Ten Questions with Bob Furmanek

Since the Dr. Film blog is very pro-preservation, I thought I’d highlight some people who are doing preservation work.  It saves me work on writing blogs (yay), and it gets some publicity to people who are fighting the good fight for preservation.

I’ve got several feelers out for people in the biz, but this will be our first one.

Mr. Furmanek poses with heavy 35mm reels and a Simplex XL.

 Q1.  I know you have worked with Jerry Lewis on some of his films. We all know Jerry as a philanthropist and a comedian.  Can you tell us a little about what you’ve done with Jerry and how Jerry feels about film preservation?

I began working for Jerry in 1984 and worked for several years as his personal archivist. He owned a huge warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood that contained material dating back to the 1940’s, including home movies, scrapbooks, photo albums, recordings, transcriptions, kinescopes, etc. It was my responsibility to identify and catalog all of the material. It took two years to get the job done.

He is very supportive of film preservation and has often expressed  his concern over the deterioration of important materials. He has lent his name and support to several projects that I’ve worked on over the years, including the restoration of a 1928 Loew’s movie palace. I know that he has donated some of his vast collection to both the UCLA Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Q2. You recently did a show at George Eastman House showcasing some of your 3D collection.  Can you tell us about that?

Jack Theakston and I were asked to present a program on the history of 3-D motion pictures at the Dryden Theater and it was a great thrill. I had never been to the George Eastman House before this event and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I brought the only known polarized 3-D print of Robot Monster and the audience loved it. They have a very conscientious staff and I look forward to presenting more 3-D programs at the Dryden Theater in the future.

Q3.  Tell us a little more about your 3D work.  You’ve really done a lot to preserve 3D over the years.

Thank you Eric, that’s very kind. I began my work over 30 years ago when I discovered that the studios and copyright holders were not being very proactive in preserving their 3-D holdings. Thankfully, the situation has gotten better at most of the studios. Most recently, we were able to insure preservation of the science-fiction film Gog and that was very gratifying.

The full story of the Archive’s history is on our website at http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/history-of-the-archive

Q4.  I recently heard about your quest to bring some 3D Blu-rays out to the market.  Can you tell us about that and how we might be able to help that happen?

We recently provided important research materials to both Warner Bros. and NBC Universal on their 3-D holdings. Thanks to our documentation, both Dial M for Murder and Creature from the Black Lagoon were mastered in their director-intended aspect ratio. It’s the first time both films have been presented in widescreen since the original theatrical release.  Viewers will no longer see the scissors pre-set device on Anthony Dawson’s back or the telephone pole in the upper reaches of the Amazon which were both visible in the open-matte versions. It’s very important to honor the director’s creative vision.

So far as how you can help, my best recommendation is to support the initial two Golden Age 3-D releases on Blu-ray. Dial M is available as a stand-alone release and Creature can be purchased in the Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection Blu-ray set. It’s also available as a single disc, region free disc in the UK. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creature-Black-Lagoon-Blu-ray-Region/dp/B008LSAQPW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350684816&sr=8-1

If these titles perform well, it will encourage the studios to dig deeper for other vintage 3-D material. There were fifty 3-D features produced between 1952 – 1955 so there’s a lot of prime stereoscopic material still buried in the vaults.

Q5. I know you’re a big fan of a really short-lived color process called Super Cinecolor.  We’re all geeks here.  Tell us about that and why Super Cinecolor is cool.

My interest began around 40 years ago. As a fan of Abbott and Costello, it always bothered me when their two Super Cinecolor features (Jack and the Beanstalk, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd) were shown on television in black and white. I eventually tracked down a 35mm print of Beanstalk in the mid-1970’s from an old time distributor in Baltimore, Robert T. Marhanke. I’ll never forget how vivid the colors looked on that 1952 print and it encouraged me to learn more about the process. When seen in an original 35mm print, the process has a very unique look with neon blues and deep, vivid reds which lend itself well to costume films and science-fiction titles. Some of my favorites are The Highwayman, Invaders from Mars and The Magic Carpet.

Because of the unique aspect of the double emulsion stock, it’s very difficult to accurately transfer Cinecolor materials in telecine. When I produced Special Edition laser discs of Beanstalk and Bela Lugosi’s Scared to Death (in two color Cinecolor) I was very careful to replicate the vibrant and somewhat unnatural hues found on the original 35mm prints.

Q6. You were THE GUY who rediscovered the missing color footage for the Star Trek episode “The Cage.”  I know it’s a little asterisk in your career, but it was really important for a lot of Star Trek geeks.  How did that happen and how close was that to being tossed out?

I found the footage in a vault with other negatives, IP’s [Interpositives] and fine grains. The vault was full of material from long-closed accounts and the film would have eventually been destroyed. It was not labeled and was lying on the floor under the bottom rack of a shelf. When I pried open the rusty can, there was a roll of color 35mm negative. I un-spooled the first few feet and when I saw the Enterprise, I realized that I had found something very special. This was around 1987 and Paramount had just released the pilot on home video using color footage from “The Menagerie” with the trims inserted from a 16mm black and white work print. When I inspected the footage, I found that it contained all of the trims removed in editing the two part episode. We contacted Gene Roddenberry’s office at Paramount and made arrangements to return the one-of-a-kind film directly to him.

Q7. Most collectors have a holy grail of collecting, something that they hope might be out there but they haven’t found yet.  Do you have something like that?

Yes, I would love to find the last missing Lippert 3-D short, Bandit Island with Lon Chaney. It had a limited 3-D release in both polarized and anaglyphic versions in the fall of 1953. One side survives in the 1954 feature The Big Chase but I would love to find the missing side. I tracked down all of the lab records and the 35mm materials were last accounted for in 1954. The only hope for its survival might be a 35mm release print in private hands.

Q8. You’ve long been an advocate of good, strong 35mm projection.  With the advent of good digital projection, do you still feel as strongly about 35mm?

I certainly do. Digital has a clean but somewhat unnatural look to me, especially if it’s been tweaked and scrubbed clean of natural film grain. Plus, there is something special about watching an original 35mm print that was screened theatrically when a film was first released. I often wonder how many thousands of people sat in a theater watching this very same print for the first time on the big screen.

Q9. I seem to recall that you were once working on a restoration of another short-lived process called Perspecta.  Tell us about Perspecta and why that was interesting.  Can you give us a short list of important titles that were released in Perspecta?

I was very good friends with the late Bob Eberenz, the gentleman that worked with Robert Fine in developing the system for MGM. Bob had restored a 1954 Fairchild integrator for me and hearing those films with the original panning and gain control was quite a surprise. Even though it’s still a mono signal, the effect of fullness and left/center/right separation could be very convincing.

I presented an all-Perspecta show on April 26, 2002 at a 1928 movie palace on a fifty-foot screen. We ran Forbidden Planet plus MGM shorts, cartoons and a promo reel. The Fine and Eberenz families were in the audience and it was a very special evening. After the show, I had people tell me how convincing the Perspecta sounded when spread across that big screen.

About ten years ago, Bob and I approached several studios and offered to preserve their Perspecta tracks to a new master so they could be utilized for home video. Unfortunately, none were interested.

Some of the noteworthy films in Perspecta include High Society, Bad Day at Black Rock, This Island Earth, Away All Boats, White Christmas, To Catch a Thief, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, East of Eden and The Barefoot Contessa.

10.  I’ve been asked questions by ignorant reporters all my life.  This is the question I always want to give people: What’s the most important question that I should have asked you but didn’t?  Once you tell me that, please answer that question!

Oh, I don’t know, how about asking if I’ve had any regrets in doing this work?

To that question I will answer, absolutely. Everybody makes mistakes and I’ve made some doozies. But all in all, I’m proud of what’s been accomplished. There’s a renewed and growing interest now in Golden Age 3-D and I’d like to think in a small way, I’ve played a part in that revival. With the technical availability now to master the original left/right elements in HD and align and correct any registration issues, we can truly make these films look better than ever before. That presents a very exciting opportunity to restore and preserve the filmmakers original stereoscopic vision.  I hope to have an ongoing involvement in bringing vintage 3-D material to Blu-ray.

I’ve had a great time chatting with you Eric, thank you so much for your interest in my work.

Sammy and Me

When I saw that the Classic TV Blog Association was having a blogathon about horror movie hosts, I knew I would have to get involved.  The whole reason this blog exists is because of a horror movie host.

Let me transport you to a long-ago time in the early 1970s.  TV stations stopped broadcasting at 2 or 3 in the morning.  Cable TV was almost unheard of.  Infomercials did not exist.  In a big market, there were maybe 5 or 6 stations that you could watch.  In the evening, after the news, you could either watch Johnny Carson or an old movie.  That’s about all there was.

In those days, we didn’t have the cultural illiteracy about old films that we have today.  Films were literally suffused into the air.  We saw them all the time.  It was nothing to see a film 30 or 40 years old, even in prime time.  Black and white?  No problem.  We knew the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Boris Karloff.

Since films were so commonplace, there was some need for brand recognition.  In the 50s, when Screen Gems released the first package of Shock Theater to television stations, someone hit on the bright idea of having a horror film host.  I don’t know who it was.  Someone will tell you it was Vampira, others will say it was someone else.  It doesn’t really matter.

By the 1960s, almost every market had one.  In Indianapolis, my home town, it was Sammy Terry.  (You get the joke?  It’s a pun on “cemetery.”  OK, subtle it isn’t.)  By the mid-70s, most of these had died out, but a few survived.  Elvira and Svengoolie are two of the more known ones that have made it all these years.

Sammy Terry worked for WTTV, our local independent station.  WTTV was something of an anomaly.  It was technically a Bloomington station (about an hour south of Indianapolis), but they sneaked the transmitter northward to hit Indy.  That could be the subject of a blog entry in itself.  WTTV’s transmitter never worked quite right.  There was always snow in the picture, in a predictable pattern.  As a kid, I always suspected that it was my dad’s makeshift antenna that didn’t work, but when we got cable, I noticed that WTTV still didn’t come in quite right!

In those days, a TV section came every week in the local newspaper.  It was important.  TV wasn’t endlessly repeated, and there was no way to record it to watch later.  If a movie or a show came on that you wanted to see, you’d have to schedule your life around it.  WTTV, lacking both ratings and network affiliation, was like a window into the past, using outdated equipment and techniques well after the other stations had moved on.

