Why Hollywood stores some of its most precious treasures in a Kansas salt mine
One of the eight wonders of Kansas lies 650 feet underground in Hutchinson, the only salt mine in the United States that operates an underground museum open to tourists.
Strataca, formerly Kansas Underground Salt Museum, takes visitors into the Earth’s belly to learn the history of salt mining in the area.
The salt mine is also pack rat Hollywood’s basement.
For more than 40 years, Hollywood has stored a treasure trove of film reels, props and costumes in a private underground storage facility operating in the mine. UV&S, formerly Underground Vault & Storage, also runs an underground storage facility in a limestone mine in Kansas City.
In recent years Australian film director Baz Luhrmann tracked down rare, unseen footage of Elvis Presley concerts from the 1970s in that underground vault. The footage served as the basis for his new 97-minute documentary/concert film, “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.”
On Thursday, “Good Morning America” will feature Strataca during a live broadcast from Kansas Speedway in KCK.
The storage facility and museum sit in mined-out caverns of the Hutchinson Salt Co. Visitors are not allowed to drink anything underground because the floors — the walls, too — are salt.
More than 275 million years ago the Permian Sea left behind a giant swath of salt — 30 trillion tons — stretching from an area northeast of Kansas City through Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The Kansas prairie we know today was a bed under that vast sea.
The constant 68-degree temperature and 45% humidity inside the salt mine create ideal conditions for preserving paper and film. Employees wear shorts at work on even the coldest days of winter.
The depth makes it safe from tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and other natural mayhem.
One company president once called the storage space “a kind of Noah’s Ark, without the animals.”
The storage facility opened in the mine before the museum. The man who conceived and oversaw building the museum, Jay Smith, the former executive director of the Reno County Historical Society, told The Star in 2012 what his first visit to the cavernous mine was like.
“It looked like you were going to a new world,” he said. “I’d been in coal mines and gold mines before, so I was happy to see wide open spaces because it made you feel comfortable.”
The storage company, which has always made clear it is not a tourist attraction, stores millions of boxes full of paper and data — oil and gas company leases and maps, insurance policies, architectural blueprints, medical files, tax records, historic New York newspapers reporting Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Secret government documents are locked up there. Everything is electronically catalogued and bar-coded so it can be easily found.
Employees have to sign confidentiality agreements.
Sony Pictures, 20th Century and Warner Bros. have stashed treasures there for more than 40 years. But the general public will never see the entirety of that trove; more than 50 acres are off-limits.
The people who run the underground vault don’t typically reveal what they are safekeeping, though The Star has reported that historic movies “Ben-Hur” and “Star Wars,” old silent movies, every episode of “M*A*S*H” and the original film negative of “The Wizard of Oz” are there.
Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo and the Simpsons live there, too.
You’ll find costumes from the 1997 movie “Batman & Robin” there — both George Clooney’s rubber suit and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s silvery Mr. Freeze get-up.
The film industry throws nothing away. Outtakes, trims, images that never see the light of day in the finished product are sent to Hutchinson to be kept safe in case they’re ever needed again.
The studios keep records of what they’ve shot, what they’ve used and what they didn’t.
Meanwhile, not far away in that enormous underground world, salt is still mined every day.
.jpg)