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- The first thing that strikes you is the cold: The moment
you enter the deep, neon-lit vault, it snaps you in its grasp, locking
you in a giant cooler thousands of square feet large.
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- The second thing that strikes you is the films, maybe
100,000 or more, all stored in metal and plastic cans -- from rolls of
tiny Super 8 stock to 70mm megaworks -- with titles ranging from "John
Huston and Friend" and "William Wyler Home Movies" to "Vertigo"
(1958) and "Stagecoach" (1939).
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- This is the Hollywood headquarters of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study,
a 118,000-square-foot former television studio that has become a state-of-the-art
hub for film preservation and restoration. The facility is a pillar of
a vast international enterprise that has exploded during the past few years
because of government and private funding that, at last, has provided the
means to keep film from becoming extinct.
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- "There is more money and more public awareness about
preservation in general," says Tim Kittleson, director of the UCLA
Film and Television Archive. "It's a very different situation than
even just a few years ago."
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- Decades after masterpieces like Erich von Stroheim's
1924 drama "Greed" were destroyed by indifferent studio chiefs
or lost in fires and other disasters, the preservation business is flourishing.
"Business" is not quite the right word, though, because preservationists
can be found in two camps: at leading nonprofit archives including those
operated by AMPAS, UCLA, the Library of Congress, New York's Museum of
Modern Art and the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., as well as
smaller nonprofit organizations such as the government-funded National
Film Preservation Foundation and the Martin Scorsese-backed Film Foundation;
and also, of course, at the major studios.
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- On the nonprofit side, the U.S. government has played
a key role, increasing the amount of money available for preservation.
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- "This last year, Congress more than doubled our
funding," says Annette Melville, director of the NFPF, which distributes
cash to archives. "It used to be $250,000 a year that we had to give
out, and that has been increased to $530,000 a year. That's not very much
by Hollywood standards, but it is by nonprofit standards."
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- After years of neglect, studios also are investing millions
in programs to preserve and restore their libraries.
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- "We've put together this process where we look at
all of our titles," says Grover Crisp, vp asset management and film
restoration at Sony Pictures Entertainment and an expert in the field.
"We work on about 200-300 films per year. Out of a library of 4,000,
since we began doing this in the early 1990s, we have improved or remastered
2,000 titles -- and 1,000 of them have had full restorations."
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- Sony's major recent restorations have included Sam Peckinpah's
1965 war drama "Major Dundee" and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975
drama "The Passenger." The studio has even rerestored films like
Elia Kazan's 1954 classic "On the Waterfront," which was restored
during the early 1990s and again in 2003.
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- "That film was torn -- the frames were torn in eight
or nine sections -- and we were unable to do anything in the '90s,"
Crisp says. "But now, we can digitally paint out the scratches."
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- Sony is not alone in its commitment. Chris Cookson, president
of Warner Bros. Technical Operations and chief technology officer at Warner
Bros. Entertainment, notes that his studio consecrated more than $100 million
for preservation during the late 1990s -- in addition to money spent for
high-profile restorations including 1933's "King Kong" and 1939's
"Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," the likes
of which can cost more than $1 million apiece.
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- "In the past, with few exceptions, film studios
were spending very little of their own money, and most of the money for
preservation and restoration came from places like the National Endowment
for the Arts," says David Shepard, a silent-film historian and restorer.
"But DVD has made it clear that there is a commercial value in maintaining
these films, and a number of the studios are starting to invest in serious,
high-quality preservation instead of turning the material over to archives
or the public sector."
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- DVD also has created opportunities for persons like Shepard,
who recently released the seven-DVD boxed set "Unseen Cinema,"
a collection of personal and avant-garde films from the silent era.
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- In addition to increased funding, preservationists' efforts
have been helped immeasurably by recent improvements in technology and
digital equipment.
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- "Problems that were unsolvable just a few years
ago, people are now technically able to tackle and are achieving amazing
results," Melville says. "For instance, people have been tackling
color-fading for years, and now, labs have developed processes to return
colors back to their original (hues)."
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- Digital technology was so effective in the restoration
of "Wizard" that even Cookson was amazed by the results.
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- "We scanned it at 4,000 pixels-by-3,000, which they
call 4K," he says. "The things that you see in it, you've never
seen before: You see the texture on the Scarecrow's face, and you see that
there is actually a rivet between the eyes of the Tin Man."
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- But even with cutting-edge technology at their disposal,
restorationists can find large projects labor-intensive -- not to mention
time-consuming. Dave Bossert, artistic director at Walt Disney Animation's
special projects unit, estimates that his studio's recent restoration of
the 1942 classic "Bambi" required 14 months and about 10,000
man-hours.
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- Such restorations usually begin with detectivelike investigations
into available prints and negatives. Bossert notes that after the "Bambi"
negative arrived in Southern California in early 2004 -- it was transported
from the Library of Congress' Ohio storage facility in a refrigerated truck
-- it was cleaned and inspected, and every frame had to be scanned.
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- "Now the film was shot on what is known as successive-exposure
film, or SE film stock, where you are essentially photographing each frame
of film three times to create a YCM (yellow-cyan-magenta) record similar
to the Technicolor three-strip process," he says. "But it is
not three strips -- it is one negative."
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- Bossert and his team then used proprietary software to
register the frames together and align the three-color records.
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- "That was all done digitally," he says. "Once
we had them all combined, (we) ran a dust-busting process to remove the
obvious dirt from each frame."