One day, I was scanning that section and I saw that Sammy Terry was running the 1931 Frankenstein with Colin Clive and Boris Karloff.  Now, in those days they marked all the black and white shows with a B/W sign.  Just why they did it, I didn’t know, but at least you knew if a movie was black and white or color.

I noticed that Frankenstein was not listed as a black and white program!  Could it be?  Did they even have color film in 1931?  I had no idea.  The whole concept fascinated me.  Luckily, I had someone to ask.

My grandmother was staying with us at the time.  She was profoundly overweight, in ill health, and she had cataracts that needed surgery.  In those days, cataract surgery was a big deal.  You had the surgery and it took 6 weeks to recover, and there were all sorts of problems with it.  Today you’re in and out and stapled in half an hour.

Grandma was not able to live by herself (which she normally did) during the recovery period.  I knew if anyone would know about color films of the time, she would.  She and I were really the only people in the family interested in the arts and movies.   Grandma loved the movies.

She’d seen Frankenstein, but she couldn’t remember if it was in color.  I asked her if it could have been in color.  She said it was possible, because there were some early color processes at the time, but she didn’t remember.

Well, that was all I needed.  I went to ask my mom if I could stay up and watch Frankenstein that weekend.

Well, mom was harried.  She was under a lot of stress taking care of grandma, and she did one of her typical stall tactics.  “Well see,” she said.  “If you behave.”

This is code for NO.

In all honesty, I can understand where she was coming from.  It was on late, and she didn’t want to deal with all that hassle, and worse yet, I was a sensitive kid who scared easily.  The idea of me staying up late was ridiculous.  She knew I’d have a fit if she outright said no, so she tried to stall me.

It didn’t work.

I behaved myself admirably all week.  I wasn’t going to give her an out.  I was planning to shove it back in her face on Friday night.  And that didn’t work either.

“Eric, you have to go to bed.  It’s late, and I don’t want you staying up that late.  You’ve never done it before.”

“You said I could if I behave, and I did.”

I knew the battle was lost, but intervention was around the corner in the form of my grandmother.

“Sister,” she said (she often called mom “sister” because she is part of a set of twins.) “I heard you tell Eric if he behaved that he’d get to stay up.  He’s been talking about this all week.  You should let him see it.”

“Mother,” countered my own mother, “I need to get to bed.  I can’t stay up with him and watch it.”

“That’s fine,” Grandma said.  “I’ll stay up with him.”

Remember, I said that grandma was the only other person in the family who really “got” movies.  That was great.

Mom reluctantly agreed, laid a lot of ground rules, but the hour was late and she was tired.  She didn’t have the energy to fight.  HAHA!  It was going to work.

Grandma sat on our green couch and cautioned me that if I got overly upset about this then she’d send me off to bed and that would be it.  She folded her hands over her giant belly and waited for the movie to start.

I think I had seen parts of the Sammy Terry intro before, because it looked a little familiar.  Sammy wore a cowl and was made up with greasepaint, looking a bit like Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Played by local performer Bob Carter, there was always something avuncular and silly about Sammy, and he didn’t scare me at all.

I still remember this after all these years.  I’d worked myself into a tizzy about seeing this, wondering if it could actually be color.  I knew the time was nigh.  Sammy (or someone) had fashioned a poster for Frankenstein, done very cheesily in a hand-drawn way.  At the bottom someone had penciled in this tag line: “In Horro-Color!”

WOW!  Could it be?

It was my first Sammy Terry intro and I just wished he’d shut up and run the movie.  I don’t think my grandmother even lasted through the first 10 minutes of the show.  By the time the film started, she was gently snoring, with her hands still folded in front of her.

Well, as you probably know, the film was in black and white after all. (Of course, this sparked a lasting level of curiosity in me, because I have a long demonstration about the history of color in the movies that’s one of my most popular shows.)  I eagerly sat through the movie, color or not.  I was delighted.  The film had a weird rustic feel that I found to be really cool.  I sat quietly through the end of the picture, woke grandma up, and we both went to bed.

She created a monster.

I was hooked.  I wanted to keep watching Sammy Terry and see more of those films.  I had to.  Grandma gamely stayed with me on most of them, still usually falling asleep.  She had one eye done, 6 weeks recovery, and another eye, 6 more weeks recovery.  By that time, I was a hopeless addict.  She went home, but I kept watching Sammy.

I discovered that my parents didn’t care too much as long as I didn’t make a lot of noise to wake them up.

I discovered that the local bookstore had a new book by film historian Denis Gifford that gave a great history of these movies.  Mom had picked it out, and she had it wrapped “From Grandma” for Christmas that year.  I recently found the 8mm home movie of that Christmas, showing me unwrapping the present.  I still have the book.

That’s me (on the left) with my grandmother and sister, Christmas 1973

I seldom missed Sammy Terry, and I went on to catch the Saturday night offering on WTTV, which was called Science Fiction Theater.  In the summertime, WTTV had another film host showing Summer Film Festival which consisted of more mainstream films.  I loved it too.  WISH Channel 8 had host Dave Smith with another show called When Movies Were Movies.  I loved it too.

It got so that in the summer I was up until 3am most every night.

Sammy was still a special favorite.  I loved his silly jokes and weird introductions, his hairy spider (named George) who interrupted the proceedings periodically.  I even loved the stupid gaffes that we’d never see today.  The Sunday paper listed one film as Sammy’s show for the week, but the Friday paper listed another film.  That night, Sammy’s intros were for the film in the Sunday paper, but they ran the film listed in the Friday paper!  OOPS.

My grandmother died in 1975.  She was a special woman and I miss her to this very day.

WTTV canceled Sammy Terry in about 1976.  I was outraged.  I started a petition to put him back on the air.  But the times had changed and they didn’t want to go back.

They finally relented and brought him back in the early 80s.  The film package wasn’t as good as it had been, but it was still fun to see Sammy back again.  There were fewer Karloff and Lugosi pictures and more gut-laden Hammer films.

Then, in the mid-80s the world changed again.  When cable became widespread, the studios discovered that they could make more money from a cable film showing than from the local stations, so they pulled all the old films.  As historian Jim Neibaur has said, it was like they decided to make one station the repository for all the old films and they filled the rest with infomercials.

Sammy Terry was gone.  Bob Carter continued to play the character at live shows and in the occasional special.  I met him a few times.  He ran a music store close to where I lived.  Seemed like a nice guy, but it was never more than a passing encounter.

Mr. Carter has been in ill health for the past few years, so he has not been so active.  His son is carrying on the Sammy Terry tradition.  I haven’t seen him yet, but I wish him well.

Of course, I started to miss that late-night experience I had so loved.  I collected videotapes of my favorite movies.  Then 16mm film.  Then 35mm film.

I’m not on TV (not yet, at least), but I carry film projectors to run film shows wherever I’m wanted.   I got to run a movie with WTTV’s cartoon show host, Cowboy Bob, and WFBM’s Three Stooges host, Harlow Hickenlooper.  It was freezing cold, and with the two of them there, including me and an assistant, I think we had 6 people in the audience.  Oh, well.  I had fun anyway.

And that still doesn’t bring the story to a close.

One of the things that dogs me about new technology is how we throw out the whole of the old to embrace the new.  We often don’t fully appreciate the magic of what we had until it’s gone.

The old horror hosts and the movie hosts in general helped us appreciate films made before we were born.  It was just part of who we were.  Now, all you have to do is channel hop over Turner Classic Movies and you’ll never see them at all.

It’s no disrespect to Robert Osborne or Leonard Maltin to say that they’re not the same as the guys from the old days.  They are preaching to the converted.  You don’t watch them unless you specifically want to see an old film.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes we look at old films as either obsolete relics or unapproachable HIGH ART.

There is little appreciation for film as an art form today.  That’s why I created Dr. Film.  It’s a deliberate throwback to the old hosted-film format.  Dr. Film isn’t specifically for horror films, although we will show them. It’s got the poverty-induced sets and goofy jokes that all the hosted-film shows had.

What’s different about Dr. Film is that its purpose is to subtly educate (and I hope it is very subtle).  I hope it’s just strange enough to catch an errant viewer asking, “What the heck is THIS?” before he flips the remote one more time.

No, this doesn’t mean I regard the new Sammy Terry as competition, because he’s not doing the same thing.  Nor do I regard Svengoolie or Elvira as competition.  I embrace them all (I’d particularly like to embrace Elvira in that tight dress, but I digress.)

I always think that a rising tide floats all boats.  And I think that the movie host is something we’ve lost and that needs to return.  I think we all miss them, even if we don’t know it.

Dr. Film isn’t really competition for anyone, because the show hasn’t made it to the airwaves.  In all honesty, it probably never will.  But I’m still in there trying, because I’m trying to save a part of our past that I miss.

Instead of tilting at windmills, I’m saving film.  I might just as well be trying to save Fizzies, Burger Chef, and handmade chocolate sodas.  Hey, maybe it’s a lost cause, but someone has to do it.

Digital is Over There! It’s Only a Matter of Sampling!

Bruce Lawton made me aware of an article in the New York Times that I found highly annoying.  It was highly annoying because it was inaccurate.  It reflects the complete misunderstanding of what “digital” means in the media and public.  In short, the public and media seem to believe this:

“Digital imaging processes are a modern miracle and are a complete replacement and upgrade from older technologies.  All digital images are perfect by their nature and will never degrade or become outdated.”

This is simply not true.  I hate to burst your bubble.  A closer summation would be this:

“Digital imaging is a miraculous tool that allows us to do things that were previously impossible to accomplish.  They can produce very high quality, not perfect, reproductions of their source images.  Their biggest drawback is that they become outdated quickly and most digital storage devices have short shelf lives.”

Now, once again, I’ll draw criticism from the masses: “You hate anything digital!  You’re a luddite!  You’re clinging to an outdated technology like film!  Get with the modern program!”

Once again, this is not true.  I use digital imaging all the time.  I think it’s great.  I did digital restorations for the Buster Keaton picture Seven Chances.  I am doing a digital restoration on King of the Kongo.  But I still believe in film.  Film doesn’t get computer viruses, hard drive crashes, or incompatible software upgrades.

I have film, actual film stock, manufactured in 1926 that is still projectable in modern projectors and plays fine.  I have digital images from 1991, carefully saved and copied,  that are incompatible with any modern program.

