Yesterday, Philiana Ng’s excellent article on the situation at the Academy included eloquent quotes from two longtime industry pros:

“The archive community is not the most visible group of people, so it’s easy for this issue to go overlooked. But for those of us who have interacted with members of that team, our experiences have been that they have an uncommon knowledge of this field. It’s alarming to me when the Academy’s official statements describe this like it’s a routine shuffling of personnel because it’s not that at all. It would be like if a movie studio had lost Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. These are major losses to the institution.” — Thom Powers, Co-founder of DocNYC

“AMPAS choosing to reduce investment in the Academy Film Archive at this time is a huge step backwards for those of us struggling to preserve indie film legacies. But it’s also a fact that all the American archives who care about indie film are under-resourced. None of our collaborating archives has sufficient capacity or staff, yet there are thousands of indie film elements that still have no home.” — Sandra Schulberg, president of film preservation organization IndieCollect