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- Disney had kept all of the original material connected
with "Bambi," giving its restoration team the freedom to check
documentation and prints for things like color-correction. According to
Bossert, the biggest challenge was resisting the urge to do too much.
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- "You didn't want to change the film," he says.
"Imagine removing dirt off a fresco in the Sistine Chapel: You want
to go in with a Q-tip and not change the fresco itself in any way."
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- The "Bambi" restoration not only added a pristine
title to the Disney library but also resulted in major sales of a newly
issued DVD -- and Warners recently enjoyed the same bonus after restoring
the original "Kong," the most-requested title in that studio's
library.
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- "We were asked to start this project about five
years ago," WBTO vp mastering Ned Price says. "It was in notoriously
poor condition, so we started doing a cursory check -- a view of what elements
we had and what elements were out there, in terms of archives and laboratories.
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- "The most difficult aspect of a restoration like
this is doing the inventory, which means finding the materials around the
world," he adds. "That was especially difficult on this title:
It was an RKO feature, and it was owned by several companies worldwide."
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- Another key problem was restoring material that had been
cut by American censors -- about 340 feet of film, or three minutes of
running time -- and which eventually was reconstructed from prints held
by the British Film Institute. Then began the task of improving the material.
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- Four Warners staffers spent 300 hours cleaning the original
"Kong" print, with such terms as "lavender" and "M&E"
peppering their discussion (a lavender is a positive print made from a
film's camera negative; M&E is music and effects). Five years later,
the restoration was complete, and "Kong" recently was issued
on DVD.
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- "Complete" might be too strong a term for Price,
though.
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- "I never consider a restoration permanently finished,"
he says, adding that there exists no proof that "Kong's" original
negative and optical track were destroyed decades ago. "I have no
documentation on this, and if there is no documentation, in my mind, I
never give up."
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- What's more, restoring sound can prove even more challenging
than restoring the picture on some movies.
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- "On a film like 'Bambi,' the sound elements that
existed were the music, dialogue and effects tracks," Bossert says.
"There weren't 24 tracks of sound; there were basically three sound
elements, and they were recorded in mono. We had Terry Porter, an Academy
Award-(nominated) sound designer, remix the elements, and he was able to
electronically pull the sound apart and make it sound fuller."
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- That, Bossert admits, begs the question: Is it the right
thing to do?
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- "What the studio decided was, on the DVD, you can
listen to the original soundtrack -- clean, but still mono -- or you can
choose to listen to an enhanced-sound version, which is fuller and more
contemporary," he says.
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- Such issues abound during the restoration process, not
only in terms of maintaining a film's integrity but also in weighing how
its subject matter might affect modern audiences. While restoring Harry
O. Hoyt's 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost
World," Shepard encountered a vexing ethical challenge.
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- "There is a Negro character in the movie; he is
supposed to be Brazilian, but in the movie version, they made him a shuffling
Uncle Tom type -- right off the old plantation -- with dialogue titles
to match," he says. "I didn't use those: I went back to the Arthur
Conan Doyle book and used dialogue from the novel. I knowingly altered
the film to make it presentable today."
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- One reason, Shepard adds, was simple economics. "I
couldn't possibly have sold it to Turner Classic Movies and gotten any
money back if I had used the original titles," he says.
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- Ethics and recent funding increases aside, money remains
a key issue for nonstudio preservationists.
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- "We are one of the major funders of projects, but
we only fund maybe one-third of the proposals that the archives submit
to us," the Film Foundation executive director Margaret Bodde says.
"We could be funding at a much higher level."
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- The Film Foundation, she adds, disburses $500,000-$1
million a year, depending on how much money it raises.
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- Economic and technical issues facing the film-restoration
sector were discussed Nov. 30-Dec. 3 in Austin, Texas, during the annual
meeting of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, which drew 600-plus
attendees from as far afield as Australia and Ghana.
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- "We discussed issues of common concern, like questions
of copyright and access," says AMIA president Janice Simpson, director
of global preservation programs at Ascent Media Group. "The labs also
showed off their state-of-the-art technology. The big issue right now is
the use of digital intermediates in restoration -- when you record film
into a computer and digitize it, then do the restoration work digitally
and record it back out to film. It is an expensive project, so primarily
it is being done by the studios, but it has a lot more capabilities (than
standard photochemical work)."
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- An even larger issue is the hoped-for establishment of
a standard that will allow film to be stored digitally, rather than on
celluloid.
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- "The biggest challenge is finding an acceptable
archival medium," says Colleen Simpson, managing director of film
preservation at Technicolor Creative Services, which has restored films
including 1925's King Vidor-helmed classic "The Big Parade."
"Nobody has come up with a replacement for film; there is nothing
that has been proven to last 100 years. You can't play beta tape now, VHS
is going away, and if you don't have the machinery to play it or something
happens to that tape, there is no way to retrieve it. There is often anecdotal
evidence of something going wrong with tape or any of these digital hard
drives."
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- AMPAS recently took a first step toward addressing such
problems by forming a study group -- the Digital Motion Picture Archival
Project, comprised of studio and archival experts -- that first met in
June.
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- "Everyone came out of it saying, 'This is a huge,
fascinating challenge,'" says DMPAP member Kittleson, whose UCLA archive
includes more than 147,000 movie titles and 200,000 TV programs. "How
are we going to archive the material? What will the formats be?"
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- Interest and money are making things possible for Kittleson
and his preservationist colleagues that they could not have imagined only
a handful of years ago -- but he notes that such possibilities could affect
how and where restored films are seen down the road.
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- "The choice of which direction we head in is going
to be crucial," Kittleson says.
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