What would you think of a library that had a book from 1991 that you couldn’t read anymore?  Not because it was damaged in some way, but rather because they couldn’t figure out how to open it. You’d say they were crazy.  You’d be right.

I’m going to refute the New York Times article point by point, but first I have to lay out some ground work.  Fear not, technophobes. I’ll try to make it as clear as possible and minimize all the math.  It really is pretty simple, but for some reason, people want to believe in the miracle part of it instead of the truth.

In the early 1980s, Disney made the first real computer feature.  It took years to complete, but it was called Tron, released in 1982.  Tron was made with a bank of computers each with less computing power than your iPhone.  Your old iPhone.  Yeah, that slow one.

Tron is not notable for many dramatic triumphs (after all, it’s basically The Wizard of Oz set inside a computer), but for cinema, it was a real breakthrough.  Disney experimented with various resolutions.  Now, before you get all paranoid about a scary word like resolutions, let me explain.  It simply means how many pixels (little squares, like the ones you see in the image above) are used in the image.

Higher resolution = more pixels = smaller squares = sharper image.  In television, this is also measured in lines, which is the number of horizontal lines in the TV picture.  You know how people keep trying to sell you 1080p HDTV?  Well, standard definition was 525 lines, and HDTV is 1080.  Again, more lines = more pixels = sharper image.  See?  Simple!

Disney knew that they would have to output their computer graphics to 35mm film in some way.  There was no digital projection at the time.  They were very concerned about “stair-stepping.”  This is an effect also called aliasing.  Don’t be scared.  Look at the picture above.  You notice that it’s made of little squares?  Omar Sharif’s collar isn’t a collar, but it’s a jagged set of white lines.  You went to plot something that was supposed to be a line and you ended up with a jagged representation instead.  It’s aliased because the thing you tried to plot isn’t what you got!

Disney’s people discovered that they could see aliasing on most images until they put the resolution at 4000 lines.  This has been the “gold standard” of digital imaging for years.  Well, almost.  Tron had a limited color palette because of the software and hardware of the time.  This made jagged lines easier to spot.  As we were able to represent more colors and shades, we discovered that we could drop the resolution to 2000 lines, and it still looked pretty good… just a little blurry to some people. Remember, this is for material generated by the computer, not something scanned from an outside source.

In engineering parlance, 4000 lines = 4K, 2000 lines = 2K, and HDTV at 1080 lines makes almost exactly 1K.

I have to introduce one last concept.  It’s called the Nyquist Sampling Theorem.  I know, it’s an engineer thing.  Nyquist is a law of digital sampling.  It says that if you are scanning an analog signal (like a piece of film), the minimum rate you can use, so that you get no significant loss of data, is twice the number of the highest frequency in the source.

Oh, no.  The mathophobes are dying now.  Please don’t.  That simply means if you’re scanning a 4K image, you need to scan it at 8K or else you’re get a picture blurrier than it should be.  For a 2K image, you scan at 4K.

Now, we can tackle this article.  Take a deep breath.

Error 1:

“(Lawrence of Arabia was shot in 65 millimeter — nearly twice the width of a 35-millimeter frame — so its negative had to be scanned in 8K, creating 8,192 pixels across each line. But it is still referred to as a 4K scan because it has the same density of pixels, the same resolution across 65 millimeters that 4K has across 35 millimeters.)”

This is a very poor way of explaining the concept.  They’re saying that this means they’re scanning more lines because the negative is bigger, not because they’re scanning more lines per inch of film.

And, guess what?  What we’re seeing here, by Nyquist, through Disney’s research, shows that they’re undersampling (blurring) the negative.  Now, I don’t blame them, and it’s probably “good enough,” and very expensive to do more, but let’s start on the right playing field.

Errors 2-3:

“When Lawrence was last restored, in 1988, some of these flaws could be disguised by ‘wetgate printing,’ a process of dousing the print in a special solution. But the new restoration has no prints. The film’s digital data are stored on a hard drive, about the size of an old videocassette, which is inserted into a 4K digital projector. In short, the problems would now have to be fixed.”

Wetgate printing is still used.  It’s simple enough.  You take the negative (not the print), and soak it gently in a fluid (some archives use dry cleaning fluid), that fills in the scratches on the clear film base.  That fluid evaporates by the time the film hits the takeup reel.  Similar processes can be used in scanning.  If it wasn’t done that way in this case, then it means more work for the people retouching the images.

The new restoration has no prints.  SO WHAT?  That has nothing to do with what you’re talking about and is a diversion from the point.  Wetgate has to do with the scanning or printing the negative, not projection. Note to the sticklers out there: yes, we can use wetgate transfers on prints, if that’s all we have, but that is not what is happening here.

Error 4:

“Luckily, there have been dramatic advances in digital-restoration technology in just the last few years. New software can erase scratches, clean dirt and modify contrast and colors not just frame by frame but pixel by pixel. In the old days (circa 2006), if you wanted to brighten the desert sand in one scene because it was too dark, you’d have to brighten the sky too. Now you can brighten the sand — or even a few grains of the sand — while leaving everything else alone. And in those days there was a limited palette for restoring faded colors. Today’s digital palettes are much vaster.

“In one sense, this restored Lawrence might look better than the original. Because of the film stock’s exposure to the desert’s heat, some of its photochemical emulsion dried and cracked, resulting in vertical fissures. ‘Some were just a few pixels wide,’ Mr. Crisp said, ‘but some scenes had hundreds of them, filling as much as one-eighth of the frame.’”

The way this is written implies that there were shooting errors that caused exposure problems with things being too dark or too bright.  It further implied that Grover Crisp and his co-workers are going in and haplessly changing things to suit their own artistic eye, not that of director of photography Freddie Young or director David Lean.

I have a lot of respect for Grover Crisp, and I know he’s not doing that.

Lawrence of Arabia was shot on Eastman color stock that was very unstable (it was especially bad from 1958-63.)  The colors fade unevenly, and brightness fades unevenly.  What they are actually doing, despite the way the article is written, is to match the colors with the way some of the old Technicolor reference prints look (Technicolor prints don’t fade, but they are 35mm and 2-3 generations down from the negative).  This is restoration, not willy-nilly artistry.  There are certain colors that will be almost entirely gone (especially blues and greens).

Error 5:

“Sony went to so much trouble to create not just this release but also a new archive for the ages. Film degrades; digital files of 0’s and 1’s do not. In the coming years, new software might allow still better restorations. But the technicians making them can work from the 4K scan. They won’t have to go back to the negative.”

This is just crazy on a lot of levels:

  1. Robert Harris made a nice duplicate negative in 65mm, on color-stable stock, for the 1980s restoration.   At the time he made it, there were already a number of unrecoverable scenes and missing bits.  This article makes it seem that Harris’ work is now outdated and rather trivial.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Harris and director David Lean worked together to save Lawrence of Arabia, and without them, Lawrence would be less than it is today.
  2. Ones and zeroes don’t degrade.  Hard drives do.  These are spinning media that are subject to magnetic fields, ball bearing problems, heat, cold, and probably the most fatal problem, sticktion.  A hard drive with sticktion has had the spinning magnetic rotor stick to the read head (much like a sticky record album sticking to the needle).  If it sticks too hard, then the drive can’t spin, and the disk is ruined.
  3. Ones and zeroes don’t degrade, but file formats aren’t forever.  Neither are disk drive formats.  Had Lawrence of Arabia been restored digitally in 1989, the results could have been saved on 5.25” floppy disks, and no one could read them today.
  4. Scanners are wonderful and they get better every day.  I’d bet that if the film is stored well, it will hang together well enough to survive until better scanners come along so that it can be scanned and improved again.

This same thing happens often with other “restorations.”  Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were shot in 3-strip Technicolor, which produces three extremely stable black-and-white negatives.  These are a pain to reproduce, so they got “restored” in the 60s to “modern” Eastman color stock.

Whoops, the restoration faded in a few years.  No trouble.  They reprinted it again, with better technology, in the 1970s.  They went back to the black-and-white negatives, which were still around.

Whoops, that restoration faded too.  No trouble.  Another restoration was done in the 1980s.  Guess how?  From the black-and-white negatives.

Oh, wait, they got a better way to reproduce the film and make the alignment sharper?  Back to the negatives.

And they needed to re-scan to make a Blu-ray (well, this time, they did an 8K transfer, which is what the Nyquist sampling theorem says we should do for such a film).  Gee, they went back to the negatives.

The moral of the story: save the negatives for as long as you can because they seem to get used a lot for restorations.

Error 6:

“Between the detective work and lots of video improvement (before the days of digital), it took Mr. Harris 26 months to restore the movie — 10 months longer than it took David Lean to make it.”

The preservation work Harris did on Lawrence of Arabia was on film.  He didn’t use video improvement.  There was no video that would do the work.

Error 7-8:

“Its life in home video has been spotty as well. The first DVD, in 2001, was made from a badly done HD transfer: colors were way off, contrasts too bright or dim. A redo, two years later, was much better, but the dirt and scratches were cleaned up by a ham-fisted process called ‘digital noise resolution’ — the easiest and, for some problems, the only technique available at the time, but it softened the focus and dulled detail.”

I am not sure, and it’s not really worth looking up, but I doubt that the DVD was made from an HD (High Definition) transfer in 2001.  It’s technically possible, but it’s unlikely.  It was probably done from a standard definition transfer, which would also account for the color drift, since the color gamut on standard definition television is pretty limited.

I have no idea what “digital noise resolution” is.  I suspect that what he means is “digital video noise reduction” (also DVNR), which is an automated process to remove scratches and other imperfections from films.  Cartoon aficionados have been bemoaning this for years.  DVNR is still used, fairly often in fact, but it can be done gently or in a ham-fisted way that the author describes.

“A forthcoming Blu-ray Disc of the film, out Nov. 13, fixes all those problems, in part because it’s Blu-ray but more because it’s mastered from the same 4K restoration as the theatrical release.”

Is the mere fact that something is Blu-ray some way of saying it’s anointed with a perfection not yet seen?  Blu-rays, DVDs, films, and videos can all look great or terrible depending on how they are handled technically.

The overarching thing that the author misses (and that others are not missing) is that this digital restoration is not archival no matter how much we would like it to be.  I’m on mailing list after mailing list from archives in a panic about how to store things so that they will last.

