![\"cinecolor\"](\"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/cinecolor.jpg\")
<\/a>AND NOW, THE LIST! 9. Monsters of the Moon<\/i> (1939).\u00a0 OK, this is a film that I found, but I\u2019m excited about it.\u00a0 A couple of aspiring filmmakers made a long promotional film based on their idea of Martians invading the moon.\u00a0 It was a clever mixture of stop-motion and live-action.\u00a0 It plays like a long trailer, but it was supposed to attract the attention of big-time Hollywood producers.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the producer it attracted was William Pizor, a bargain-basement filmmaker if there ever was one.\u00a0 Pizor bought the footage and put his name on it in dim hopes that he could raise money to finish the film. (It should be noted that Pizor was the producer of Murder by Television<\/i>, which was highlighted in episode one of the Dr. Film <\/i>TV show, which you\u2019ll see if I can ever sell it!) \u00a0 Monsters of the Moon<\/i> never went anywhere.\u00a0 The only known copy of the film ended up in the hands of Forrest J. Ackerman (long-time monster fan and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland<\/i>), who took the footage, recut it a bit, added some girly footage at the end, and showed it at the first WorldCon in 1940.\u00a0 He lost the film afterward, finding it again a few years later, when he gave it to (please hold your hisses) movie mogul Raymond Rohauer, who added some titles, showed the film once, and kept it.\u00a0 Ackerman saved stills of the film and touted it as one of the great lost films.\u00a0 It showed up on eBay this year, in its original form, with Pizor\u2019s name on it, proving that there was actually more than one print struck.\u00a0 What will become of this?\u00a0 Stay tuned!<\/p>\n 8. Accidentally Preserved<\/a>.\u00a0 Ben Model is a marketing genius.\u00a0 Many of us who do film preservation work have stacks of one-off films that aren\u2019t \u201ccool\u201d enough to merit video releases.\u00a0 In many cases, they\u2019re the only surviving prints of a particular film, but, as I always say, \u201cIt\u2019s the law of supply and <\/i>demand.\u00a0 You may have a unique film, but if no one cares, then it still has no value.\u201d Ben and I agree that an important part of preservation is presentation<\/i>.\u00a0 If no one sees the films you\u2019ve preserved, then they might as well be lost.\u00a0 Ben has done something I\u2019ve never been able to do, and that I\u2019ve not seen anyone else do, either.\u00a0 He\u2019s made people care about oddball silent shorts, and he\u2019s getting people to buy DVDs.\u00a0 That\u2019s really, really great, folks.\u00a0 It means that more stuff like this will become available.\u00a0 It helps everyone.<\/p>\n 6. Whoozit<\/i> (1928)<\/a> If you know me or read this blog with any regularity, then you\u2019ll know that I\u2019m a huge fan of comedian Charley Bowers.\u00a0 Among the most neglected of silent comedians, Bowers\u2019 work has been passed over because nearly all of it has been lost.\u00a0 Over the past 15 years or so, bits of his work have been popping up piecemeal, and they reveal an artist unlike anyone who came before or since.\u00a0 That\u2019s not superlative, folks… Bowers was unique.\u00a0 Whoozit <\/i>is Bowers\u2019 second film under his contract with Educational Pictures.\u00a0 He\u2019d been with FBO the previous year, and those films had been successful, but they bounced him out anyway.\u00a0 Contemporary reviews claim that this film is better than There It Is<\/i> (Bowers\u2019 first at Educational.)\u00a0 Given that There It Is <\/i>is now considered a minor classic of silent comedy, I have high hopes for Whoozit<\/i>.\u00a0 Thanks to preservationist Serge Bromberg and the EYE Institute for digging up this gem. 5. Dearth of a Salesman<\/i> and Insomnia is Good for You<\/i> (both 1957)<\/a> These are both short films featuring a young Peter Sellers, who was just beginning his career in feature films.\u00a0 If that isn\u2019t cool enough, they were both co-written by the legendary Mordecai Richler, author of the Jacob Two-Two series and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.\u00a0 <\/i>I\u00a0 have a feeling that these will be just plain hilarious.<\/p>\n 4. Their First Misunderstanding <\/i>(1911)<\/a> What\u2019s not important about this film?\u00a0 Pretty much everything is.\u00a0 It\u2019s an early film from Independent Motion Pictures (IMP), which became Universal over the next year or so.\u00a0 It\u2019s the first film in which Mary Pickford got billing.\u00a0 It was directed by George Loane Tucker (Traffic in Souls <\/i>and The Miracle Man<\/i>) and Thomas Ince (Civilization<\/i>).\u00a0 Oh, and it co-stars Owen Moore, who was married to Pickford at the time.\u00a0 I can\u2019t wait to see this.<\/p>\n 2.The Mysterious Island<\/i> (1929)<\/a> This has been available for years, but only in black and white. The Czech film archive has located an original Technicolor print. Sure, this is a disappointing film, with an early music-and-effects track (and some talkie sequences). Two-color Technicolor was a novelty at the time, and particularly a film that had a measure of underwater footage (although much of it here was faked.)