King of the Kongo – Dr. Film’s Blog & Marketplace

This is What I Am Doing!

Some of you are asking what’s taking King of the Kongo so long. Let me describe to you why in three words: it’s a mess. The more I get into it, the uglier and messier it gets. I know many of you don’t want to hear about this because you consider it whining, and I’ll hear about it. I know many of you like to hear what’s going on, and I’ll hear about that too.

Let me answer the questions I keep getting:

1. Are you actually still working on Kongo?

Yes, almost nothing else. It’s taking forever. You’ll see why in a bit.

2. We’re all getting older. Are you going to release it?

Yes, I’m hoping by the end of the year. At the pace we’re going, that may be optimistic. Remember that this is 21 reels of footage whereas Little Orphant Annie was FIVE reels of footage. And Annie was in better shape.

3. Why don’t you do a Kickstarter to get some extra funds to hire some help?

That’s a fantastic idea. Right now, I’m stretched pretty thin doing all the stuff I’m supposed to be doing. Doing a Kickstarter takes time and effort that I don’t have to put into this. Someone wanna volunteer? (Crickets.) I didn’t think so.

4. Didn’t you get a grant to work on this? Use some of that money.

Yes, I got a grant to do it, and I discovered in May of 2020 that I needed two things: a) a faster computer or I’d never get it done, and b) at least two more helpers to help me get things done. I’ve done those things. I have three helpers now. But the grant money only covered the cost of the computers.

Here’s what I’ve been doing:

I suspended work on Chapter 10 given some priorities. I announced in December of last year that I’d be showing some rare Karloff stuff and we’d have Sara Karloff join us for a Zoom meeting. I thought if I held it in March that FOR SURE we’d have enough to show. Chapter 10 resolves all the hanging plot points: Who or what is the gorilla (aka the King of the Kongo)? Who’s the girl’s father? Where are the jewels? Who’s the prisoner in the basement? I thought that using Chapter 10 as my example was kind of a bad idea.

Given this, I thought maybe I’d try getting Chapter 9 done, since we’d gotten a good start on it. But we had problems: my helper was bogged down in the cleanup, and there was a great deal of decomposition on the negative. I finally told him that we’d get rid of the decomp later; just go for the dirt. That didn’t help. He was making no progress.

I finally figured out why. The decomp really didn’t seem too bad until you got into it and then it was triggering all sorts of false positives in the cleanup software. I had a backup plan: unlike Reel 1, we had a print for Reel 2 as well. We could just use that instead of using the negative. The print was in reasonably good shape with not too much decomp.

WRONG. The print was missing shots all over the place. It had been sliced apart for stock footage and then put back together with masking tape. Each time they sliced it apart, they put it back missing a frame on both edges. But that was OK, since two or three shots were missing entirely. One sequence was in the wrong place. And then the coup: there’s a shot in Chapter 9 reel 2 that belongs in Chapter 10 reel 1! This was nice, because that shot is missing in the print of Chapter 10 that we have (minus one frame on each side of the splice.)

So in late December, after we’d already announced, I took the disks with the negative and the print, and we went through them frame at a time to figure out what had been put where, reconstructing the best shots from the best prints. That then had to be re-stabilized and re-scaled. Great, huh? Turns out not. As we were removing dirt I discovered that something looked weird. We were accidentally cleaning up a low-res test version of this file, not the high-res version that we needed. Late January. Start again.

So maybe let’s get Chapter 8 going? Well, that’s in the hands of another helper I have, and he is going through it. Except Chapter 8 has a particularly ugly dialogue scene in it and it would require a massive amount of re-recording. And we have the sound for R2, which looks to be edited, so that would be a sync problem. We have the negative for R2 but alas, I haven’t received it yet, because the scanning is behind at Library of Congress, so it seemed a real waste of resources to work on this chapter that we were probably going to have to tear out anyway. Plus the sound hasn’t even been started for restoration, so that’s an issue.

Chapter 7 we have, but it’s got a lot of decomp and hasn’t been started.

By this point, in early February, I was about to call Sara and tell her we should cancel the show. I just did not see how we could get anything ready. I’ve got another helper lined up, but he got COVID, and he’s got some other family illness, and he had other commitments.

So I thought, OK, let’s try Chapter 5 and 6. Those don’t look too bad, either! Let’s try those! And we have restored sound for them. Chapter 5 looked promising until I discovered that reel two is the silent version that doesn’t match the sound version at all. The picture for the sound version of Chapter 5 reel two is not scanned yet. Chapter 6 looked more promising. It looked pretty good until I realized that the ending was rotted off in the negative. OK, let’s look at the print. Also rotted off, no cliffhanger. Then I remembered that some of Robert Youngson’s compilation film The Days of Thrills and Laughter features the fight between Karloff and Walter Miller (I’d seen the stills). That’s the cliffhanger I need!

So I wrote Serge, knowing he had some 35mm of this title, and asked him if he could scan it for me. Well, the scanner place is down due to COVID, but sure, he agreed to do it. Just to verify, I found a copy of Days of Thrills and Laughter and looked at it. Turns out that what Serge has is the beginning of Chapter 7, not the end of Chapter 6, with the same fight, but it’s the cliffhanger resolution. Then I went back to Chapter 7 and discovered that the negative for reel one is complete, but the print is missing exactly the footage that’s in The Days of Thrills and Laughter. Yep, it was copped from the same print I have!

