{"id":229,"date":"2012-05-15T14:02:45","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T18:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=229"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:31:53","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:31:53","slug":"my-top-13-films-that-need-preservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=229","title":{"rendered":"My Top 13 Films That Need Preservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Find out more on the Film Preservation Blogathon here<\/a>. \u00a0Donate here<\/a>. \u00a0The host blogs are Marilyn Ferdinand’s<\/a> and Rod Heath’s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I read about this blogathon with some interest.\u00a0 They\u2019re raising funds for preserving and distributing The White Shadow <\/em>(1923).\u00a0 This is a worthy project, since it\u2019s one of those films that won\u2019t be preserved by normal methods.\u00a0 We only have the first half of this film that Alfred Hitchcock co-directed.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t really a Hitchcock film, and it isn\u2019t complete, and Hitchcock remembered it as not being very good.<\/p>\n

Exactly the kind of thing I\u2019d love to see!\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And since it\u2019s not really terribly historically important, and incomplete, it will get shoved on everyone\u2019s back burner.\u00a0 Again, that makes it the film I want to see.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading over the blogs on the blogathon so far, and there are quite a lot of them about Hitchcock and Hitchcock-related films.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What isn\u2019t being adequately covered is the thing that is most dear to my heart, which is film preservation itself.\u00a0 I got myself to thinking what other projects I\u2019d love to see preserved.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Since I am involved in film preservation myself, I\u2019ll naturally pick projects that I\u2019m already involved in.<\/p>\n

Well of course!\u00a0 That\u2019s why it\u2019s my blog.\u00a0 If you\u2019d like to rant about your own special projects, then write about them in your <\/em>blog.<\/p>\n

