The concert documentary features the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and a host of other hitmakers. It was filmed at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in October 1964 and released two months later, just a few days after Christmas. No less a cinephile than Quentin Tarantino has called it one of the three greatest rock films of all time, and he owns a 16mm print of it.
That 16mm print is precious because it's never made its way to home video - bits and pieces of it have emerged on various compilations, but the whole "T.A.M.I. Show" has never appeared on VHS or DVD.
On Monday night, one of the handful of other remaining 16mm prints of the "The T.A.M.I. Show" will be dusted off and shown at the Melwood Screening Room in Pittsburgh. The print came from an archive at the University of Minnesota, and was spared from the trash by a group of Minneapolis-area film buffs who grabbed the whole collection of educational and feature films with an eye toward preserving them.
"We were given five hours to move them from the library to a storage facility, which was a feat," said Adam Sekuler, co-founder of the group that now calls itself Search and Rescue.
As far as Sekuler knows, there are only four or five other 16mm prints of "The T.A.M.I. Show" in the world. But that wasn't the only rarity Sekuler and his friends unearthed - they found a color-tinted version of "The Birth of a Nation," D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent epic, and unused footage from "Louisiana Story," a groundbreaking 1949 documentary.
The oldest film in the collection was a "welcome to campus"-themed short made by the University of Minnesota in 1907.
Sekuler explained that many films are in danger of being lost as libraries get rid of their film archives and switch to video and DVD.
"They have to make financial decisions about what they can keep and what they can get rid of. Sometimes that ends up causing fatalities of film."
Now a programmer at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, the 29-year-old Sekuler isn't sure why "The T.A.M.I. Show" has been closeted away for so many years. It's owned by Dick Clark Productions, and he assumes that getting copyright clearance to all the songs and performances is part of the hold-up.
"It's a really thrilling concert film," he said. "It's completely remarkable because it's a real time capsule of the era.
He added that Brown's appearance, which comes just before a show-closing set by the Rolling Stones, is "probably the best performance I've ever seen in my entire life, something I wish I would have been there for."
Sekuler will be at the Melwood Screening Room Monday to discuss "The T.A.M.I. Show," film preservation and the work of Search and Rescue.
For more information, call 412-681-5449 or visit www.pghfilmmakers.org.