I was at the Library of Congress recently seeing the process of the entire run of Laugh-In being copied from 2” tape, a format now long obsolete, to something now (we hope) more permanent.

At the same visit, I saw a roll of film made in 1893 by the Edison people.

Which of these is archival?

The Library of Congress still uses, and intends to use, 35mm film for archival storage.  They haven’t found anything to beat it yet.  They are keeping Kodak and Fuji from shutting down the manufacturing lines.  Other archives demand film, too.  It just holds up better.

That doesn’t mean digital doesn’t have its place.  It’s just that digital isn’t the magic panacea that cured the world’s ills.

It’s a tool, just like anything else.

Another Take on the Colorado Massacre

This has been beaten to death in “the media” (whatever that means). I don’t want to have a political discussion or a political rant about gun rights or letting psychos loose or anything like that. I mean no disrespect to the people who lost lives, property, limbs, or well-being. What happened in Colorado was horrible, and I want to make that clear.

However, this is a movie blog, and this happened at the movies. The whole incident reminds me of just how much we’ve lost as a society in so many ways.

The screening of The Dark Knight Rises was a community event. We have so few of those today. It was an event that people wanted to attend, that people wanted to share. It was the opening of a movie people were eagerly awaiting, and they lined up to see it.

That kind of thing is going away. When I was a kid, there were lines around the block to see Star Wars. Before that, you’d stand in line to see Gone With the Wind or The Sound of Music. The opening night of a James Bond film, every two years or so, was a big event. Even the Star Trek films were a big deal. Now, not so much.

Our whole culture has become depersonalized and cold, in a way that seems like a bad Stanley Kubrick film. Movies are not for big screens but for iPhones. Want to eat in a restaurant? Well, you can go to the fast food giant and they can pump you full of calories for pennies, and you can do it all from the privacy of your car, never seeing anyone, never talking to anyone else, never sharing the experience. Don’t take the bus, take your car. Kids don’t even play outside anymore. They stay inside and play video games. It seems that we can live our entire lives without sharing anything with another living person.

Is it any wonder that Facebook has become so popular? As the whole world has become so depersonalized, Facebook is personal. You can pick your friends, build communities, and share things. Like it or not, people are biologically attuned to this sort of thing. We need it, but we’re not getting much of it these days.

That’s why, even though I’ve not seen a single one of the Christopher Nolan Batman series, I welcomed this phenomenon. People gathering in one place at one time to share a moment in the cinema! Cool!

And now this happens. Beyond the grim statistics and horrible outcomes, it says a lot about what the cinema has become, not a bit of it good.

It seems that Holmes left the back door open and came back to the premiere unobstructed. Where were the ushers? We don’t have them anymore. What was the emergency evacuation plan? We don’t have them anymore. Where was the projectionist? Long since fired, replaced by automation. The only people manning the theater were zit-faced teenagers at the popcorn stand, none of whom had any idea what to do. OK, more staff may not have solved the problem, but it certainly could have helped.

This was a big premiere. A multiplicity of social issues were involved. There were children, even some newborns, in the audience. Why? Why would a parent take a pre-teen to a violent movie like this? In an age of helicopter parents who over-control every aspect of the lives of children, how is this OK? How is it that we can’t see Bugs Bunny on network TV anymore, because that’s too violent, but you take those same kids to see Batman blow people away on the big screen?

In the old days, in the 40s or 50s, it would have been harder for this massacre to happen. There’s nothing new about midnight showings, and there’s nothing new about sold-out openings. Those have been going on for years.

What’s different is that in the old days there was always a theater manager present, and each screen had an usher, or multiple ushers. Someone had the responsibility to check the exits and to warn management if people got unruly. The usher would throw you out if you were obnoxious. What a refreshing idea! In the wake of many theater fires, there was a plan (required by law) to evacuate people in the case of an emergency. The ushers were trained in how to do this.

A lot of theaters even had a kiddie movie run simultaneously with the “adult movie” so that the parents could drop off the kids safely. Other theaters actually had rooms for parents with small children, glassed off from the main house, so that they could watch the movie but not have loud children disrupt the experience for everyone else.

We solved all these problems by firing all of the ushers and relaxing all the rules. Today, people can act up in a theater, can call on their cell phones endlessly, and there are no consequences. It’s had a big impact, too: most people don’t want to go to a movie theater anymore, because it’s not as fun as it used to be.

It’s easy to blame the theater owners or Hollywood itself for this problem, but that would be unfair. As movie theater attendance dwindled due to TV, Hollywood reacted by making bigger, more spectacular movies. TV couldn’t compete in spectacle. In making bigger movies, they needed to recover more money, so they charged the theaters more for them.

Since the Supreme Court had decreed that movie studios could not own theater chains, Hollywood and the owners had to vie for tight funds. The theater owners reacted in the only ways they could. They fired the ushers, laid off excess projectionists, hired teenagers at minimum wage, fudged on equipment, skimped on theater cleaning, etc.

Patrons noticed the changes and reacted by going to fewer movies. And Hollywood and the theater owners reacted by tightening even more. It’s gotten worse and worse. Many theaters are to the point that they are actually unpleasant to attend, and the whole presentation is slipshod at best. Fifty years ago, attending a movie was a spectacular event. Today, seeing a movie means going to a depersonalized box theater. We’ve gone from filet mignon to McDonald’s, but we are still charged for filet mignon. Is it any wonder people don’t go?

As fewer people attend movies in theaters, Hollywood has turned to a reliable demographic: teenage boys love to get out of the house, from under their parents’ thumbs, to see movies. All of the rest of the world has been conditioned to stay home.

Gee, today we have movies that are based on comic books, with no plots and too many explosions. Why is that?

And that leads me back to The Dark Knight Rises. An event, a community event, aimed, predictably, at fifteen-year-old boys. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I was for it, if for no other reason than it keeps alive a 100-year-old tradition of cinema.

My fear is that this will erode the theatrical experience even further. People will probably feel like sitting ducks in a movie house, perhaps with some justification.

How do we fix it? We remember some things:

  1. People go to the movies for a good time. We have to give them one. That means that they have to behave well in groups. Americans are born for rugged individualism, and that should have some limits inside a theater: no loud talking, no cell phones, no throwing things, etc.
  2. We have to have one or two trained theater employees at each screening to enforce behavior rules and help in case of emergencies. Having someone there who has a clue about what to do in an emergency makes people feel safer.
  3. If we fixed #1 and #2, then more people who aren’t necessarily 15-year-old boys might come back to the cinemas. We should make movies for them, too. Did you notice that Midnight in Paris made $100 million on a small budget? There wasn’t an explosion in it. Food for thought, guys.

I find that more and more movies are made for a smaller and smaller audience paying less and less money for each one. That means that all of cinema is becoming YouTube. YouTube is great, but it’s not for Lawrence of Arabia, or even The Match King. It’s great for cat videos, and promos, and your nephew Louie’s new shaky-cam epic, shot in the back yard.

As I mourn for the victims of the shootings in Colorado, I fear one of the casualties may be cinema itself. I almost feel a responsibility to go see a movie just to vote with my dollars.  As a wise man once said, “If the psychos scare you so much that you change your behavior and live in fear, not doing what you once did, then that’s how they win.”

Let’s not let Holmes win.  There’s a reason that the Dr. Film pilot ends with these words: “Go out and see an old movie.” Movies were designed with an audience in mind, timed for an audience, and play best with them.  Let’s all go see a movie (preferably an old one.)

Taking the Picture No One Likes

I’m bad at marketing.  I’ll be the first person to tell you that.  I can fix your computer, but I couldn’t convince you to buy one.  Some people are just built that way.

When I shot the pilot episode for Dr. Film, I thought that people would be jazzed about it, that they’d put it in the DVD player, watch it, read the material I sent, and we’d have a deal.

I sent it everywhere I could find an address.  I had some printed material that I’d prepared explaining what the show was.  I thought it was fine.

Of course, no one responded.  Not one.  They didn’t even say that they didn’t like the show.  I then discovered a fundamental truth of life (although I knew it before, it was really hammered home):

People will flock around to tell you what’s wrong with a failed project, but while you’re working on it, they say nothing.

My friends agreed that I’d screwed up by not having a slick cover color folder for the show.  Then the consensus was that no one would read all the material I sent, so it needed to be cut down.

But then the last part was that I needed to spiff it up with ART!  I was told that I needed to push the idea that we’re dealing with classic film!  Emphasize the characters!  Emphasize the interaction!  In the show, they’re never in the same shot!  Have them together!

Wow.  All great ideas.  I’d never thought of them.  Of course, no one thought to tell me this before I sent all the material to all the TV stations.

I couldn’t hire an artist.  Artists need to eat three times a day, so they can’t work for free.  And since I didn’t have any money to give them, hiring an artist was out, out, out.

OK, that’s fine, say I.  I have some experience in this.  I may not be the greatest artist in the world, but I think I can get the job done.  Hmm, the show’s characters interacting.  In the same shot.  Emphasizing film.

There’s another problem. In the show, Dr. Film and Anamorphia never are in the same shot for very practical reasons: a) I only had one camera and b) Anamorphia is an elaborate (not digital) special effect.  Dr. Film isn’t a special effect at all, and so they can’t be in the same shot together.

I got an inspired idea.  Anamorphia is so named because she’s anamorphic: she’s squeezed horizontally, like someone who survived an Edgar Allan Poe torture, unlike Glory, who plays her.  Just for one shot, I knew I could get them together, but only if I lined them up just right.

I’d give Glory an extra large reel of 35mm film, with a diameter twice as large as a regular reel.  Then, I’d shoot her dead on straight ahead, and I’d be standing next to her.  The math would work out so I could squeeze her in a photo program and it would make the wide reel look like a regular one!

How would they interact?  Well, in the show, the characters are always bickering about how long-winded and boring he is about film.  She’s gotten frustrated with his verbose habits and wraps him in the film he’s been talking about too much. He’s angry, she’s angry, that’s consistent, PERFECT.

By this time, it had been over a year since we’d shot the show.  But that’s OK, we thought, no one saw it in the first place, so we can still send it out with the new slick paper brochure!  I needed help, because I couldn’t shoot it myself: I’m actually in the shot.  I talked to my sister about it.