Here, then are some of my top picks, in no particular order.\u00a0 I have restricted these to films that actually exist and could be preserved or restored, but nothing is currently being done.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Thunder<\/em> (1929).\u00a0 This is Lon Chaney\u2019s penultimate film, for which about 12-16 minutes exist.\u00a0 I know that it was a big deal a few years back when Rick Schmidlin did a stills-only restoration of London After Midnight<\/em>.\u00a0 Well, Thunder <\/em>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.\u00a0 The disadvantage that Thunder <\/em>has is that it\u2019s not a lost Tod Browning picture, and few people have heard of it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve 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<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019d love someone to care about this film in the same way people cared about London After Midnight<\/em>.\u00a0 Even half as much.\u00a0 Chaney is always an amazing actor.\u00a0 His work should be seen.<\/li>\n
  2. Seven Chances<\/em> color restoration.\u00a0 What?<\/em>, I hear you ask.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t you already do this?\u00a0 Yes, I did.\u00a0 I even wrote about it a zillion times<\/a>. 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.\u00a0 There are a number of people who would need to collaborate on this project, and it would be expensive to do it right.\u00a0 I hope the politics can be overcome and this film can be preserved in the way it deserves.\u00a0 I think my restoration could be vastly improved if we just had better source elements.<\/li>\n
  3. Little Orphant Annie<\/em> (1918).\u00a0 Not only is this a rare early Colleen Moore film, but it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know for certain, because I haven\u2019t seen it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t have the money.\u00a0 The print has subsequently been donated to an archive that has no immediate preservation plans.\u00a0 Complicating the issue is that a truncated version was duplicated (rather poorly) by a dubious collector in the 1970s.\u00a0 It\u2019s felt that this version may be \u201cgood enough\u201d even though we may have a complete original nitrate, which would be longer and better.\u00a0 The last I heard was that the nitrate was starting to get sticky.\u00a0 I hope that people wake up before this film is gone.\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. King of the Kongo<\/em> (1929).\u00a0 Hey, wait!\u00a0 Isn\u2019t this a pet project?\u00a0 It sure is.\u00a0 I wrote about it here<\/a>.\u00a0 Vitaphone researcher Ron Hutchinson<\/a> located the original sound discs for three reels of this rare serial and they do <\/em>sync with my silent 16mm print.\u00a0 I was able to restore the sound to the reels for the first time in 80 years.\u00a0 The pluses?\u00a0 It\u2019s the first sound serial, and an early Boris Karloff film.\u00a0 The minuses?\u00a0 It\u2019s painfully acted by people desperate to dive in for the immobile microphones, and it isn\u2019t very good.\u00a0 We only have the sound for one complete chapter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even with all the extant discs, we\u2019d have less than half of the serial restored to sound, and I\u2019ve got to tell you that the blu-ray sales of this one would be in the single digits.\u00a0 Still, it\u2019s cool <\/em>and it should be restored.\u00a0 I\u2019m probably going to do a Kickstarter project to get it done…at least what we have now.<\/li>\n
  5. Beggar on Horseback<\/em> (1925).\u00a0 Gee, a silent picture directed by James Cruze, with Edward Everett Horton, from a play co-written by George S. Kaufman.\u00a0 Could this be a hidden gem?\u00a0 You bet it is.\u00a0 The good news is that it has been preserved, but the bad news is that it\u2019s missing the last reel.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen it; it\u2019s wonderful, bizarre stuff.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to see this released on some sort of video with stills and bridging text.\u00a0 It\u2019s not been done yet, but it should be.\u00a0 The trouble?\u00a0 As usual… copyright issues from a studio that thinks no one cares.\u00a0 I hope they\u2019re wrong.<\/li>\n
  6. Showdown at Ulcer Gulch<\/em> (1958).\u00a0 OK, this one isn\u2019t very good.\u00a0 I admit it.\u00a0 The \u201creview\u201d on IMDb by the fraudulent F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre makes it sound worse than it is.\u00a0 Chico Marx\u2019 son-in-law, animator Shamus Culhane, directed this piece for the Saturday Evening Post.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It stars Orson Bean and Salome Jens.\u00a0 I found a faded Eastman color print of this in 2001, and it is in desperate need of a color restoration.\u00a0 The color negative may still exist, but it\u2019s on very unstable stock (1958-62 Eastman negative is particularly bad at fading), and it may be too far gone.\u00a0 Historically important?\u00a0 You bet!\u00a0 <\/em>I\u2019m not sure what the problem is, but someone is claiming a copyright on it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve offered it as an extra to two separate boxed sets and have been turned down twice.<\/li>\n