\u00a0 This is important as one of the first MGM talkies, one of the first Technicolor talkies, one of the first color\/sound science fiction films, and it was directed by Benjamin Christensen (at least in part) before he was ousted from the project.<\/p>\n 1. Too Much Johnson<\/i> (1938)<\/a> has got to be one of the Holy Grails of film preservation.\u00a0 The only print was thought to have burned in the 1970s, leaving it a big question mark in the career Orson Welles.\u00a0 OK, we know it\u2019s not a great picture: it was intended to flesh out a play that tanked and Welles was threatened with legal action on it anyway.\u00a0 It was never shown in public, but what was a movie with the Mercury Theater people shot three years before Citizen Kane <\/i>like?\u00a0 The mind boggles. \u00a0I haven’t seen this yet, but I’m looking forward to it!<\/p>\n I hate lists like this, but I know people love them.\u00a0 I\u2019ve deliberately not included material that\u2019s long been available but recently released on video.\u00a0 These are all things that have never seen the light of day and have been rediscovered this year.\u00a0 So, for example, Ben Model\u2019s Musty Suffer series doesn\u2019t make the list, … Continue reading “The Top 10 Film Preservation Stories of 2013”<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background-on-the-blog","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","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=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":544,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions\/544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n10. Hey, is that SuperCinecolor?\u00a0 This is film preservation and history for geeks, but in 1948 there was a strike at Technicolor that caused a slowdown in their production of prints.\u00a0 For a while, Warner Brothers had Cinecolor print their product for them, to the point that a few cartoons from this period are actually credited as being \u201cIN CINECOLOR.\u201d\u00a0 But Cinecolor was a two-color process, and Technicolor was a superior three-color process.\u00a0 All the Cinecolor cartoons, when seen today, are three-color.\u00a0 What\u2019s the story?\u00a0 Well, this year, a few cartoons popped up on eBay that show all the earmarks of being in Cinecolor (reddish\/purple edge codes for one), but are definitely three-color, because they have vibrant blues and greens in the same shot, something regular Cinecolor couldn\u2019t reproduce.\u00a0 Even stranger, these are 16mm prints.\u00a0 Cinecolor eventually employed a process called SuperCinecolor, a three-color process, but that didn\u2019t find its way into theaters until the 50s, and then always in 35mm.\u00a0 So why are these prints in SuperCinecolor several years before?\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure, but I suspect it involves avoiding patent lawsuits with Technicolor that didn\u2019t expire until a couple of years later.\u00a0 Wanna hear more about this?\u00a0 I can elaborate!<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>7. Hello, Pop<\/i> (1933)<\/a>\u00a0 This has been a great year for recovering Technicolor footage.\u00a0 Few people know that The Three Stooges worked for MGM before they went to Columbia, the studio where they gained fame.\u00a0 MGM even made a few early two-color Technicolor shorts with the Stooges and their then-leader, Ted Healy.\u00a0 The MGM Stooge shorts tend to be highly variable, and\u00a0 today Ted Healy comes off as abrasive and annoying.\u00a0 Still, this is an important stepping-stone for the Stooges, and there are very few two-color Technicolor shorts that survive.\u00a0 Always a poor judge of comedic talent, MGM fired the Stooges and kept Ted Healy.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>3. Dr. Who: The Enemy of the World <\/i>and The Web of Fear.<\/i><\/a>\u00a0 In the 1970s, the BBC stupidly erased a big chunk of the Dr. Who <\/i>episodes from the 1960s.\u00a0 The first doctor, William Hartnell, was affected badly, but the second, Patrick Troughton, had the majority of his episodes destroyed. The BBC had sold 16mm prints to TV stations in Africa and New Zealand (as well as others), which is where a few episodes have been found, but there has been a discernible slowdown in recovered episodes in the last few years. Philip Morris (not the cigarette company) has been traveling the world literally being a filmic Indiana Jones to find abandoned TV episodes.\u00a0 He\u2019s been kidnapped by pirates and arrested many times.\u00a0 Morris found 9 episodes (almost two complete stories) and returned them to the BBC.\u00a0 They paint a new portrait of Troughton\u2019s Who, since he gets to play multiple parts in one (and quite well), and we finally get to see the first appearance of stalwart Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (here not yet ascended to full rank.)\u00a0 Great shows, so lovingly restored that they look <\/i>like BBC 2\u201d tape from the 1960s even though they came from 16mm kinescopes.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"