OK, so I can insert the cliffhanger ending from the 16mm that I already have scanned and then just go from there? No, bad call, because there’s a SECOND print of Chapter 6 that is in the inventory of stuff not yet scanned at the Library, so no reason to rescale and re-contrast that icky footage when that will just be replaced anyway. And I hope that the print is in better shape than the alternate print we have. Who knows? Maybe it’s the silent one. We have no idea. But given what I’ve seen, I sure want to look at it before investing a lot of time starting a restoration. (Interestingly, Chapter 5 and 6 are tinted, and the tinting is fading from these prints. We intend to restore it.)

For those of you keeping score, Chapter 10 is out, Chapter 9 is questionable, Chapter 8 is probably out, and Chapter 5,6,7 are out. And we don’t have any more complete chapters. This is why you hear me scream. I nearly called Sara again and said we’d have to postpone.

That’s where your heroine, Ms. Greiff, stepped in and told me that we could probably do this. She thought I could lean on my helper working on Chapter 9 and meanwhile I could get reel 2 recorded.

I’d wanted to do the sound recording to the restored print, because it’s easier to see lip sync, etc, but she said we should just synchronize to the negative. After all, the frame count was the same, so it should work. We spend our time recording and my helper does the contrast fixing and de-dirting! It could happen!

Well, for those of you who don’t follow this, each reel is one disk and each chapter is two reels (except Chapter 1, which is three). And we don’t have discs for all the picture. We have Chapter 9, reel one, but not reel two!

Since the music is repetitive—they use the same themes over and over, I thought, gee, we can “fake” the score by using some of the same themes. I know they had sound effects (they particularly liked gunshots), so I found a gunshot and sampled it, then threw one in in sync with every shot. The gorilla theme is consistent throughout: whenever the gorilla is on screen, there’s a sinister violin theme that accompanies him. So we know what that would have sounded like. And the close tag is the same in every chapter, so we know that.

With about a day’s work, I got a serviceable “guess” track going that sounded pretty much like an original track would have. Except we didn’t have the dialogue scene. OK, I have the script, so I just recorded the dialogue and synchronized it to the players.

Meanwhile, my helper is working on the same reel to get the picture cleaned up. This is an agonizing process and takes hours.

The dialogue didn’t synchronize at all. The actors weren’t reading the dialogue as it was written. What were they saying? Who knows? I knew that Peter Jackson had employed forensic lip readers for They Shall Not Grow Old. I watched that (not as amazing as people said, but what do I know?) and contacted the forensic lip-reader. $200 a minute! Not possible.

I contacted the Indiana School for the Deaf. They didn’t get back to me. I contacted two other deaf people. No response. Another one: “This is too hard… you mean you don’t have any sound at all??” Finally, in desperation, I said, “I’ll do this MYSELF.” I slowed it down 4:1 and blew up the lips. The reason I thought I could do this was that I’ve already spent hours synchronizing the audio back to the video, and lip reading is a part of that. I thought I could get it pretty close. I finally did. We got a few minor corrections from a friend of my new brother-in-law, who also reads lips.

I recorded the new dialogue, and it sounded like me doing strange voices. Bad. So I had Glory do the voice of the priest and we lowered it digitally. It sounded like Glory doing the voice of the priest lowered digitally. I knew that I’d had people crawl out of the woodwork wanting to do voices for this, but it turns out this is hard. You have to get the dialogue just right and read it with the intonations that the actor did 90 years ago. I thought I should turn to someone who’s already done this. And let them know we need this NOW NOW NOW.

Bless his heart, Larry Blamire, actor extraordinaire, recorded the lines in about 45 minutes for me, and he got the intonation pretty close to right. Turns out that if you use fancy equipment it sounds TOO GOOD, so we just used phones. George Willeman from Library of Congress rerecorded the priest for me. I remained as the hero (Walter Miller), because I can match his deadpan delivery pretty well.

The art center where I do shows wanted the video uploaded a week early, and I thought that might never happen. I let them know I might be late, and to hold up sending links. On Tuesday, I got a call that the final render had crashed, because it filled up a disk. In haste, I went out to buy another disk and got it out to him. The show was due Friday. Rendering happened Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On Friday night at 10pm, I went to his house and collected the disk.

BUUUUUUT NO (as John Belushi would have said.) A bug in SOME program had assumed I really meant a frame rate of 23.98 instead of 24.00. This means that it helpfully repeats one out of 50 frames to convert it for me. Except I really DID mean 24.00, so all the gunshots and dialogue I put in were off. Took hours to fix it. There were other problems, more technical, that I shan’t bore you with. Bottom line: I got it done on Wednesday before the show Saturday. A lot of people were angry that it wasn’t available until late, and that the links went out late, etc. Couldn’t be helped.

So what have we learned?

There are a lot of people who really are generous and help a lot. I am grateful for this beyond any measure.

This project is a technical mess.

We need a minimum of 2TB to render some of these things.

We actually CAN do a reasonable job of re-recording.

Before I do any more reels, I need to go through each reel carefully to inspect it so that we don’t waste time on alternate versions and cuts.

I didn’t get enough grant money (I am on the hook to finish this but I will be getting a grand total of $0 for any work!)

When we have original negative, it almost always has extensive decomposition. When we have print, it is almost always cut extensively for stock footage. The one exception to this has been Chapter 10 reel two, which is almost all dialogue and very consumed with some looooong talking shots that I guess weren’t too exciting to extract for stock footage.

We’re working backwards, mostly because we received material that way. Current status:

Chapter 10: R1, about 85% done, needs some decomp removed. Restored missing shots from NFPF project, one shot from Chapter 9. R2 in hands of helper for de-dirting. Already stabilized and contrast-fixed.

