Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 150 · permalink

Private office

30:18–30:22 Released 1938; registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed. 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; no visible events claimed. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 30:2030:20

Play from 30:18 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 88 · shots 270–270. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
private_office (private office, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man with dark hair, wearing a suit and patterned tie, adjusting his tie visible
  • older man with glasses and receding hairline, wearing a suit, leaning over desk visible
Seen
{'item': 'wood-paneled wall', 'evidence': 'frame:1'} [frame:1], {'item': 'desk with papers and inkwell', 'evidence': 'frame:1'} [frame:1], {'item': 'suit and tie', 'evidence': 'frame:1'} [frame:1], {'item': 'glasses', 'evidence': 'frame:1'} [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: serious; themes: formal meeting, business or legal setting; style notes: medium shot, static framing, high-contrast lighting typical of 1930s studio films

Two men are seated at a desk in a wood-paneled room; one adjusts his tie while the other leans forward over papers. No dialogue or on-screen text is present in this beat.

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from Water Rustlers (1938) at 30:20 (passage 30:18–30:22); US record: No renewal found

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