ACK. Glory is shorter than I am, and my sister is shorter than I am.  My sister had the idea of shooting outside to make sure we could get lots of light.  That made harsh unflattering shadows, but there was a worse problem.  Due to the widely varying heights, nothing lined up, and I looked like a giant slug being wound up by a tiny silkworm.  It was ridiculous.

Glory complained that the reel I’d found for her was actually full of real film!  This was a problem because a 3000’ reel with film on it is heavy, and she had to hold it very still, and straight horizontally, to get the shots.  Not a good idea.  She was pretty sore by the end of the shoot, and I don’t blame her.  Especially since the pictures were utterly unusable.

Upon reflection, I remembered that Glory (a historian) had just written a National Register nomination for a building with a large stage.  If we could use it, then we could stand on the stage, and have a photographer stand on the main floor, thereby solving the height issues.

I also decided I’d be seated, which helped equalize the height differential.  I found an empty reel, and that made it a little easier for her.  The building owners allowed us to use the stage for a few hours.  I brought in lights, tripods, everything.

It was HOT!  The lights were in my face all the time, and I was wrapped in disintegrating film.  I used a vinegary print of From Russia With Love so I wouldn’t ruin good film!  It smelled terrible, and as I was sweating, it dripped dye on me.  Wonderful.

We spent about 2 hours shooting.  My friend Greg shot the pictures this time.  (My sister couldn’t get off work!)  Greg tried really hard, but 99% of the pictures were junk.  There was one picture in the whole bunch that looked OK.  It was very dark, even with all the light we had pouring on us.  It was just a hard picture to shoot.

I’m not going to show all the raw pictures, because I’d had Glory stand closer to the camera (to keep me from overwhelming the shot).  This caused some focus issues and makes her look unusually large in the raw image.

I worked on equalizing the exposure and applied the anamorphic factor, and got this:

Suddenly, voila, we have art!  Dr. Film and Anamorphia in the same shot!  I used the picture for the new brochure and spruced it up.  I thought it looked pretty good.  We ran it by some design people.  They liked it.  I cut the text down to 8 pages, with lots of color pictures.

Guess what?  This will surprise you.  No response.  Apparently no one even bothered to look at it.

Discouraged?  You bet.  I was about ready to give up on the project.  We’d thrown time and money at it, and no one cared at all.  We weren’t even interesting enough to warrant a polite, “HEY! Buzz off, willya?”

But Dr. Film also seems to be The Project That Never Dies.  There are always a few people who have been unfailingly encouraging, to the point that some people are in my face saying, “It’s a great idea!  Don’t give up on this show!”  (I’ve never actually been sure why this is, but it seems to be.  Most of the rest of the world looks at Dr. Film with a cold indifference.)

I installed a blog on the web page, the one you’re reading now, updated the site, and went from there.  The blog, as you can see, has been a rip-roaring success, attracting email from Viagra shippers the world over.  With no real web traffic and only a tepid response to the blog, I was ready to shut the project down again.

Several others suggested that Dr. Film was too long.  The feeling was that we needed cut it down and make it in 30 minutes, based on the attention span of modern audiences.  This is where I draw the line.  I have a two-fold argument with this: a) there are so many interesting movies out there that don’t get shown that I hate to CUT them to something shorter.  b) A 30-minute show is actually more work than a two-hour show!  Why?  Well, I have to go through more material, cherry-pick, and edit.  More narration to explain what’s missing.  More shooting.  More work.

The whole idea of Dr. Film has always been to make an economical show that appeals to an admittedly small demographic.  Since a 30-minute show means more time, it also means I’d have to charge more money, which I think is more of an impediment than the difficulty in clearing a two-hour slot.

Glory and I talked to publicity people and they told us that there was probably no hope for Dr. Film since no one responded.  Once again, I was ready to shut the project down and move on to other things.

Remember I said Dr. Film just never seems to die?  Well, I had an idea.  You see, I don’t believe anyone who matters has ever watched the show and given it any sort of chance.    I have a feeling that it’s off the beaten path, consequently under the radar.  I don’t think it mattered what sort of picture we had.

I realize that Dr. Film is an unconventional project.  I know that there is a niche market, but we have to reach it.  My idea was to draw upon on word-of-mouth support and an internet community.  If we have a vibrant Facebook group, a bunch of advocates for the show, a successful blog, then people have to notice it.  Someone floated the idea that “Support Dr. Film!” t-shirts would be a great idea.  A way to build the community feeling.

That’s fine, I thought!  I’ve got art for shirts!  We’re set!  I’d designed a shirt for a convention showing, and I still had the files!

Then, just as I was ready to submit the design, a couple of people, all generally supporters of the show, told me how much they hated the shirt.

WHAT?

They hated that same picture I’d literally sweat over for hours.  And hate was the word.  It was repulsive.  One guy told me he’d never wear the shirt because it looked like a bondage scene to him.

I have to tell you that I never thought of this.  Knowing the characters, and knowing that there is not a spark of anything between them, it never occurred to me.  Not once.

OK, so what should we have instead?  This is where I get frustrated.  Once again, people can’t seem to tell you what they like.  It’s the old joke, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like!”

Some ideas were in direct contradiction to other ones.  I wanted to scream.  Actually, I did scream.  I thought we were about done, and suddenly, I was back at square one.  I often marvel about how I’ve come this far on Dr. Film with nothing to show for it!

Ernie Kovacs once called Edie Adams and told her that the show opening wasn’t working, and he didn’t know why.  He was joking about being tired and working overtime.  Edie told him that the audience didn’t care how tired they were or how hard they worked.  They only cared whether the show was funny or not.

Edie was right. It makes no difference how we got to the t-shirt design and how we took The Picture That No One Likes!  It only matters that we came up with a design that people seem to like.  On the other hand, it’s a great story and it makes a great blog entry!

You note I’ve not spoken about what I thought personally?  Well, I don’t like the new design (even though I did it.)  I like the other one better.  I don’t think there’s enough art in this one.

But, clearly, I have no idea what I’m talking about!

PS: I haven’t had a chance to take redo the art for the brochure, so you can still see it here.

 

Ray Bradbury Meets the Man of 1,000 Faces

When I was a kid, growing up and watching movies on TV, I read about Lon Chaney Sr., in the magazines of Forrest J. Ackerman.  Ackerman (1916-2008) was a great friend of Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen.  As of Mr. Bradbury’s death today, Harryhausen (1920- ) becomes the last survivor of the long-lived group.

Ackerman always praised Lon Chaney and claimed he was a special actor, whose like is not to be seen today.  Even as a nine-year-old, I wanted to see more of his films.  In those days, most of Chaney’s pictures were impossible to see.  If you were very lucky, you might see a chewed-up print of The Phantom of the Opera or The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It was unlikely that you’d see any of the other ones.

As video came to the world, I got a slow trickling of Lon Chaney movies.  I was a teenager at the time.  I was mesmerized by him.  What an actor.  Ackerman was right.

Then, many years later, I attended a lecture at Butler University with Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury, two authors who could hardly be more disparate, but were both typecast (if one may use that word for an author) as “science fiction guys.”  This, as Harlan Ellison would tell you, is considered by the literati to be one small step up from porno authors and men’s room attendants.

Adams came on and was enchanting.  He read excerpts from his Hitchhikers’ Guide books, and some other things.  He was a natural-born actor, able to put a spin on his work like no performers I had ever seen before.  I loved every moment of what he did, and since he died not long after, I’m glad I got the chance to see him in person.

Then Bradbury came on.

By this time in his life, had had a stroke, and was stuck in a wheelchair.  His speech was somewhat impaired.  His ability to move one hand seemed to be a little strained.

I realize that everyone will focus on Mr. Bradbury’s literary accomplishments, which are legion, in celebrating his life.  I don’t want to take anything away from that at all, because I love Bradbury’s work.  But there was another side to him, as a lover of film, and since this is a film blog, that’s what I want to cover here.

Bradbury called films “wonderful” and “magical,” and he wanted nothing to do with the idea that they were somehow low-class art.  He’d worked on many films himself, including the underrated Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and Moby Dick (1956).  He did a fantastic impression of director John Huston when he spoke of the making of that picture.

He went on to talk about his favorite star when he was growing up.  Born in 1920, Bradbury was an impressionable child just as Lon Chaney was becoming a big star.  In those days, it was fairly easy to see movies reissued, so even as a youngster, he was able to see most of Chaney’s big pictures in reissue.

Chaney, he said, was able to reach into his soul and find something in some of these characters that was human and touching, despite how horrible they often were.  Bradbury often teared up a bit when talking of Chaney’s work, and how emotional it made him.

Of course, most of the audience had no idea what he was talking about.  After all, Chaney has been dead since 1930, and he only made one talking picture.  Even today, a good bit of his silent material is difficult to see and a fair chunk doesn’t survive at all.  But I had seen it!   I knew exactly what he meant.

One of the things that always annoys me in an interviewer is when they ask me, “Can you name an actor today who is like this silent star we’re discussing?”  Well, no.  Lon Chaney was unique in cinema.  There was no one ever like him, and there likely never will be again.  Despite the fact that some of his movies were clichéd and hammy, with hare-brained plots and weak direction, Chaney was always able to wring something worthwhile out of them.

He was so good at certain things that he got tagged with them and had to do them over and over again.  Weird, contortionist makeup?  He was great at it.  Playing disabled characters with deformities?  No one better.  Ethnic types?  Chaney’s your man.  And the thing that tied them together: No one, no one ever, was able to convey the emotions of traumatic disappointment and utter heartbreak like Chaney did.  One facial expression.  You felt his pain.  The man was a genius.

It was almost a given that Chaney didn’t get the girl at the end of the picture, but he sure tried and it killed him (sometimes literally) that someone else ended up with his love.  I often find that some of Chaney’s best performances are in his most conventional parts, like Tell It to the Marines (1926) or While the City Sleeps (1928).  But Chaney could still play convincingly through thick makeup.  Even a fairly conventional picture like Shadows (1922) features Chaney playing an 80-year-old Chinese laundryman.  It is hard to see the 39-year-old Chaney in the part.  After a few minutes, we simply believe he is that character.

As I continued to listen to Bradbury, it occurred to me that much of his work was colored in the same way that Chaney’s had been.  No, not science fiction, not horror, not claptrap.  Chaney was all about emotion. Often it was about a alienated person who didn’t really fit in with the rest of society.  Bradbury’s work was too.