Chapter 9: R1 with extensive decomp fixed. R2 re-rendering as we speak. Re-recorded audio. About 98% done.

Chapter 8: De-dirting about 95% done. Unknown extra work.

Chapter 7: Rerecorded most of audio for Chapter 7, R1. Identified Chapter 7 R2 missing dinosaur footage. Have sound for R2. Have silent version of R1 and R2. Next in line for picture restoration.

Chapter 6: Ending needs restored. Awaiting material. Tints need restored properly. Sound seems good.

Chapter 5: Need R2 sound version.

Chapter 4: Have one reel.

Chapter 1: Have one reel with extensive cuts. In contact with MoMa for possible replacement if no 35mm alternates can be found.

Everything else we’re still awaiting or has not been looked at in detail yet.

You guys know lip-readers or anyone who wants to run a Kickstarter campaign? You know where to find me!

Update on King of the Kongo

Boris Karloff shows up in Chapter 9. This is only slightly restored; we’re in the middle of this process.

I’m posting this in various groups that are asking me about this. If you follow me on the Dr. Film page, you may have heard some of this, but it’s worth reading because there’s new information in here too.

THE PROJECT:

King of the Kongo is the first sound serial, made in 1929. Although it’s been on video for years, the prints available are really bad, and they were all made from the sound version without the sound discs, so not only does it look bad, but doesn’t make sense without the sound.

It’s not a great film, but it’s fun. I think it was partly the inspiration for Son of Kong, which also takes place in a wrecked temple, has a gorilla, jewels, and some dinosaurs in it. Other than that, they’re different!

It’s also the first time Boris Karloff has dialogue in a sound film. It’s his second sound film, the first being Behind that Curtain, which came out about a month earlier, although he has no real dialogue in that.

I’ve been working on this since 2011, and I bought a print of the film in 1989! I have collected as many sound discs as survive on this one. The entire picture survives, but only some of the sound. Keep reading.

THE HISTORY:

King of the Kongo was released in late summer 1929 to a lot of ballyhoo. It was released as a sound-on-disc only and it was called a “wild animal serial.” True to their word, there are lions, cheetahs, “gorillas,” “dinosaurs,” and elephants in the film. There was a silent version offered, but I have found no record that it actually played anywhere in the silent version.

In the 1950s, two collectors found a beaten up nitrate print with no sound discs and made a run of 16mm prints. I spoke to one of the collectors who made these prints. There are a few of these in private hands. I think there were only 5-6 made. I bought one of these prints. The lab work is, shall we say, questionable.

Several video companies released various copies of the film mastered from various prints in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2011, I discovered that the print I had bought in 1989 was actually the sound version. I had only dimly considered it for a restoration project, but the curiosity got me to contact Ron Hutchinson, who sent me copies of several sound discs he had.

I did a Kickstarter to restore Chapter 5, and subsequently restored Chapter 6 and 10 with National Film Preservation Foundation grants. Each chapter is two reels (each reel lasting about 10 min), and there’s a talking sequence (about 2-3 min) in each reel. The rest of each reel is silent with a music and effects track. So far, the sound survives for about half the serial: Chapter 4 (one reel), Chapter 5 (both reels), Chapter 6 (both reels), Chapter 7 (one reel) Chapter 8 (one reel), Chapter 9 (one reel) and Chapter 10 (both reels). The script for the entire film survives.

As I was finishing up the work on the last of the NFPF grant work, word came to me that there was a stock film library that had the entire film in 35mm. Given that what I had was from beaten up 16mm prints made in the 1950s, the idea that there was nitrate was of some surprise.

THE CURRENT PROJECT:

I had been negotiating with the owner of the stock film library and the Library of Congress (where the stock film library is now held) since 2015. The length of time this has taken has led many to believe that I’m an evil hoarder who will never release this material. I just felt there wasn’t really cause to release what I had if there was a chance of getting better material, really four generations better than what I’d restored.

This year, I got all the details worked out, and we went through the whole film. In one state or another most of it survives in 35mm. We still have only 10 of the 21 reels of sound, but that’s not changed in several years.

The LoC currently has 47 reels of material on the film, and, amazingly, much of this is original camera negative! Given that this was a Mascot serial, later a part of Republic, the master negatives should have burned with the bulk of the Republic and Mascot material in the great Fox nitrate fire of 1937. Just how this survived is a mystery.

So we’re trying to restore the entire film with the best surviving material from each chapter, the best surviving sound material from each chapter, and using actors to recreate the missing sound.

WHERE WE ARE ON IT:

I am restoring the whole film at 4K right now. The Library of Congress is still in the process of scanning materials. I’ve only seen about 1/3 of the material so far. I have a grant that covers most of the cost of the actors and the blu-ray mastering, but the whole process at 4K is REALLY SLOW, and there’s a lot of damage in the film (keep reading). I’m hoping to have a release of this on Blu-ray in 2020. The grant I have is barely going to cover expenses, which means I’m going to have to do a lot of the work myself instead of farming it out while I do only the most critical work. This just means it takes longer, but it’s happening. FINALLY.

