The title 'Etaoin Shrdlu' comes from the letter-frequency order of the first two columns of keys on a Linotype machine's keyboard — operators would run their fingers down them to fill a faulty line with nonsense, to be discarded later. The phrase became shorthand for the hot-metal era itself.

On July 2, 1978, the New York Times produced its last edition set in hot lead. David Loeb Weiss, a proofreader at the paper, filmed the roughly 30-minute documentary that same night, capturing a craft about to disappear.

The film shows the Ludlow machine casting lead at 535 degrees, Linotype machines assembling lines of type, and the presses in action. The Linotype is operated for the final time by Carl Schlesinger, who also narrates the film. Viewers consistently note the extraordinary noise produced by all those people and machines working together.

The documentary is as much a portrait of the passing mechanical age as it is about the newspaper business: the old composing rooms give way to new computers, which appear strangely ominous under fluorescent light.

The film is freely available to stream and download on the Internet Archive, uploaded by A/V Geeks in 2015.