{"id":364,"date":"2013-01-06T14:19:54","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T19:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=364"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:29:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:29:59","slug":"james-bond-meets-the-king-of-the-kongo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=364","title":{"rendered":"James Bond Meets The King of the Kongo"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve always said that collecting and restoring film is like James Bond without the women.\u00a0 You have international intrigue, shady characters, plots and crossplots and unexpected villains.\u00a0 This is an idea that isn\u2019t unique to me, however, since \u201cWild Bill\u201d Everson came up with a movie serial parody that was actually produced as Captain Celluloid Vs. The Film Pirates <\/i>(1965).\u00a0 There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But once again, fantasy is outpaced by reality.\u00a0 Let me preface this, as I always do, by stating that I\u2019m not making any of this up.\u00a0 I\u2019ve changed the names to protect the innocent and the guilty, but I didn\u2019t fabricate anything.<\/p>\n

\"kongo2\"<\/p>\n

In August, I put up a Kickstarter campaign<\/a> to restore one episode of King of the Kongo <\/i>(1929).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 These are on Vitaphone discs, which were carefully transferred by Ron Hutchinson at The Vitaphone project.\u00a0 I use\u00a0Ron\u2019s real name because he\u2019s a good guy, and I have nothing bad or controversial to say about him whatsoever.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been working with another fellow who shall, however, remain anonymous.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He quoted me a very nice price on getting the restoration printed to film.\u00a0 I knew this was important because I\u2019d promised to premiere the restoration at the Syracuse Cinefest, and they need the film on 16mm.\u00a0 For the sake of this posting, we\u2019ll refer to this gentleman as Red Grant, to use a Bond name… and it\u2019s actually fitting.<\/p>\n

As I was preparing the Kickstarter project, I posted a notice about it with a group that is dedicated to the preservation of serials.\u00a0 Let\u2019s refer to them as SPECTRE.\u00a0 Now, innocent me, I thought if I was preserving a serial, then I was on the same side as SPECTRE.\u00a0 Not so, my friends.\u00a0 It seems that SPECTRE wants to do its own <\/i>restoration of King of the Kongo<\/i> and that they felt what I was doing was a waste of time and effort.\u00a0 Again, innocent me, I thought, gee, we\u2019ll pool our resources and share what we\u2019ve got to do the best job possible.\u00a0 It seems that the SPECTRE chief just wanted me to go away, because he \u201cknew where a 35mm of Kongo <\/i>was located,\u201d and he \u201cknew of the existence of several more discs.\u201d\u00a0 He didn\u2019t actually have <\/i>any of this stuff, whereas I had all of my materials, but he knew where it was, you see.\u00a0 And I was competing with him, at least from his standpoint.<\/p>\n

This aspect of collecting is one that still infuriates me.\u00a0 I guess SPECTRE didn\u2019t really want to restore King of the Kongo<\/i>, but they wanted the credit <\/i>for restoring it.\u00a0 Knowing where something is and having it are two very different things.\u00a0 I know where more Kongo <\/i>discs are, too, but they are in the hands of a reclusive collector who thinks he has something worth a lot of money.\u00a0 And that\u2019s more money than it\u2019s worth, more money than you could ever raise from selling copies, and basically pointless.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I am reminded of Samuel Peeples\u2019 line, which, in summation, says that this kind of reasoning is like \u201ctrying to bisect a sneeze.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The problem was that the print was banged-up, too.\u00a0 Actually, it was the pre-print that was banged up, the 35mm nitrate that my print was copied from.\u00a0 There were also a few sections that were printed out-of-frame, a Mascot Serials trademark that I hadn\u2019t noticed in my quick-and-dirty transfer done on my home equipment.\u00a0 As archivist DJ Turner has said, \u201cSometimes [a high-resolution transfer] doesn\u2019t do these old films any favors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
This is an unretouched title frame from the scan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"This<\/a>
This is a frame from the restoration (Quicktime oopsie at bottom!)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had to do a lot of surgery on Kongo <\/i>to make it look halfway right.\u00a0 I could keep spending time on it, hand-tweaking it even more, but it actually looks fairly good now.\u00a0 I matted out the out-of-frame sections, rebalanced the black-and-white contrast on a shot-by-shot basis.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t counted on the huge slow-down such a thing would cause my computer, but it was a massive computing task.\u00a0 Red Grant had told me that he\u2019d need the file by early December, so that was my goal.<\/p>\n

I worked extensively with David Wood (a good guy, so I\u2019ll use his name.)\u00a0 Dave is the equivalent of Q in this story.\u00a0 In fairness, I was the picture Q and Dave was the audio Q.\u00a0 Dave asked me a question I thought no one would ever ask me: \u201cWas this transferred with an RIAA curve or a Vitaphone curve?\u201d\u00a0 Well, I knew Ron had done the transfer work, but knowing curves was a pretty arcane thing that I wouldn\u2019t expect most people to know.\u00a0 It turns out that the needle and transfer arm of a record player are calibrated to a certain equalization curve, much like you\u2019d use on your stereo.\u00a0 Dave had discovered that there was an official Vitaphone curve (something I never knew).\u00a0 So he applied an inverse RIAA curve and then a Vitaphone curve, and the sound was vastly improved.\u00a0 He also matched the speed with the footage I had.<\/p>\n

Now, if you understand what I just said, then you have some recording knowledge, and it will impress you.\u00a0 If you didn\u2019t understand it, then please come away with a vague sense of awe for what Dave was able to accomplish.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Pretty good!<\/p>\n