So far, I’ve rendered preliminary passes of Chapter 7, 9 and 10. I’ve discovered that there’s a section of Chapter 9 that’s rotted out and will have to be replaced from 16mm. Also, the surviving 35mm of Chapter 10 is missing the cliffhanger resolution and will have to be restored from 16mm. Even though we’re working from stunningly sharp negative on most of this, the negative is deteriorating. There are glue splices that are starting to rot and there’s flickery decomposition throughout most reels. I’m working with animation historian Steve Stanchfield to remove most of this, one more pass through restoration programs I wasn’t expecting.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED:

This film really has some beautiful photography in it. This aspect of the film has been missing in the horrible dupes that have been available for many years. You can tell that some of it was shot on location and in a hurry in those scenes, so the lighting there is kinda hit or miss, but the interior scenes are very well done with some atmospheric lighting.

Some of the scenes in Chapter 6 were originally tinted! Pretty amazing. The negative has tinting instructions in it.

The temple scenes, credited with being shot at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, were inserted from camera negative shot in 1922 and 1927. These shots, by and large, are responsible for a lot of the deterioration. Apparently, producer Nat Levine just bought this negative and then had costumes made to “match cut” in with the footage of his actors shot in California. The closer temple shots in California are shot in some deteriorating building, and I think it’s a Spanish mission.

WHAT I AM HOPING TO DO:

I’ll have a restoration commentary on this (that seemed to work well on Little Orphant Annie), and I’d like to have some guest commentators on this so I’m not shouldering a three-hour yawn fest of me telling you that this is from print one or print six. I’ve contacted a whole swath of people and I’m hoping to have a number of them provide some good insights here.

WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD:

There is another entity trying to release King of the Kongo on DVD/Blu-ray. They have been spreading bad will in social media and the collector network. If you have heard that I am hoarding material or if I am out after a cash grab on this for my own glory, this is not true. The actual answer is that I’m bordering on psycho for working on this as much as I have! I’ll be lucky to break even!

I don’t go for trashing other people in public forums, so I wish these guys well, and I hope they continue their work in restoring other serials. I have no idea why they are so upset with me, but it’s been pretty nasty in some circles. If they release King of the Kongo in their group, you have my blessing to buy it. Maybe they’ll have some cool stuff I missed.

No, I will not be working with them. Sorry, life is too short.

Karloff threatened by a gorilla in this, um, well, you’ve gotta love it.

Close-up from Chapter 9. This is from original camera negative

Larry Steers discovers jewels in European settings while searching through a Spanish Mission doubling for a Cambodian Temple, all of which is supposed to be taking place in Africa. OK, it’s not too accurate.

Kongo Lessons

Restoration Demo for King of the Kongo (it looks even cooler in HD!)

Some of you may not be aware that I’m in the midst of restoring The King of the Kongo (1929), which is the first sound serial ever made. You’d think that people would be happy that I’m doing it, but I get frequent complaints about it, and a lot of questions. I’m going to answer some of these today.

Q1: Why are you restoring a serial that’s bad and the prints aren’t great?

A: Because it’s bad and the prints aren’t great. The archives weren’t interested in this one. I tried. They didn’t care. They probably shouldn’t care, either, because part of their job is triage. I think it’s important—it is important—it’s just that there are a lot of films in worse shape that are in line ahead of it, so I’m doing this myself.

The bottom line is that I knew that if I didn’t restore it, then no one would, and I knew where all the elements were, so I wanted to get it done while we could.

Q2: Is the whole serial sound?

A: The serial is part silent and part talkie. The trade papers are a little confused about this, so I can’t prove this theory. The trades at the time announced The King of the Kongo as being available in silent and sound versions. There’s even an announcement that the silent version is finished and they’re starting on the talkie version. But there’s no mention that I can find anywhere of the serial being played without sound. I suspect that there was only a sound version released, and that is part silent (with synchronized music and effects) with one scene per reel with synchronized dialogue.

Q3: What survives on the serial? Are you restoring the whole thing?

A: The entire picture exists. There were 21 reels initially and we have 10 reels of the sound. That’s a little less than half of the original sound that survives. Of those, Chapters 5, 6 and 10 exist with complete sound. Three other chapters have one reel of sound with the other still being lost (each chapter is two reels and hence two discs of sound.)

I restored Chapter 5 with Kickstarter funds, Chapter 10 with National Film Preservation Foundation funding, and Chapter 6 is being done now. For all three Chapters, I owe thanks and funding support to Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc. (There’s a lot of drama about how Silent Cinema saved my bacon in previous blog installments.) I may go back and restore the the picture for the rest of the episodes and drop in the sound for those parts that survive. The complete chapters that survive have been archived to film.

Q4: This is the digital age. Why waste money on film?

A: The restorations were done digitally and archived on film because film never crashes and goes beep when you turn it on. Film is archival.

Q5: Are you going to put this on YouTube?

A: No.

Q6: Will it be available on Blu-Ray?

A: I hope so.

Q7: A friend of mine told me that UCLA has 35mm prints of this serial and so you’re wasting your time on this bad print you’re restoring.

A: I hear this rumor all the time. You know what I did about it? I contacted UCLA. You know what they told me? They have a 16mm print, just like mine and it’s under a donor restriction, so I couldn’t access it anyway. There is one more print in the US that I’ve heard about in private hands, and I couldn’t access that. There’s another 16mm print in France that’s not better than mine. There’s a partial 35mm in an unnamed US archive that’s also under donor restriction, meaning we can’t get to it. So that’s it, folks. I contacted the donors for permission and they said no.

You want footwork to find the best materials? I did it.

Q8: It’s frustrating to watch a serial a chapter at a time and then out of sequence. Why don’t you wait until you find all the sound and restore it then?