  7. \"\"<\/a>The Haunted<\/em> (1965).\u00a0 Yes, this is another of my own pet projects.\u00a0 After many years of searching, I found a print of this on eBay a couple of years ago.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written about it before, but it\u2019s a wonderfully spooky pilot by Joseph Stefano, co-creator of The Outer Limits <\/em>and the screenwriter for Psycho<\/em> (1960).\u00a0 Hey, I got in a Hitchcock reference!\u00a0 There are more here: Hitchcock stars Martin Landau (North by Northwest<\/em>), Diane Baker (Marnie<\/em>), and Dame Judith Anderson (Rebecca<\/em>) are the top-billed actors.\u00a0 Spooky photography by Conrad Hall, and a beautiful, lyrical script by Stefano make this an unheralded classic.\u00a0 16mm material exists in the hands of at least one archive and a couple of different collectors.\u00a0 35mm material exists in the hands of a major network.\u00a0 There are two different cuts, both a pilot at 60 minutes and a feature cut (distributed to Europe) at about 90 minutes, but it\u2019s languishing in contract problems.\u00a0 Is there a negative?\u00a0 Do we need a restoration from the surviving prints?\u00a0 It\u2019s not clear.\u00a0 I can\u2019t recommend this highly enough: it\u2019s as good as the best of the Outer Limits <\/em>episodes, yet no one can see it.\u00a0 Maddening<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  8. Mack Sennett credits.\u00a0 Paramount sold its library of short films to NTA in the 50s.\u00a0 NTA retitled them for TV issue.\u00a0 In many cases, this was butchery of the highest order, but it was done for legal reasons.\u00a0 In some cases, original negatives, uncut, survive, but in others, we are not so lucky.\u00a0 Mack Sennett did a series of shorts for Paramount in the 1930s that had a unique opening<\/a>: 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).\u00a0 In most cases, NTA just froze the main title, leaving the soundtrack alone, so it\u2019s possible to hear the dog even though we never see it.\u00a0 Fortunately, there are a few surviving prints of the barking dog visuals.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to see these restored to the Sennett shorts, because they give a fresher, more vibrant open to these films.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked on it a bit, and I think it could be done with more of them…<\/li>\n
  9. Hard Luck<\/em> (1921) This is one of the maddening problems in film when a movie is really too profitable, so people fight over it.\u00a0 An early Buster Keaton short, it does not exist in complete form.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I fully sympathize with the problem, because I know that Keaton pays the bills on other projects that are worthy but pay less.\u00a0 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.<\/li>\n
  10. \u00a0 The Lost World<\/em> (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.\u00a0 Historically, it\u2019s a knockout, because it\u2019s the first ever giant monster film with dinosaurs found in a \u201clost world,\u201d a set piece so powerful it was even stolen for the movie Up <\/em>(2009).\u00a0 A major archive did a complete restoration of The Lost World<\/em> from the best materials, and they did some roadshows around the country.\u00a0 Alas, they wouldn\u2019t release it on video.\u00a0 This meant that another company did another restoration on it and released it themselves.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 You guessed it.\u00a0 The two prints each have footage not in the other, meaning that no one yet has seen the complete version.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to see the various political factions work out the problems here so that this film can finally get the restoration it deserves.<\/li>\n
  11. The Mascot<\/em> (1934) This is an early sound stop-motion short, with lovely, almost stream-of-consciousness animation.\u00a0 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\u2019d never seen before!\u00a0 Ironically, my own print contained footage not in theirs!\u00a0 This short has been cut and recut so much over the years that the original intent of Starevitch\u2019s wonderful work is often blunted or lost.\u00a0 I have a feeling that it would make a bit more sense if we had more of it to tie the narrative together.<\/li>\n
  12. The Treasurer’s Report<\/em> (1928) Robert Benchley\u2019s groundbreaking and hilarious monologue was one of the first sound-on-film releases from Fox.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Between the two prints, an almost pristine restoration could be made.\u00a0 Will it happen?\u00a0 I doubt it.\u00a0 The copyright on it is dubious, and there\u2019s a problem deciding who owns what.\u00a0 It deserves to be saved.<\/li>\n
  13. Freckles<\/em> (1935) Ostensibly based on the book by Gene Stratton-Porter, this film ends up being a completely separate work.\u00a0 It\u2019s also basically a lost film starring Virginia Weidler and Tom Brown.\u00a0 I found a badly vinegared print, still runnable, on eBay a few years ago.\u00a0 As far as we know, it\u2019s the only surviving print.\u00a0 There\u2019s the usual trouble: it has a copyright renewal, but no one knows who owns it now.\u00a0 As a result, I can\u2019t show it except in archival conditions, I can\u2019t 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.\u00a0 One offered to store it for me but not to do any work on restoring or preserving it.\u00a0 No thank you!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    No, there\u2019s no Greed <\/em>here, no London After Midnight<\/em>, nothing really earth-shattering.\u00a0 There is a great deal of material that\u2019s interesting and historically important.\u00a0 Some of it may be preserved eventually, some may see the light of day, but I expect some to continue languishing.<\/p>\n

    That doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not in there fighting!<\/p>\n

    I love the idea of a blogathon that actually results in a film being preserved.\u00a0 I have always been told that no one cares about old films, particularly silent ones.\u00a0 Please, just for me, prove those people wrong!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Find out more on the Film Preservation Blogathon here. \u00a0Donate here. \u00a0The host blogs are Marilyn Ferdinand’s and Rod Heath’s. I read about this blogathon with some interest.\u00a0 They\u2019re raising funds for preserving and distributing The White Shadow (1923).\u00a0 This is a worthy project, since it\u2019s one of those films that won\u2019t be preserved by … Continue reading “My Top 13 Films That Need Preservation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,207],"tags":[90,87,91],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-films-pocket-rants","category-film","tag-blogathon","tag-film-preservation","tag-hitchcock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1926,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/1926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}