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LaMar Stephens Sr. has spent more than three decades building one of the only surviving video archives of hip hop's formative years. He started what became Rap Entertainment back in 1992, out of public access and local origination television in Jersey City, recording the artists, videos and live performances that most broadcasters either ignored or, in some cases, taped over and destroyed.

In this episode of The Archive Room, LaMar joins us to talk about what it actually takes to build and protect a hip hop archive with no institutional backing, no preservation budget and no guarantee anyone would ever want the footage. We go deep on the tapes that did not survive, including the loss of ABC's Hot Tracks masters and the Jersey City cable reels that were recorded over to save money, and why that loss still shapes how he approaches archiving today.

We talk through what actually lives inside the Rap Entertainment archive, from golden age hip hop performances to the artists who came up through public access television before anyone knew their names. LaMar also shares where he sees the archive going next, from FAST channel distribution to AI assisted restoration of lost performers, and how Rap Entertainment TV is trying to help the next generation of creators get paid fairly for their own work.

It's a conversation about hip hop history, documentary archive research and TV archive history, told from someone who lived through the years he's now trying to preserve.

0:00 Cold open, the tapes that got erased

Find Rap Entertainment TV at rapentertainment.com, and on YouTube at youtube.com/c/rapentertainmenttelevision.

The Archive Room is brought to you by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and part of the John Gore Studios family. Find them at silversaltrestoration.com.

Coca-Cola isn't just a drink, it's one of the most recognized symbols of American culture in the world. Neeve Kelly, Outreach Archivist at the Coca-Cola Company, takes us inside the vault holding over 130 years of advertising, packaging, and cultural history, and explains how one brand ended up shaping everything from what Santa Claus looks like to how Hollywood treats American history on screen.

In 1931, Coca-Cola commissioned Chicago illustrator Haddon Sunblom to paint a standardized Santa, based on the jolly, red suited figure from Clement Moore's 1823 poem The Night Before Christmas. Because Coke's advertising was everywhere, from the Saturday Evening Post to store windows across the country, that single campaign quietly rewrote what the whole world pictures when they picture Santa Claus. It's why documentary crews covering the history of Saint Nick still come knocking on Coca-Cola's door.

Then there's the formula. It genuinely does sit in a vault at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, ceremoniously moved there a few years ago, but the real story is stranger than the legend. It wasn't written down at all until the 1920s, when the company needed it as collateral for a bank loan during a sugar shortage. Before that, it existed only in the heads of Asa Candler's family, who mixed it by smell and feel, ripping the labels off ingredient barrels and replacing them with cryptic numbers and letters so nobody outside the family could reverse engineer it.

Neeve also walks us through how new material gets accessioned into the archive today, the process productions follow when they want to license Coca-Cola's footage, and her own story founding Adidas' first North American archive before she joined Coca-Cola.

This episode is presented by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and part of the John Gore Studios family.

The Archive Room is co-hosted by Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho, produced by LOLA Clips.

In this episode of The Archive Room, we sit down with Henry Apodaca of the Skid Row History Museum and Archive to explore what community archiving looks like when the archive itself is embedded in the neighbourhood it documents. Henry takes us through his own path into archival work, from record collecting and a background in anthropology to earning his masters in library and information science at UCLA, and eventually landing at the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

We talk about the history of the Skid Row neighbourhood and where the name actually comes from, the decades long fight between the city's redevelopment plans and the community's own response, and how that fight shaped the single room occupancy housing that still stands there today. Henry explains how the archive is funded, how researchers and members of the public can access the collection, and why some parts of it carry deliberate restrictions rooted in the community's own history.

We also get into a choice that says a lot about how Henry approaches this work: preserving people's own words and language exactly as spoken in oral history transcription, rather than smoothing them into something tidier. And we talk about why Henry sees history as cyclical rather than linear, drawing a direct line between the sweeps of the 1984 Olympics and the concerns already building around the Games returning to Los Angeles in 2028.

This is a conversation about what it means for an archive to genuinely serve and reflect a living community, not just store its past. Henry also joins Sandra for the Quickfire Round before we wrap up.

