Whatever period you define as the golden age of Hollywood, most of the movies are probably lost to time. That phrase — golden age — is a canard if it distracts

Whatever period you define as the golden age of Hollywood, most of the movies are probably lost to time. That phrase — golden age — is a canard if it distracts from the actual point, which is that we've lost access to important artifacts of our culture and history, and we can't ever get it back. Also, the fact that people have not seen a lot of movies from before 1939 does not argue that they should not be preserved. Most people haven't read The Iliad or Action Comics #1 either. Or visited the Acropolis, or watched the moon landing. We don't preserve artifacts because most people will want to use them in the future. In fact, we can't know what the future will need or want to know about our time, which is why we preserve as much as possible.