Most of these films have been released on DVD or Blu-ray, streaming services have made it easy to see dozens of formerly 'lost' movies and more than a few of the movies mentioned in this post are somehow streaming for free on YouTube. How things have changed over the last two decades. When he first wrote 'Dark City,' he was describing mostly unseen movies to an audience who may have heard rumors about most of them but didn't have access to any way to see them. What Muller and those like him did were show aging and fading original prints at repertory theaters in the big cities, tape late-night broadcasts on early VCRs and trade the tapes with other collectors. Many of the movies we now consider classics had fallen out of circulation, and more than a few were considered lost forever.

If you've only seen Muller on TCM, you may think of him as a knowledgeable guy who knows a lot about film noir, but he's also one of the key people who fought to reclaim and preserve the genre in the '70s and '80s. Eddie Muller on the set of TCM's 'Noir Alley.' (Turner Classic Movies)

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