A: Because we may never find all of the sound. And right now, we’re at a point where I can sync the sound and picture with the help of some people I know. Later on that might not happen.

Q9: Why did you restore Chapter 10 and then Chapter 6?

A: Because we found the complete sound for Chapter 6 after Chapter 10 was already underway.

Q10: There’s a whole group of people who do serial restorations who are spreading bad rumors about you. Do you hate them?

A: No. I can’t hate people who do restorations. I contacted those people some time ago, offered to pool resources, and was told to go away. So I went away. They were convinced that they could do a better restoration than I could do, and that they knew where all the sound discs were. To date, they have not done a restoration. I would still be happy to pool resources with them. I feel that films should be restored from the best elements. If they know where better materials are (and they might exist in private hands), then I’m willing to help. I suspect that the elements they thought were complete were the same incomplete ones that I found in private hands, and I bought them so I could do my restoration. But I would still help them if they asked.

Q11: I heard that Library of Congress has all the sound discs.

A: I heard that too. I asked them, and I contacted the film people and the audio people. Do you know what they told me? They don’t have them.

Q12: Does this look better than the DVD that I bought of this?

A: You bet it does.

Q13: The DVD I bought is silent with music, but has long stretches with no titles. Is your music the same?

A: You have the sound version missing the dialogue track. About half of each episode was silent with intertitles. The remaining half had dialogue. The music on your DVD is patched in later to go with the action. The original score by Lee Zahler is on the discs, plus dialogue in all those long stretches with no titles.

Q14: I heard a rumor that you may start a Kickstarter program to release a Blu-Ray. That seems kind of crooked to me, since you got grant money to do the restorations.

A: I got grant money to do the lab work for the restorations. The lab work (scanning, track re-recording, and digital film out) was covered. All the by-hand work (sync, image restoration, etc.) was free. And we’d need to do that work on the 7 chapters that still need their picture restored.

Q15: Did you learn anything of historical significance while you were restoring the serial?

Yes, some.

Ben Model’s undercranking theories are borne out here. The silent sequences are shot at about 21-22 fps and then played back at 24. The actors haven’t adjusted to this yet, so they’re still playing slower for 21-22 which makes the dialogue deadly slow. Once again, we see that audiences in the silent days were used to seeing films played back slightly faster than they were shot.

This film has some very interesting set design and some interesting lighting, almost expressionistic. It’s mostly lost in the prints we see today.

Despite the fact that the film has that deadly 1929 slow pacing, I note that director Richard Thorpe has put some interesting touches in it. There’s a long shot in which Robert Frazier is tailed by Lafe McKee and William Burt. It’s staged to show off the set and so that we get a sense of distance between McKee and Frazier, but it’s all done in one shot with no cutting. There’s not a second where nothing is happening onscreen, but it’s done very economically.

Mascot used black slugs (pieces of leader) to resynchronize shots that had drifted out of sync. I’ve seen this in The Devil Horse (1931), The Whispering Shadow (1933) and The Phantom Empire (1935). I could have taken them out, but it’s part of the Mascot “feel” and “history,” so I left them in. There are several in Chapter 10.

There’s a little throwaway line in which Lafe McKee refers to Robert Frazier as “black boy.” It’s 1929 racism. I left it in (you probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d cut it.)

Q16: You were talking about donor restrictions. Do you mean that the donor of the film restricted access to the films after donating them?

That’s exactly what I mean.

Q17: You mean that we spend taxpayer money housing and cooling films that the donors won’t let us see?

I do mean that, yes. And that’s the topic of another blog post. Remember, I don’t make the rules. I just live with them.

Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bond

If you didn’t read my last blog post, James Bond Meets King of the Kongo, then you won’t understand this post at all, so you’d be well-advised to go back and read that one first.

When we last left the saga, it looked as if our hero, the film preservationist, was in a dire predicament. The film looked as if it would not be saved, the Kickstarter grant was compromised at best.

In desperation, he stares at the ceiling of the cavernous room, hoping against hope that someone, anyone, can rush in and save him. The odds are overwhelming and he’s just one man. Then, against all the odds, through a shower of bullets, a group of gray-clad ninjas breaks through the roof, sliding down on thin ropes to rush in and give the hero the hope he so desperately needs.

It’s the end of You Only Live Twice (1967), and James Bond has been rescued by the ninjas. He goes on to defeat Blofeld, blow up a volcano, save the space program, and avert global thermonuclear war.

But that same description also fits the end of Brazil (1985), at which point our hero, Sam Lowry, has lost all grip on reality and fantasizes about a rescue that will not, and cannot come.

And me, well, I wasn’t sure quite which one I was.

My options had shrunken to one, and my funding was almost zero. I’d been criticized by a serial preservation group, and betrayed by a friend. Frankly, things looked pretty dire. I had fashioned a note apologizing to my grant donors explaining the situation and offering a partial refund.

My last hope seemed to be teetering on the edge… I’d had an intrepid envoy, who I’ll identify as Cinerama Jones, to the last remaining lab that could do the work I needed, and I got a call that he’d been admitted to the emergency room with a raging fever and an out-of-control white cell count.

I’d been pinning a lot of hope on this project, because I find it distressing that archives are only funded to do high-profile restorations. Well, King of the Kongo is about as low-profile as it gets. It’s historically significant, interesting for some of the cast that appears, but, honestly, it’s not a landmark piece of cinema, and we only have about 1/10 of the sound for the whole serial.

But that doesn’t make it any less cool. I was hoping to parlay this into doing more restorations of little niche films like this, but I knew there was no hope if I had to crawl out of this one.