I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned to read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.   I know that the “English teacher mentality” taught that 1984 was a timeless classic.  I felt at the time that Fahrenheit 451 was much more interesting, because it had passion that I never felt at all in Orwell’s novel.  Bradbury’s characters deeply loved a history that society was taking away, so much that they were willing to die in order to preserve it.

It was a very Lon Chaney sort of idea.

Bradbury was moved to tears again as he recounted Chaney’s untimely death in 1930, and how it affected him personally.  This man, his hero, was dead!  It could even happen to someone like Lon Chaney!  It made the ten-year-old boy shudder at both Chaney’s mortality and his own.

We are fortunate that Bradbury lived over 90 years, just as we are unfortunate that Chaney never reached 50.  Tonight I celebrate the legacy of both men.  I hope somewhere, somehow, The Man of 1000 Faces gets to meet the creator of The Illustrated Man.

As a postscript: I have seen an artist’s picture, which I cannot find, of Death laying the final mask on Lon Chaney’s face.  I can think of no better image to include here.

Post postscript: (added 8/26/12).  Michael Blake found the picture, which I am including here.

 

My Top 13 Films That Need Preservation

Find out more on the Film Preservation Blogathon here.  Donate here.  The host blogs are Marilyn Ferdinand’s and Rod Heath’s.

I read about this blogathon with some interest.  They’re raising funds for preserving and distributing The White Shadow (1923).  This is a worthy project, since it’s one of those films that won’t be preserved by normal methods.  We only have the first half of this film that Alfred Hitchcock co-directed.  It isn’t really a Hitchcock film, and it isn’t complete, and Hitchcock remembered it as not being very good.

Exactly the kind of thing I’d love to see!  Why?  Because it will show just how Hitchcock developed as a director, and I love the work of some of the actors (especially Clive Brook) in the picture.

And since it’s not really terribly historically important, and incomplete, it will get shoved on everyone’s back burner.  Again, that makes it the film I want to see.

I’ve been reading over the blogs on the blogathon so far, and there are quite a lot of them about Hitchcock and Hitchcock-related films.  It got me thinking how I could contribute in my generally contrarian way, not really talking too much about Hitchcock, which I think is being covered adequately by others.

What isn’t being adequately covered is the thing that is most dear to my heart, which is film preservation itself.  I got myself to thinking what other projects I’d love to see preserved.  Now, many of you loyal readers (I realize this is an impossibility since I have too few readers to be called many!) will cry foul.  Since I am involved in film preservation myself, I’ll naturally pick projects that I’m already involved in.

Well of course!  That’s why it’s my blog.  If you’d like to rant about your own special projects, then write about them in your blog.

Here, then are some of my top picks, in no particular order.  I have restricted these to films that actually exist and could be preserved or restored, but nothing is currently being done.

  1. Thunder (1929).  This is Lon Chaney’s penultimate film, for which about 12-16 minutes exist.  I know that it was a big deal a few years back when Rick Schmidlin did a stills-only restoration of London After Midnight.  Well, Thunder has two advantages over that film: a) There is actually some footage that survives and b) all indications are that it was actually a good picture.  The disadvantage that Thunder has is that it’s not a lost Tod Browning picture, and few people have heard of it.  I’ve been told by archivists that the photography on this film is as lovely as any ever shot, and this comes from jaded guys who have seen everything.  I’d love someone to care about this film in the same way people cared about London After Midnight.  Even half as much.  Chaney is always an amazing actor.  His work should be seen.
  2. Seven Chances color restoration.  What?, I hear you ask.  Didn’t you already do this?  Yes, I did.  I even wrote about it a zillion times. What I hope I proved was that a full-scale restoration could be done in the right way, from good-quality film elements, combining the best of multiple print sources.  There are a number of people who would need to collaborate on this project, and it would be expensive to do it right.  I hope the politics can be overcome and this film can be preserved in the way it deserves.  I think my restoration could be vastly improved if we just had better source elements.
  3. Little Orphant Annie (1918).  Not only is this a rare early Colleen Moore film, but it’s also one of the only appearances ever made by poet James Whitcomb Riley, in a film that was probably made at his house by Chicago filmmakers.  I don’t know for certain, because I haven’t seen it.  Film historian Bruce Lawton located a nitrate print several years ago, and I tried to raise funds to restore it from local historical societies and the Riley Foundation itself.  They didn’t have the money.  The print has subsequently been donated to an archive that has no immediate preservation plans.  Complicating the issue is that a truncated version was duplicated (rather poorly) by a dubious collector in the 1970s.  It’s felt that this version may be “good enough” even though we may have a complete original nitrate, which would be longer and better.  The last I heard was that the nitrate was starting to get sticky.  I hope that people wake up before this film is gone.
  4. King of the Kongo (1929).  Hey, wait!  Isn’t this a pet project?  It sure is.  I wrote about it here.  Vitaphone researcher Ron Hutchinson located the original sound discs for three reels of this rare serial and they do sync with my silent 16mm print.  I was able to restore the sound to the reels for the first time in 80 years.  The pluses?  It’s the first sound serial, and an early Boris Karloff film.  The minuses?  It’s painfully acted by people desperate to dive in for the immobile microphones, and it isn’t very good.  We only have the sound for one complete chapter.  The agonizing part: another collector has several more discs and smells money, so he will not lend these discs for a restoration, but will only sell them for an outrageous sum.  Even with all the extant discs, we’d have less than half of the serial restored to sound, and I’ve got to tell you that the blu-ray sales of this one would be in the single digits.  Still, it’s cool and it should be restored.  I’m probably going to do a Kickstarter project to get it done…at least what we have now.
  5. Beggar on Horseback (1925).  Gee, a silent picture directed by James Cruze, with Edward Everett Horton, from a play co-written by George S. Kaufman.  Could this be a hidden gem?  You bet it is.  The good news is that it has been preserved, but the bad news is that it’s missing the last reel.  I’ve seen it; it’s wonderful, bizarre stuff.  I’d love to see this released on some sort of video with stills and bridging text.  It’s not been done yet, but it should be.  The trouble?  As usual… copyright issues from a studio that thinks no one cares.  I hope they’re wrong.
  6. Showdown at Ulcer Gulch (1958).  OK, this one isn’t very good.  I admit it.  The “review” on IMDb by the fraudulent F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre makes it sound worse than it is.  Chico Marx’ son-in-law, animator Shamus Culhane, directed this piece for the Saturday Evening Post.  It’s no more than 15 minutes or so, but it contains cameos by no less than Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Edie Adams, Ernie Kovacs, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby.  It stars Orson Bean and Salome Jens.  I found a faded Eastman color print of this in 2001, and it is in desperate need of a color restoration.  The color negative may still exist, but it’s on very unstable stock (1958-62 Eastman negative is particularly bad at fading), and it may be too far gone.  Historically important?  You bet!  I’m not sure what the problem is, but someone is claiming a copyright on it.  I’ve offered it as an extra to two separate boxed sets and have been turned down twice.
  7. The Haunted (1965).  Yes, this is another of my own pet projects.  After many years of searching, I found a print of this on eBay a couple of years ago.  I’ve written about it before, but it’s a wonderfully spooky pilot by Joseph Stefano, co-creator of The Outer Limits and the screenwriter for Psycho (1960).  Hey, I got in a Hitchcock reference!  There are more here: Hitchcock stars Martin Landau (North by Northwest), Diane Baker (Marnie), and Dame Judith Anderson (Rebecca) are the top-billed actors.  Spooky photography by Conrad Hall, and a beautiful, lyrical script by Stefano make this an unheralded classic.  16mm material exists in the hands of at least one archive and a couple of different collectors.  35mm material exists in the hands of a major network.  There are two different cuts, both a pilot at 60 minutes and a feature cut (distributed to Europe) at about 90 minutes, but it’s languishing in contract problems.  Is there a negative?  Do we need a restoration from the surviving prints?  It’s not clear.  I can’t recommend this highly enough: it’s as good as the best of the Outer Limits episodes, yet no one can see it.  Maddening.
  8. Mack Sennett credits.  Paramount sold its library of short films to NTA in the 50s.  NTA retitled them for TV issue.  In many cases, this was butchery of the highest order, but it was done for legal reasons.  In some cases, original negatives, uncut, survive, but in others, we are not so lucky.  Mack Sennett did a series of shorts for Paramount in the 1930s that had a unique opening: a bulldog came out of a dog house, barking twice, and then a fade into the main title (a spoof of the popular MGM lion opening).  In most cases, NTA just froze the main title, leaving the soundtrack alone, so it’s possible to hear the dog even though we never see it.  Fortunately, there are a few surviving prints of the barking dog visuals.  I’d love to see these restored to the Sennett shorts, because they give a fresher, more vibrant open to these films.  I’ve worked on it a bit, and I think it could be done with more of them…
  9. Hard Luck (1921) This is one of the maddening problems in film when a movie is really too profitable, so people fight over it.  An early Buster Keaton short, it does not exist in complete form.  However, there are two different versions, each with different footage, that survive, and since Keaton makes money, both versions are available on video. I hate it when this sort of thing happens.  I fully sympathize with the problem, because I know that Keaton pays the bills on other projects that are worthy but pay less.  In this case, I really wish the two players could get together and cooperate so we could get a more complete version of this short.
  10.   The Lost World (1925) Long a holy grail of film restoration, it was a big deal when a extra footage from this film finally resurfaced in the 1990s.  Historically, it’s a knockout, because it’s the first ever giant monster film with dinosaurs found in a “lost world,” a set piece so powerful it was even stolen for the movie Up (2009).  A major archive did a complete restoration of The Lost World from the best materials, and they did some roadshows around the country.  Alas, they wouldn’t release it on video.  This meant that another company did another restoration on it and released it themselves.  The result?  You guessed it.  The two prints each have footage not in the other, meaning that no one yet has seen the complete version.  I’d love to see the various political factions work out the problems here so that this film can finally get the restoration it deserves.
  11. The Mascot (1934) This is an early sound stop-motion short, with lovely, almost stream-of-consciousness animation.  A couple of years ago, the Library of Congress reprinted a beautiful 35mm of this relatively common short that contained a great deal of material I’d never seen before!  Ironically, my own print contained footage not in theirs!  This short has been cut and recut so much over the years that the original intent of Starevitch’s wonderful work is often blunted or lost.  I have a feeling that it would make a bit more sense if we had more of it to tie the narrative together.
  12. The Treasurer’s Report (1928) Robert Benchley’s groundbreaking and hilarious monologue was one of the first sound-on-film releases from Fox.  Long available in hideous dupes, with the most common print marred with an ugly defect that looks like a tarantula leg stuck in the optical printer, this film appeared to be doomed to a life of substandard picture and hissy image.  I found an original diacetate 35mm print in the hands of a collector several years ago, and another collector owns a beautiful 16mm reduction print from the original negative.  Between the two prints, an almost pristine restoration could be made.  Will it happen?  I doubt it.  The copyright on it is dubious, and there’s a problem deciding who owns what.  It deserves to be saved.
  13. Freckles (1935) Ostensibly based on the book by Gene Stratton-Porter, this film ends up being a completely separate work.  It’s also basically a lost film starring Virginia Weidler and Tom Brown.  I found a badly vinegared print, still runnable, on eBay a few years ago.  As far as we know, it’s the only surviving print.  There’s the usual trouble: it has a copyright renewal, but no one knows who owns it now.  As a result, I can’t show it except in archival conditions, I can’t copy it to video without contravening the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and three archives have turned me down on my offer to have it preserved.  One offered to store it for me but not to do any work on restoring or preserving it.  No thank you!

