{"id":374,"date":"2013-01-21T11:47:06","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T16:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=374"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:29:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:29:46","slug":"welcome-to-brazil-mr-bond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=374","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bond"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you didn\u2019t read my last blog post, James Bond Meets King of the Kongo<\/a>, then you won\u2019t understand this post at all, so you\u2019d be well-advised to go back and read that one first.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the end of You Only Live Twice <\/i>(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.<\/p>\n

But that same description also fits the end of Brazil <\/i>(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.<\/p>\n

And me, well, I wasn\u2019t sure quite which one I was.<\/p>\n

My options had shrunken to one, and my funding was almost zero. I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

My last hope seemed to be teetering on the edge… I\u2019d 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\u2019d been admitted to the emergency room with a raging fever and an out-of-control white cell count.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d 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<\/i> is about as low-profile as it gets. It\u2019s historically significant, interesting for some of the cast that appears, but, honestly, it\u2019s not a landmark piece of cinema, and we only have about 1\/10 of the sound for the whole serial.<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t make it any less cool<\/i>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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<\/i> was only a joke. He apologized profusely. I have to give him that.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s known for somewhat \u201cedgy\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It’s actually more severe than that. \u00a0Red’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. \u00a0Woody Allen has a rule, “90% of success is just showing up.” \u00a0I’ve got a corollary: “The rest of success is doing what you said you would do.” \u00a0Of 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. \u00a0We can go around and around on that… but the deadline is clearly outlined in the Kickstarter proposal for all to see.<\/p>\n

Should I forgive Red or not? I\u2019m not sure. I do have another rule, \u201cNever ascribe malice to anything that could be explained by stupidity.\u201d And this, well, this is stupid. Maybe I will forgive him. I\u2019ll have to cool off first, though.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t find a good way to get the files to him, a lab in Maryland outpricing me, and Red Grant\u2019s calling. I have to say I wasn\u2019t optimistic that anything could be worked out, but I had some good people on my side.<\/p>\n

Cinerama Jones arranged for Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc<\/a>, a great group that I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/i>to Metropolis Film Labs, where it will be converted back to film. They haven\u2019t received it yet, so I just have to hope what I sent them works well.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still some talk about Kongo <\/i>appearing on a major TV network, and whether that will happen or not is up in the air.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also hoping to put the restored print in as part of an episode of Dr. Film<\/i>. That still may happen. I\u2019m working on a grant to make more Dr. Film <\/i>episodes. Whether that will happen is also an open question; statistically it\u2019s rather doubtful, but we got Kongo <\/i>going… maybe this will go too.<\/p>\n

So what goes from here? Well, Kongo<\/i> should still premiere at the Syracuse Cinefest, <\/i>thanks to Silent Cinema. We\u2019re still looking at distribution channels forDr. Film<\/i>, and Kongo <\/i>should appear on that. Dr. Film <\/i>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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0466\"<\/a>
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.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you didn\u2019t read my last blog post, James Bond Meets King of the Kongo, then you won\u2019t understand this post at all, so you\u2019d 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. … Continue reading “Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bond”<\/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":[5,207],"tags":[131,34,36,134,37,133],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background-on-the-blog","category-film","tag-karloff","tag-king-of-the-kongo","tag-restoration","tag-silent-clowns","tag-sound","tag-vitaphone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374","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=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":379,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}