"so battered"

Film Another film archive discovery story, which though not as tenuous or impossible as the Metropolis restoration, shows that the difference between an important film existing or not existing is a simple and strange as the number of prints in existence:

"Almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film [Sara Driver's adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story] fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape."

Yet more hope that Marco Polo is still out there. Somewhere.