 

No, there’s no Greed here, no London After Midnight, nothing really earth-shattering.  There is a great deal of material that’s interesting and historically important.  Some of it may be preserved eventually, some may see the light of day, but I expect some to continue languishing.

That doesn’t mean I’m not in there fighting!

I love the idea of a blogathon that actually results in a film being preserved.  I have always been told that no one cares about old films, particularly silent ones.  Please, just for me, prove those people wrong!

Why I’m Just Mean

Many years ago, a friend of mine disciplined his 5-year-old girl.  She reacted with disgust at not being able to do whatever she had put her mind to doing.  As one might expect with a 5-year-old, tears were immediately forthcoming and she burst out with a loud pronouncement:  “You’re just mean!”

I thought of that again the other day when I got involved in an argument on archive.org.  It was only a third-hand argument, and, frankly, I can’t do anything about it, but it points up a problem that I keep encountering, and it’s one that makes me “just mean.”

I’ve long hated the kind of collector who collects things just so other people can’t have them.  I particularly believe that film is an art form that depends on being served up socially, and someone who squirrels away prints just so no one else can see them is, I think, somewhat messed up.  This is why I do every thing I can to ensure that films I have are accessible to people.

That’s another problem.  I have a lot of films that are in “copyright hell” that no one can legally watch, and some of them are languishing with no one to show them or even (in a few cases) preserve them.  I keep these prints.  Others may be public domain but of a nature that no one will ever want to see them.  These include bad pictures, shorts of an odd length with no stars in them, and sometimes even films that are of only historic/academic interest.

I keep these prints, too.  I hope someone wants to see them someday. But I’m crazy.  You knew that.  I keep these prints and I mend them, resprocket them, throw camphor in with them, patch them, put them on new reels, etc.  It takes money.  And, as you all know, I am a film professional, which means that I make a “living” (not much of one, hence the quotes) from doing film shows, presentations, and lectures.

Film exhibition is a strange thing.  Rare films doubly so.  There may be an area that really wants to see a particular film and has wanted to for years, but they just can’t seem to find it.  I got a job recently in Vevay, IN playing a print of The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1935) just because the author of the book came from that same town.  It didn’t matter that the film had virtually nothing to do with the book.  They wanted to see it.

That film is available freely on archive.org, which is fine, since it’s in the public domain, and it had an impact on how many people showed up.  Despite the fact that I had a nice print, showed a cartoon, and showed it on a big screen, it was “contaminated” by being free on archive.org.  Only 15 or so people showed up.  It’s sad.  (I could do a whole separate posting on how theatrical exhibition is being killed by inferior material shown at home, but that’s for another time.)

I have to face the fact that I can put on a better, nicer, sharper show than archive.org can put on, but the fact that I have to charge in order to keep solvent is a hindrance to me.  That’s why I rely on a few profitable films that keep me floating above water.

These are films that are generally not very available, in the public domain, and have some niche market for them.  These are films that I run over and over again.  I refer to them as “the pantheon.”  They pay the bills for the other, less marketable, films in my collection.

Alas, I have to guard these films jealously.  No one seems to care that I lavished time, care, and hours of work into preserving some of these films.  All they care about is seeing it free on archive.org.  Many years ago, I was also involved with a video company that specialized in getting good copies of public domain titles into the marketplace.

I learned my lesson on that one, too.  Ever buy material from Alpha Video?  Well, probably 1/3 of their catalog is material that got copied from my collection.  Sure, it’s public domain, but my copies were and are nicer.  I was charging $10-$15 for copies, and they’d make DVDs blasted (poorly) off VHS copies of copies and throw them at Wal-Mart for $1.  At the time, I couldn’t even buy blanks for that price.  The power of cheap blew away the power of better quality.  Ack.

So, in response, I started doing live film shows.  These are infinitely more satisfying, because they’re with an audience, you can see the quality difference, etc.  Amazingly, if you factor in costs of media, I make more money from 2-3 successful film shows than I did in a year of selling video copies of the same film.  Extra points: as I accrue more rare titles, Alpha doesn’t get them.  I can still show them.  I get eating money.  Yay.

At this point, a lot of people will already chime in and claim that I’m “just mean” for not putting these on video.  A couple of years ago, a woman who called me worse than that for not releasing a film with questionable copyright on video.  Yes, I have the only copy, and no, no one wants to preserve it because of rights issues.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to break the law to make the film available.

I also point out that I am more than happy to rent out films from my collection, to do backyard parties or film shows, etc.  I have never told anyone to buzz off if their request was legal.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to shoot myself in the foot by putting it on video.

A while back, there were 3 people who asked me for a copy of a particularly rare film.  I won’t go into specifics, because that will draw attention to that title, and not to my overall point.  These people had some good reasons that they could use a copy.  I made some, and asked them not to make copies of that title.  I nicely explained that doing shows of this film helps keep me preserving others.  They all politely agreed.

So, then, it was a great surprise to me to find that someone had uploaded it for free use on archive.org.  It was from my own transfer and my print.  I recognized my handiwork.  It was also 2-3 generations removed from what I’d done, so yet again a degraded copy is competing in the marketplace with something I have in a better copy.

I carped about it, and said that, once again, I’m too nice.  I should tell people to buzz off when they want video copies.   It’s already had an impact: I used to get 4-5 shows on this title per year, and I’ve only had one (non-paying) in the last year.  I just can’t compete with free.

A friend of mine leaped to my defense and posted a shame-on-you response on archive.org.  The vitriol that this caused amazed me:

“There is no copyright on this movie. No one owns it. No one has the right to keep others from watching it.

“Anyone who has a digital copy can—and should—share it with others.

“XXXXXXX is the one who should be ashamed for viciously and mindlessly attacking the uploader.

“Another who should be ashamed is XXXXXXX’s friend, who attempted to keep this film out of the hands of the public, and who, by so doing, increased the likelihood that the film would be lost forever.”

WHAT??????????  ARE YOU KIDDING ME????????  Well, that caused me to have Popeye syndrome:  “I’ve had all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more.”

I wrote this in response:

“Uploading low-resolution copies of material at archive.org is not a way of preserving films. Neither is the practice of uploading books a replacement for the books themselves. It may be useful, but it’s not a preservation. I intend no slam at the wonderful service archive.org is. Google isn’t a replacement for librarians, either.

“(the film in question) is preserved at The Library of Congress and a pristine 35mm print exists that anyone can rent out. The original camera negative survives. It is not in danger of going away. There are two senses of the word ‘own’ here: in one sense I do not own the intellectual rights to these films, because they have expired rights. In another sense, I may in fact own the best surviving prints of them.

“I need prove to no one that I stand for preservation and availability of films. I have donated films to every major archive, and I’m an archive source for TV and DVD. Many films from my collection have already been bootlegged and appear here for free, often in embarrassingly poor copies. I was not provided any remuneration for the hundreds of hours I put in preserving these films, transferring them, and making them projectable. Many of these are films that I preserved myself and would not have been available had I not rescued them.

“The vast majority of films in my collection are not marketable and few people care enough to see them… When a film is free on the internet, it drastically cuts down the audience that will pay to see it projected theatrically..

“I’d be happy to make more films available on archive.org, and even make good direct-from-film transfers of them. When someone comes up with a way for me to do so without compromising both my means of income and my ability to preserve films, I’ll do it. The gas man needs to be paid, even if he may agree that what I do is cool and worthwhile.

“Perhaps you still feel that I should be ashamed, but I am not, because I’ve done more for film preservation and availability than most people you will ever meet.”

You’ll note that I did not resort to profanity even once.  I’ll admit I sure thought about it.

I’ll close with some more thoughts here.  I love old films, and I love showing them.  I preserve material that no archive and few collectors care about.  I also know that I will lose all control and all income from them once they’re on the internet.  I further understand that I can only be in so many places at once doing shows.

The whole idea of the Dr. Film show is to let me do the same sorts of things that I do in live shows, but to share them with a wider audience.  I fully realize that they’ll be bootlegged nine ways from Sunday all over the internet once they air, but at least I can be paid once for my work before it gets shared all over the net.

You want to strike a blow for film preservation and availability?  Help me get Dr. Film on TV somewhere…anywhere. (Contact your favorite TV provider and send them our web page address!)  I guarantee you’ll see oddball films that you haven’t seen before, and usually from the best prints that survive.  Strike a blow against the third-rate free films and help me do it a little closer to “the right way.”

Still, if I come to your town, please show up anyway.  OK?

Guest Blogger DW Atkinson reviews The Three Stooges movie

DW Atkinson, one of the moving forces behind Cinesation, is perhaps the biggest Stooge fan I know. Even his license plate and email have variations of NYUK (the Curly laugh) on them.

Full disclosure: I’m not the biggest Stooge fan ever. I don’t find them hilariously funny, as some do, but I respect them. When I see what they were able to do with the 35-cent budget allocated to them by Columbia, and I compare it to what many of the other Columbia comedians were able to accomplish with the same money, the Stooges blow them out of the water every time. I figured that Mr. Atkinson was the most qualified to review this modern-day version of classic comedy.