You can learn more about the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, explore the collection, and support their work directly at lapovertydept.org

The Archive Room is presented by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and part of the John Gore Studios family. Learn more at silversaltrestoration.com

Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho sit down with Kate and Mike Griffiths of Clearance Matters, the husband and wife team behind the archive research on documentaries including Broken English with Marianne Faithfull, Paul McCartney's The Hunt for the Lost Bass, a Culture Club documentary, and Elton John's Never Too Late. Kate and Mike talk through how they trace missing footage, build trust with private collectors and contributors, and pull together photographs, audio, and film from archives around the world to help shape a film's story from the earliest stages of production. They share stories of tracking down long lost footage of The Clash, David Bowie, and Elton John, and discuss the challenges of clearing music, working across UK and US productions, and why credits for archive contributors matter so much in their work. The episode closes with a Quickfire round covering some of the biggest myths in archive research.

Dominic Walker, Global Business Director at BBC Studios, joins The Archive Room to explain how one of the world's largest broadcast archives is run as a business. We cover archive footage licensing through BBC Motion Gallery and its fifteen year partnership with Getty Images, live events built from BBC IP including Planet Earth concert tours and Bluey's World at Disney, and BBC Radio and Music, spanning the Production Music Library and a toolkit built from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop archive.

Dominic also traces his own career, starting as a booking agent alongside Miles Copeland and The Police, through music publishing at BMG and Universal, into television at Fremantle Media and eventually BBC Worldwide.

For anyone working in documentary archive research, TV archive history or archival storytelling, this is a rare look inside how a major broadcaster balances commercial licensing with editorial values, and why story always comes first regardless of format.

Topics covered: archive footage licensing, BBC Motion Gallery, Getty Images partnership, archive digitisation, documentary archive research, TV archive history, BBC Production Music, Radiophonic Workshop, music licensing, live events and immersive experiences, archival storytelling.

The Archive Room is presented by Silver Salt Restoration, a John Gore Studios company. New episodes weekly on the people, footage and history behind the archives that shape our screens.

What does it actually take to restore a Hollywood classic? In this episode Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho sit down with Charlotte Barker, Senior Director of Film Restoration and Preservation at Paramount Pictures, where she has worked since 2005 and led the restoration team since 2019.

Charlotte oversees one of the most significant film libraries in cinema history, spanning over 114 years of filmmaking and including the full Republic Pictures catalogue. Her restoration credits include To Catch a Thief, White Christmas, Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Dragonslayer, Ragtime and Harold and Maude. In 2023 her team won the inaugural Hollywood Professional Association Award for Best Restoration for The Godfather, and in 2025 the Sunset Boulevard restoration received the first DEG NTEC Award for Technology Innovation in Film Restoration.

In this conversation they get into what preservation actually means versus restoration, how Paramount selects titles for its programme each year, what happens when 14 frames of Sunset Boulevard were simply missing, and why VistaVision — a format most people had never heard of two years ago — is now being shot by filmmakers like Brady Corbet on The Brutalist. They also cover nitrate handling, frozen vaults, the silent heroes of any restoration project, and the very particular pressure of working on somebody's favourite film.

The Archive Room is presented to you by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and a John Gore Studios company. Find them at silversaltrestoration.com.

Generative AI is producing 34 million synthetic images every day. For archives, documentary producers, and footage researchers, that changes everything about what can be trusted, what can be licensed, and what history will look like on screen.

In this episode of The Archive Room, we sit down with Rachel Antell, Co-Founder of the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), and Laura Rooney, Executive Director of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), to discuss the Trust in Archives Initiative — the most significant collective response the archive and documentary community has produced to the AI challenge.

TAI has published a practical toolkit designed for archive professionals, footage researchers, and documentary producers. We go through all four components in detail: the Due Diligence Checklist for authenticating archive footage in an AI-saturated landscape; two adaptable licensing templates that protect collections from unfettered AI use; a shared taxonomy so the whole field is finally speaking the same language; and a ten-consideration framework for any archive being approached by a tech company wanting access to their collections.

We also get into the access paradox — how the footage archives need to make public to serve researchers is now the same footage being scraped without consent — and what the IMLS defunding means for institutions already operating on the thinnest of margins. Plus: the moment a major streaming platform responded to a TAI licence by asking for unfettered use of generative AI on the licensed material.

The Trust in Archives Initiative is a coalition of the Archival Producers Alliance, the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the Society for American Archivists, FootageFest, FOCAL International, and the Digital Object Authenticity Working Group.

