In 1978, beneath an old ice rink in a small mining town in the Yukon, a cache of thousands reels of nitrate filmstock was discovered, a collection thought to be lost for over fifty years. As Lawrence Weschler writes at Vanity Fair, Dawson City, once the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, boasted a population of over 30,000 people at its peak, and held several movie theatres within its meager city limits. In its heyday, miners, trappers and other, shall we say, “entrepreneurs” (in the wilderness of the Yukon, prostitution and gambling was hardly a clandestine activity), could visit any number of these new-fangled movie theatres, catch up on newsreels or the latest drama, and head back out in search of their fortune.

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After the rush ended, however, the town’s population plummeted to a few thousand, and the necessity to...