DW’s review starts below the trailer for the new film.

The Three Stooges: Those who saw the film this weekend — a 58% male crowd — didn’t love it, assigning it an average grade of B-, according to market research firm CinemaScore. Even if word-of-mouth on the movie doesn’t end up being fantastic, 20th Century Fox didn’t spend much to produce the film: $37 million.

The word film was used but it was digital for me. B- is generous. What I could do 37 million? Don’t get me started.

I just watched the new Three Stooges movie.
I could tell it was partially made as an homage to Howard, Fine & Howard.
But too many times it was it was an Oh-man moment for me. Not in a good way either.
And as usual, most of the good parts were in the trailer spoiling too many scenes.

The movie just didn’t work for me. It couldn’t decide what it wanted to be or how to get there.
It was funny in parts, made me smile and laugh.
But when it’s over, the “what the hell was that” question smacked me upside the head faster than Moe with a shovel.

I am not a fan of the Farrelly’s work with the exception of Shallow Hal.
In fact, after paying to see Dumb & Dumber back in the day, I vowed to never pay to see another Farrelly movie.
I still think it’s a dumb movie and I was dumber paying to see it. I could have edited it down to 30 minutes.
Anyways, like most Farrelly flicks, body fluids/functions have a spotlight and the Stooges are not immune.
The nursery scene went a little long but it was funny at first. The Curly gas scene worked because unlike
some other gags, it wasn’t over worked.

I don’t understand the reasoning for the assorted famous supporting cast members and I don’t care enough to look it up. Larry David? Really?

I don’t believe a real Stooge fan will like the new Three Stooges Movie,
but having said that, they won’t hate it either.
It could have been worse. Remember the Laurel & Hardy movie back in 1999?

How would I rate the film?
Would I go see it again? NO
Would I buy it on DVD next month? NO
I give it three Nyuk’s = a grade of C

Kevin Brownlow and the Holy Grail

Kevin Brownlow (right), and Abel Gance (1967)

Seldom has a movie, particularly a silent film, been so enmeshed in legend and politics as Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927).  The French have their own restoration, there’s a different version at MOMA, and there’s yet a different cut made by Francis Coppola, who owns the rights to show it in the US.  But the most famous, most complete version has been assembled by Kevin Brownlow, slowly, painstakingly, over the last 45 years or so.  It hasn’t been shown since the 1980s in the US.

Attending a screening of Napoleon has become something of a Holy Grail.  The few European screenings have attracted viewers from all over the world.  The challenge of mounting a showing is daunting.  The film is about five and half hours long, and it requires a screen for three interlocked projectors with a triple-wide ending sequence.  Since it doesn’t have a recorded score, the film has an orchestral accompaniment written by Carl Davis, which he generally conducts himself.  Just the thought of paying overtime and double overtime for the union musicians is staggering.

I was lucky enough to attend a showing in Oakland, California on March 31.  It was spectacular.  The theater was breathtaking, an art deco gem called the Paramount, absolutely gigantic, and painstakingly restored.  I’d have gladly paid most of what I paid for admission just to look around the theater.

So what about the movie, you ask.  Well, I’m getting to that…

I try to keep the Dr. Film blog pages from getting too saturated with film theory and technical jargon. I strive to have the blog full of film lore for geeks, but I also want to encourage newcomers.  With this film, I have a problem.  I can’t seem to discuss the movie without doing it in film geek terms.

The problem with talking about Napoleon is that it diverges strongly from most other silents.  The differences between it and the run-of-the-mill silent films of the period can only be explained and illustrated by using fancy film terms.  So I will apologize in advance to any newcomer who may be reading this.  I hope it is still rewarding to any newcomer, but if you find if rough going, I recommend skipping forward to another one of my blog articles.

Napoleon is part of a rarefied class of films made by half-crazy directors who went wild spending money and had crews and producers that would support it.  It requires a charismatic director so dedicated to the film that people will follow him into the abyss.  In a very real sense the making of a film like Napoleon is like a Napoleonic campaign.  Consider that Gance went to all the places that Napoleon did, with a similar sized crew/army, and prop ammunition, etc.  The logistics are quite impressive.

Napoleon joins the rank of films like Intolerance, Metropolis, Lawrence of Arabia, Heaven’s Gate, 2001, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and a number of others.  All of these have troubled production histories, bloated runtimes, maniacal directors, and out-of-control budgets.  All of them are today considered at least minor classics, some major classics.  Most of them were subjected to investor interference and extensive recutting.

I am saddened by the idea that many of the people who saw Napoleon did so without ever having seen another silent film.  What makes Napoleon unique is that it uses a number of fascinating techniques.  Some ideas were used years later, others not at all.  To see Napoleon is to see one of the great experimental films ever made.  There are parts of it that work brilliantly, other parts less so, but the ideas we see in this film are nothing short of staggering.

Consider these:

• Silent films tended to be cut with a slower rhythm that modern films are.  Gance has several sequences in Napoleon that are cut with lightning speed, just as fast as a modern Michael Bay film.  Gance had the intelligence to use this technique sparingly, so that the confusion of “chaos cinema” used in action sequences today is minimized.  What does happen is that we get the effect of being “in the fight” while still clearly understanding what is going on.

• A brilliant little sequence uses a technique I’d never seen before.  Napoleon sees Josephine and finally gets a chance to meet her properly.  He’d met her briefly a number of times before.  Gance gives us a closeup of Napoleon, and then flash cuts of their other meetings, and then back to Napoleon reacting.  In the space of a second, we understand what’s going on in Napoleon’s head as he works this out.  Amazing technique.  No flashbacks, lap dissolves or anything.  The only other time I’ve ever seen anything like it is during a scene toward the end of Charade (1963), but that usage is fundamentally different and is actually cut slower!

• Moving camerawork was difficult in 1927.  Film stock was slow, which meant that a lot of light was required to keep anything moving in focus.  Furthermore, most cameramen were using hand-cranked cameras, which naturally limited mobility.  Gance gleefully breaks all convention here.  Motorized cameras, handheld camerawork, cameras on seesaws, on wires to create smoother shots.  It all looks rather seamless and more like some of the work we see today with Steadicams and the like.  Gance had no such things.  Perhaps the Germans were doing a bit more with the moving camera at this time, but Gance integrates it wonderfully into the film, less as a stunt and more as a real storytelling device.

• Gance’s Polyvision, with three interlocked cameras, used at the end of the film, is amazing.  Gance could have met with Henri Chretien, creator of the Hypergonar process that eventually became Cinemascope.  That would have given him the widescreen process he craved.  What he came up with was equally brilliant.  The interlocked projector technique, which he called Polyvision, is extremely similar to Cinerama, which debuted publicly in 1952.  But even here Gance does things differently.  Cinerama always apologizes a little for the join lines between the panels, trying to minimize them as much as possible.  Gance embraces the whole idea.  While Cinerama always used single shots (the same scene spread across each of the three screens), Gance will happily have a different shot on each screen, or a mirror of the right screen on the left screen.  Sometimes Napoleon will be seen in closeup in the center panel while a long shot is seen on the side panels.  This would never have been done in Cinerama!  At the end of the film, he even tints each screen to match the French flag in a sequence that is as bravura a piece of filmmaking as I have ever seen.

Is it excessive?  Sure it is.  That’s the whole point.  If I can make an analogy that’s used frequently, Gance starts Napoleon like an organ with all the stops pulled.  You’d think he had nowhere to go.  What he does is to effectively build more stops through the end of the picture and use those.  Yes, it is wearing, and yes, there are sequences that are so long that any producer would scream to cut them back.

That’s why I can understand why people have wanted to cut Napoleon down to a manageable size for years.  Gance himself recut it and recast it with sound.  He remade it with sad results.  But if we look through history, Intolerance was long and was recutThat was DW Griffith’s picture, one of the directors Gance revered.  Metropolis was recut extensively.  2001 was recut.  Brazil was recut.  Lawrence of Arabia was recut.  Each of these films was long and excessive, made by an obsessed director.

Again, that’s the point.

This is why I laud Kevin Brownlow for restoring Napoleon as it was.  He’s fought the good fight against recutting it to fit modern tastes, to fit cinema runtimes, to anything other than the best we can approximate Gance’s vision.  This is why that, to this day, Napoleon still stands out from the crowd.  It’s not commercial.  It never was.  It’s not like any other film, silent or sound.  It wasn’t intended to be.  It is what it is.  Even Coppola’s cutting and speeding-up of Napoleon, which was intended to minimize the overtime for the musicians, compromises Gance’s vision.

Napoleon felt, to me, a lot like a David Lean film (Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia.)  It also had a strong influence from DW Griffith (Intolerance) in terms of narrative structure and editing.  But it also had an avant garde feel.

The acting was brilliant, particularly Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon.  Davis’ score was an inspiration, based on pieces of music from each period in Napoleon’s life.  The theater, presentation, and ambience were all top notch.

Out of all the brilliance of the evening, I still need to single out Kevin Brownlow.  I wouldn’t call soft-spoken Mr. Brownlow obsessive.  I would call him dedicated to doing the right thing.  He’s suffered slings and arrows for years from people who didn’t care to have Napoleon restored.

I give him a special tip of the Dr. Film fez.  Without Kevin Brownlow, we’d be missing a key piece of movie history.  It’s a glimpse of a cinema that was, a cinema that never would be, and a cinema from the mind of a genius.

A still from the triptych: look carefully, and you can see where the 3 images join

Special side note: Much was made of the idea of putting Napoleon out on DVD or Blu-ray.  I, for one, hope it never is.  What I hope for is a well-publicized successful roadshow of the film in major cities across the US.  I know that theatrical exhibition is passé today.  I still think Napoleon should be seen in a theater, with an audience, and if possible, with a live score.  Brownlow mentioned that Stanley Kubrick wanted to borrow a print of Napoleon to watch on his flatbed viewer (a small-screen device used for editing films.)  He told Kubrick that this was a bad idea, given that the film lost most of its impact on a small screen.

“It’s like watching Lawrence of Arabia on a phone,” Brownlow said.  (Mind you, I believe Mr. Brownlow would happily release the film on DVD just to get it out there for people to see.  It is my own opinion, not his, that it shouldn’t be on video.)

For the record, I won’t watch Lawrence of Arabia on anything but a big screen, and I think Napoleon deserves the same respect.