I was really bummed and pretty cranky. Many of my friends will agree that I was cranky! Then, interesting things started to happen. It was very strange.

First, the gentleman I identified as Red Grant read the previous installment and recognized himself. He emailed me, and I ignored him, and then he called (I don’t have caller ID… I still have a LAND LINE!) so I picked up. He carefully explained that his demand for copying rare film in exchange for doing King of the Kongo was only a joke. He apologized profusely. I have to give him that.

He’s known for somewhat “edgy” jokes, but that one was over the edge. The bottom line was that he was serious about not being able to do the work, so the only real difference was that one way I was cheesed off and without a film, and the other way I was just without a film.

It’s actually more severe than that. Red’s failure to do what I’d asked him to do has cost Silent Cinema (see below) a lot of money and me a lot of headaches. Woody Allen has a rule, “90% of success is just showing up.” I’ve got a corollary: “The rest of success is doing what you said you would do.” Of course, Red’s counter to that was that he didn’t realize that I was on a tight deadline and that caused the whole problem. We can go around and around on that… but the deadline is clearly outlined in the Kickstarter proposal for all to see.

Should I forgive Red or not? I’m not sure. I do have another rule, “Never ascribe malice to anything that could be explained by stupidity.” And this, well, this is stupid. Maybe I will forgive him. I’ll have to cool off first, though.

Struggling valiantly against a fluctuating fever and accompanying weakness, Cinerama Jones managed to get a deal struck with the lab, and he also found some funding to get the film transfer done. Now, this all happened simultaneously with the deal in Italy failing because I couldn’t find a good way to get the files to him, a lab in Maryland outpricing me, and Red Grant’s calling. I have to say I wasn’t optimistic that anything could be worked out, but I had some good people on my side.

Cinerama Jones arranged for Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc, a great group that I’ve worked with many times, to donate the completion funds , as well as finding a kindly anonymous donor, who thought the project was cool, to kick in some cash at the last minute.

The whole thing meant I had to do an elaborate re-rendering of all the credits and some other technical bits, which seems always to take tons of time, but on Friday I sent off Kongo to Metropolis Film Labs, where it will be converted back to film. They haven’t received it yet, so I just have to hope what I sent them works well.

There’s still some talk about Kongo appearing on a major TV network, and whether that will happen or not is up in the air.

I’m also hoping to put the restored print in as part of an episode of Dr. Film. That still may happen. I’m working on a grant to make more Dr. Film episodes. Whether that will happen is also an open question; statistically it’s rather doubtful, but we got Kongo going… maybe this will go too.

So what goes from here? Well, Kongo should still premiere at the Syracuse Cinefest, thanks to Silent Cinema. We’re still looking at distribution channels forDr. Film, and Kongo should appear on that. Dr. Film may appear on an independent station, or it may yet make it to a major national network, or it may not appear at all. Right now, we just don’t know.

Stay tuned.

My buddy Carl at Fedex shot this picture of me with messy hair (as usual) as I sent off the files to Metropolis Film Labs.

James Bond Meets The King of the Kongo

I’ve always said that collecting and restoring film is like James Bond without the women. You have international intrigue, shady characters, plots and crossplots and unexpected villains. This is an idea that isn’t unique to me, however, since “Wild Bill” Everson came up with a movie serial parody that was actually produced as Captain Celluloid Vs. The Film Pirates (1965). There’s also a famous anonymously written USENET parody about film collectors that was surreptitiously posted several years ago on alt.movies.silent that is formatted as an actual James Bond film.

But once again, fantasy is outpaced by reality. Let me preface this, as I always do, by stating that I’m not making any of this up. I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent and the guilty, but I didn’t fabricate anything.

kongo2

In August, I put up a Kickstarter campaign to restore one episode of King of the Kongo (1929). Many of you regular readers will remember that this is the first sound serial ever, and that I have a 16mm silent print of the entire serial, but only three reels of the sound are, well, accessible. These are on Vitaphone discs, which were carefully transferred by Ron Hutchinson at The Vitaphone project. I use Ron’s real name because he’s a good guy, and I have nothing bad or controversial to say about him whatsoever.

I’d been working with another fellow who shall, however, remain anonymous. I had advised him on setting up a computer-to-film conversion process and even did a considerable amount of help for him in getting some Cinemascope conversions done digitally. He quoted me a very nice price on getting the restoration printed to film. I knew this was important because I’d promised to premiere the restoration at the Syracuse Cinefest, and they need the film on 16mm. For the sake of this posting, we’ll refer to this gentleman as Red Grant, to use a Bond name… and it’s actually fitting.

As I was preparing the Kickstarter project, I posted a notice about it with a group that is dedicated to the preservation of serials. Let’s refer to them as SPECTRE. Now, innocent me, I thought if I was preserving a serial, then I was on the same side as SPECTRE. Not so, my friends. It seems that SPECTRE wants to do its own restoration of King of the Kongo and that they felt what I was doing was a waste of time and effort. Again, innocent me, I thought, gee, we’ll pool our resources and share what we’ve got to do the best job possible. It seems that the SPECTRE chief just wanted me to go away, because he “knew where a 35mm of Kongo was located,” and he “knew of the existence of several more discs.” He didn’t actually have any of this stuff, whereas I had all of my materials, but he knew where it was, you see. And I was competing with him, at least from his standpoint.

