RESTORER LAUDS N.Y. FILM WORK

“I don’t really like the term film preservation. It’s a misnomer,” Ron Haver said from his County Museum of Art office. “ Moving picture preservation is much better, because you can’t preserve film; it’s too unstable.

“It’ll last 50, maybe 100 years if you don’t touch it, but what’s the point? If you’re preserving it you want to show it, but if you show it you’re in danger of ruining it.”

Few are more concerned about preserving cinema’s past than Haver, once dubbed “the Indiana Jones of film history” by a colleague at the museum, where he is head of the film department.

The trademark Fedora is not all Haver has in common with the fictional excavator. Two years ago he restored what many considered the lost ark of cinema, George Cukor’s 1954 “A Star Is Born,” to nearly its original running time.

Today, Haver is enthusiastically promoting the latest chapter in moving picture preservation, the museum’s screening of 29 restored films preserved by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (See adjoining story by Kevin Thomas.)

According to Haver, the series highlight will be the Nov. 18 screening of Raoul Walsh’s 1930 Western saga “The Big Trail” starring John Wayne, shot in an early 70-millimeter process called Fox Grandeur.

“The only version that has existed for all these years is a 16-millimeter print-down of the 35-millimeter version. The original was considered lost, until the Museum of Modern Art began reconstructing it.

“The 70-millimeter is quite spectacular, because the whole film was shot on location. I don’t think there’s a studio shot in the whole thing.”

In addition to the MOMA tribute, Haver is also encouraged about another development in film preservation: the influence of home video.

Thanks to the home market, Haver explains, film studios are increasingly willing to restore missing footage from classic films such as John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn” (to be released next month), Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” and Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”

Even more significant is the advent of the laser disc, which Haver describes as “the hope of the future. Tape has the same instability problems as film, but laser discs will last for literally hundreds of years; you can’t destroy them.”

According to Haver, there are some notoriously butchered films that will never be seen uncut in any medium. The famous missing 45 minutes from Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” for example, “were dumped in the Pacific in 1957. It’s gone forever.”

Ditto Erich von Stroheim’s seven-hour, 42-reel version of “Greed” (cut to 2 1/2 hours by its studio), despite persistent rumors of its existence. “I went through every holding of MGM, every possible place,” Haver said. “No matter who swears that it exists, I can tell you it doesn’t; that’s just one of those great legends.”

Haver is cautiously optimistic about one restoration he has undertaken, the reconstruction of Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” cut from its near-3-hour running time to 125 minutes.

“Forty cans of negative sound track and 400 cans of negative visual material have been sent to us from Pinewood Studios in England,” Haver said. “None of it is marked, and all the cutting records of the film were destroyed in a fire several years ago.

“That’s a project nobody else would take on except the museum, which has been quite brave. It’s a very expensive proposition.”