TAI is running a free four-part webinar series on the toolkit. Register below.

Assessing Authenticity: Due Diligence in the Age of AI | 16 June https://www.eventbrite.com/e/assessing-authenticity-due-diligence-in-the-age-of-ai-tickets-1988961465284

Content Licensing: Navigating Rights in the Age of AI | 23 June https://www.eventbrite.com/e/content-licensing-navigating-rights-in-the-age-of-ai-tickets-1988961933685

Strategic Engagement with Technology Companies | 8 July https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1988962119240

Speaking the Same Language: Taxonomies for AI-Generated and Altered Media | 14 Julyhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/taxonomies-for-ai-generated-and-altered-media-tickets-1988962319840

More at trustinarchives.org | archivalproducers.org | amianet.org

This episode is presented by Silver Salt Restoration — the UK's foremost film and television restoration company, and a John Gore Studios company. Find them at silversaltrestoration.com.

The Archive Room is a video podcast about archive footage — the people who preserve it, license it, restore it, and fight for it. Hosted by Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho. Find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Podbean.

Matthew Frank has spent over 30 years at the top of television rights and distribution. He built RDF Rights from the ground up, ran Zodiak Rights as CEO generating revenues exceeding $80 million across 200 broadcasters worldwide, and now runs Rocket Rights and Rights Booster, helping content owners exploit their libraries across VOD platforms, FAST channels, and YouTube.

In this conversation Matthew breaks down exactly how the content monetisation landscape has shifted and where the real opportunities are right now. He explains why linear broadcasters are no longer the gatekeepers they once were, how FAST channels and YouTube are reshaping what distribution actually means, and why brands are becoming the new commissioners of content.

We also get into the story behind Wife Swap — the format that nearly never got made — and the remarkable case of French YouTuber Inoxtag, who turned a 9 million subscriber following into a 50 million view documentary that sold out 200 cinemas in France before it ever hit YouTube.

Whether you are a documentary filmmaker, archive manager, rights executive, or content owner trying to navigate a fragmented market, this episode gives you the frameworks and honest industry intelligence you need.

What does archival research really look like on some of the most powerful documentaries of the last decade?

Rosemary Rotondi is a New York based archival producer and researcher with over 30 years of experience. Her credits include Attica (Oscar nominated), John & Yoko: One to One (Apple TV+), and American Murder: Gabby Petito (Netflix, 90 million views worldwide).

In this episode she takes us behind the scenes of all three films. We hear how she tracked down NYPD surveillance footage of John and Yoko at anti-Vietnam War protests in the New York municipal archives, how Attica footage had simply vanished from upstate New York's small local archives through years of neglect and lack of resources, the story of a film crew who felt threatened filming drone footage outside the prison, and the reality of working on the Gabby Petito police body cam case — including what happened to the officer in that footage two years later.

Rosemary also reflects on the emotional toll of working with traumatic archive material, who makes the ethical decisions around disturbing images, the stark lack of diversity in true crime documentary coverage, and what it actually takes to break into archival research.

If you work in documentary film, care about film history, or want to understand how archival storytelling really works — this is essential listening.

Fremantle makes Got Talent, X Factor, The Price Is Right and Baywatch. But behind those formats sits one of the most extraordinary broadcast archives ever assembled, stretching back over 100 years and spanning drama, documentaries, news and entertainment across every continent.

Gordon Craig has spent nearly two decades at Fremantle overseeing archive licensing, home entertainment and in-flight sales. In this episode he opens the vault on how a commercial TV archive at this scale actually works: the reality of digitising tens of thousands of tapes, why a production's rushes policy can make or break a licensing deal years later, what it takes to clear talent across global format shows, and why Gordon once uploaded 28,000 clips to YouTube simply because there was no search engine.

We get into the Thames Television archive, running since 1968, which contains news footage, landmark documentaries and celebrity interviews that still sell around the world today. We talk about the Take That Netflix documentary, the Angela Davis jail interview, the remastering of The Sweeney and Baywatch, and the complicated rights picture facing anyone licensing a clip from a modern co-production. Gordon also shares his take on fast channels, AI and whether authentic archival footage can hold its ground.

The video version of this episode is available on YouTube. Search The Archive Room or find the link at lolaclips.com.

The Archive Room is hosted by Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho, produced by LOLA Clips