This aspect of collecting is one that still infuriates me. I guess SPECTRE didn’t really want to restore King of the Kongo, but they wanted the credit for restoring it. Knowing where something is and having it are two very different things. I know where more Kongo discs are, too, but they are in the hands of a reclusive collector who thinks he has something worth a lot of money. And that’s more money than it’s worth, more money than you could ever raise from selling copies, and basically pointless. The fact that SPECTRE was actually rallying cries against me and hoping for my failure in the face of their own inability to obtain materials is just confusing. I am reminded of Samuel Peeples’ line, which, in summation, says that this kind of reasoning is like “trying to bisect a sneeze.”

So, I got the grant (thank you again, donors), and I had a company do the scanning for me that did a bang-up job. The problem was that the print was banged-up, too. Actually, it was the pre-print that was banged up, the 35mm nitrate that my print was copied from. There were also a few sections that were printed out-of-frame, a Mascot Serials trademark that I hadn’t noticed in my quick-and-dirty transfer done on my home equipment. As archivist DJ Turner has said, “Sometimes [a high-resolution transfer] doesn’t do these old films any favors.”

This is an unretouched title frame from the scan

This is a frame from the restoration (Quicktime oopsie at bottom!)

I had to do a lot of surgery on Kongo to make it look halfway right. I could keep spending time on it, hand-tweaking it even more, but it actually looks fairly good now. I matted out the out-of-frame sections, rebalanced the black-and-white contrast on a shot-by-shot basis. I hadn’t counted on the huge slow-down such a thing would cause my computer, but it was a massive computing task. Red Grant had told me that he’d need the file by early December, so that was my goal.

I worked extensively with David Wood (a good guy, so I’ll use his name.) Dave is the equivalent of Q in this story. In fairness, I was the picture Q and Dave was the audio Q. Dave asked me a question I thought no one would ever ask me: “Was this transferred with an RIAA curve or a Vitaphone curve?” Well, I knew Ron had done the transfer work, but knowing curves was a pretty arcane thing that I wouldn’t expect most people to know. It turns out that the needle and transfer arm of a record player are calibrated to a certain equalization curve, much like you’d use on your stereo. Dave had discovered that there was an official Vitaphone curve (something I never knew). So he applied an inverse RIAA curve and then a Vitaphone curve, and the sound was vastly improved. He also matched the speed with the footage I had.

Now, if you understand what I just said, then you have some recording knowledge, and it will impress you. If you didn’t understand it, then please come away with a vague sense of awe for what Dave was able to accomplish.

I had to do a little minor surgery on the sound, but it basically fit, and I married track to picture and watched the results. Pretty good!

Then I sent a hard drive to Red Grant. Red took his time getting back to me. Before all else, he denied ever knowing about a time deadline, which I had clearly outlined in both the Kickstarter project and in emails to him. Then he said he was having problems with the soundtrack, and then he couldn’t do it. He promised to look into an alternate way of doing the soundtrack. Fine.

This made me panic. As part of the project, I’d promised to produce a film print. I started looking for other places. I posted on international film groups. I found a place in Norway, a place in Germany, a place in Italy, and a place in NY that sounded like they could do it.

I’d specified 16mm output, but most of the places I contacted were limited to 35mm output. Only two places, a guy in Italy (we’ll call him Largo) and a film lab in NY (we’ll call him Felix Leiter) could do the 16mm that I needed.

Meanwhile, back to Red Grant.

Just before Christmas, I heard from him. I’d asked him if he could do anything to expedite the process… anything. Then I got the answer.

Mr. Grant told me that he’d be happy to expedite the process. All I’d have to do would be to send him some rare footage that I’d promised not to let out of my hands. See, I have this problem… when I promise someone something, I keep the promise. If I treat someone shabbily, then I’m not likely to hear back from them in the future. I always figure the right way to treat people is on the straight and narrow. (And that way I get more film, which is what I want anyway!)

So Red Grant, knowing that I had some material I would not let him copy, and sensing that I was over a barrel, figured he could blackmail me into giving him some rare film. He also didn’t count on one thing: I’m a pretty easy guy to get along with, but when you try to screw me over, as Red Grant did, I’ll crawl through the depths of hell with infected knees before I’ll let you win. In short, he’s not getting anything from me… ever.

But the drama isn’t over. You see, Felix Leiter wants four times the money I had allotted to make the print, and Largo only speaks English through fractured Italian, so getting him a file as large as Kongo is a problem. Also, Largo only makes a color positive print, whereas I’d stipulated a black and white negative. Largo’s price is quite reasonable, but it’s not the product I need.

In the meantime, I sent a special envoy to talk to Felix Leiter, hoping that he could be talked down from the stratosphere of budget breaking. That’s not gone well, either, since my special envoy just had to go to the hospital emergency room.

(Deleted here is a long Bondian sub-plot involving TV network head George Kaplan and the possibility of showing Kongo and even the Dr. Film show on national TV. Trust me, it’s real… if you want to know about it, post a message in the comments or on the Dr. Film Facebook page.)

So how does this end? Who will make the print? Will it be Largo or Felix Leiter? Will the print be finished in time for the Syracuse Cinefest? Does George Kaplan exist? Will Kongo appear on his network or another one, and what of the fate of the mysterious Dr. Film? Will James Bond be able to rescue the secret formula from the clutches of… oh, wait.

I really have no idea how this will end. A lot of this is out of my hands. I can only tell you that if it follows the pattern we’ve had so far, it will be dramatic, twisty, and unpredictable. Welcome to my world.

