proud. Oh, yeah.
I'm a week drunk.
(LAUGHS) If it's a success...
We both will.
We both drunk a week long.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes.
BIAS: Since November of 2009,
we have fully occupied our new flagship American space,
officially called Impossible America.
We've formed a business.
We've hired lawyers and accountants
and gotten everything sort of up to speed
as far as creating our corporation in the United States.
We found a great solution
for shipping to American customers
with a guy who actually worked for Polaroid for 25 years
and left there and formed his own fulfillment company.
We've actually produced some test film
that we sent out to some photographers around the world
that we selected.
And, you know,
I think it was more of an effort
just to kind of get something out the door
and in the field and let's see what happens.
When the picture comes out and it hits the light, what happens?
And we picked about...
I think it was 18 or 20 photographers here in the States,
and they did the same from the European office.
We sent them each four packs of film.
It's two types of film.
And, you know,
there were some instructions about how to use it properly
so that you get the best effect.
And we got the results back,
and it was crazy
how wildly different every single frame was.
You know, the rule was, when we sent out this test film,
every frame comes back to us,
regardless of whether it's got a picture on it or not.
And so what we've produced is a show of these images.
We have 32 that we've selected.
We've blown them up really big.
They're going to hang on the wall behind me here.
And in two days, we're inviting the press.
We have press from all over the world coming.
They're going to sit in this room,
and they're going to hear about
the announcement of our first new film for sale.
It's so hard for me to say, "Yeah, we're making history,"
because that just sounds so corny to me,
but at the same time, we are.
HITCHCOCK: If Doc had not come along with this crazy idea
to make instant film again,
I think that
people would have lost
an important means of communication.
BIAS: I'm really happy that I quit my job and decided to do this.
It was impossible.
It really was impossible to make this film
15, 16 months ago.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)
We are very honored
that we are standing here
and that we can present you something
that will change the history of photography.
MAN: One, two, three, four.
(LOVERS LANE PLAYING)