Followup: Don’t miss continuing adventures as this plot continues to thicken. Here is the next article in the series: Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bond!

Kongo Speaks! Karloff Clams Up!

I had an interesting conversation last year at a film convention. I had brought a chapter of King of the Kongo (1929), which didn’t go over especially well. That’s not a surprise; it’s not particularly good. Most of the Mascot serials aren’t particularly good. They’re a lot of fun, full of action, and most of them don’t make a lot of sense. This was where the conversation came in.

It’s known that King of the Kongo was film was released in both silent and sound versions. I’d seen another version of the serial on VHS tape, and it trumpeted the serial’s theme song, “Love Thoughts of You.” My print didn’t say this. With this missing, I simply assumed that I’d gotten the silent print.

Not so, said the gentleman speaking to me. How could I ignore the fact that there were long stretches of film that showed actors speaking–without intertitles? The film didn’t make any sense! I figured that the producer sent out the same print regardless of who ordered it, and if it was for a silent show, then he just didn’t ship the sound discs.

King of the Kongo was produced as a sound-on-disc film, which meant that the sound had to be played back from a set of records that accompany the film. There are tons of these films that were made in the early sound era. The problem is that in order to see the films today, it’s necessary to have a copy of both the picture and the discs. By early 1931, all films went to the easier-to-use optical soundtracks that we still use today. (Well, they’re similar… no hostile notes please.)

The gentleman went on to tell me that he knew of collectors who had sound discs for King of the Kongo and, to top it off, several people told me of the legend that “a reclusive collector” had the complete serial on film.

That reclusive collector is yours truly. Many years ago, in 1989 to be exact, I bought a 16mm print of King of the Kongo from a collector named JM Gillis. (I can use his name because he’s deceased now.) He was liquidating a collection of films he’d amassed since the 1950s.

I wanted King of the Kongo because it was historically important (it was the first sound serial), and because I love Boris Karloff. I bought it even knowing the print was silent. Other people wanted it, so it went for a premium. Even though it was licensed by a video company, I never made my money back on it; they didn’t sell very many copies. No one was ever interested in putting it out on DVD, much less Blu-Ray.

Gillis told me that he’d had a guy make several 16mm reduction prints from 35mm back in the late 1950s. It was that song credit for “Love Thoughts of You” that kept bothering me. I wondered if the lab technician who’d made Kongo just snipped it out because he didn’t have the discs.

As I mulled it over, I wondered if the guy at the film convention had been right all along. I might have the sound version, but with the song credit removed. That would explain the long sections without dialogue. It would also explain why I was never able to make heads or tails of the plot.

The idea occurred to me that it might be possible to test my theory by getting access to some of the extant sound discs. I contacted Ron Hutchison at The Vitaphone Project, which is dedicated to finding lost movie sound discs. It’s named for the Vitaphone process that pioneered the successful sound-on-disc movies in the 1920s. Ron told me that he had material for 3 reels of King of the Kongo. He was more than happy to make me CDs of them.

The complete serial is 21 reels! He had only 3: Chapter 5, reel 1 and 2, and Chapter 6, reel 2.

I went to the basement and grabbed the two chapters involved. I quickly transferred Chapter 5 to video and loaded it into my snazzy new computer. With a few minutes of work, I saw that I could roughly get a dialogue scene to work in the first reel. It was going to have to be done all by hand, not by calculation: my print had some splices in it, and was missing a few frames at the end each reel. The length of the soundtrack proved that the credit for “Love Thoughts of You” had indeed been chopped out. The sound was about fifteen seconds longer than the actual reel, just enough time for the missing title.

The lab work on this particular chapter was pretty bad. It was dark and hard to see. I loaded it into a video enhancement program and corrected it the best I could. That way I could at least see the lip movements. I sent the audio to sound king Dave Wood; he scrubbed it and got it resynchronized until it looked OK.

The results? Well, with about 15 hours of work, I have a complete, restored Chapter 5. The serial is not a great work of art, but it never was. The sound sequences give the story a lot more clarity! It appears that they had already finished the serial as a silent and then added one talking sequence in each reel. The rest is silent with the original 1929 score on the discs.

I felt sorry for the actors. In the early days of talking films, the microphone was heavy and nailed down. Later on, as microphones got lighter, and mike booms were invented, the sound man could follow the actor. In Kongo, the microphone is in one place and the actors have to dive for it to say their lines. Immediately, they must move away for the next poor guy. Quality acting is out the window. The idea is to get through the scene without having to stop and cut. Incidentally, Boris Karloff has no lines in the available sound footage, although he’s highly visible in the rest of the chapter.

And then the song. “Love Thoughts of You?” What is this doing in here? It has no place in an action serial. The song is pleasant enough, sung by a typical 1920s tenor, but it clashes with the hard-edged African atmosphere of the rest of the film. It even distracts the cliffhangers. Typically, when the hero is in dire peril at the end of the chapter, the music swells dramatically and we cut to the “Don’t Miss the Next Chapter” title card. Not here. As Walter Miller is charged by the baddies, the title fades up, accompanied by a bubbly instrumental of, yes, you guessed it, “Love Thoughts of You.”

I have no idea if any archive has a better print of King of the Kongo. I’m certain that it’s not high on anyone’s restoration list. I doubt that my material is good enough to make a proper restoration on archival film. Next year, there may be a world premiere special showing of the complete chapter–on video. And you can see two clips of the dialogue sequences here.

How’s that for a so-called reclusive collector? That’s a discussion for another day. Call me crazy… I think this material should be seen!