Mining Hollywood’s Old Movie Gold

Americans seem to love their magic moments.

The idea is this: Stage something special--something different , exciting . . . new . . . important --shout loudly enough and the people will come, bringing their love and their credit-card fortunes.

Staged events attract attention as our conventions demonstrate and they do the same in sports as in Tuesday’s meaningless All-Star Game and next week’s first post-Cold-War Olympics, although how much fortune NBC television will ring up as it triple jumps into pay-per-view is up to the viewers.

Then there’s Hollywood, where magic moments were invented, where almost every new movie is an event worthy of celebrities, charitable causes and in-your-face paparazzi .

What’s good, then, for the new is good also for the old and the ex post facto crowd.

Never before have so many old films, tapes and kinescopes emerged from vaults, closets and hiding places to be dusted off, restored, enhanced, and then turned into magic moments again.

Magic-money moments, too.

Somewhere in the country the new “Casablanca” movie plays. A re-released “Pinocchio” is in a theater down the street. Collector set videos and laser discs are celebrating a cinematic past at your home video store. And in Santa Monica next week, another “restored” work comes to town, the French ‘50s film “The Proud Ones,” based on a Jean-Paul Sartre story, its love theme being pushed as an event of some historic significance.

Hollywood’s Golden Age is being re-gilded. There’s a hot, new market for used movies.

The Disney organization discovered vault magic years ago as it turned each re-release of “Fantasia” or the currently running “Pinocchio” into a major event, a generational rite of passage. You weren’t a complete parent until you had passed a piece of your childhood’s cinematic culture on to your children.

“ ‘Fantasia’ and ‘Pinocchio’ are like moments in the past,” says Disney Vice President Roy Disney, “I don’t think you can improve upon them. You have to think about those movies as moments in time that were so good that you know some mother and daddy has got to say, ‘You know, I saw that movie when I was a little kid and now you should see it.’ ”

Then there’s Ted Turner, who helped reinvent the reel after spending $1.6 billion on various film libraries. He had to find new ways to get people to see old movies.

“We have to create new interest in our movies,” Roger I. Mayer, president and chief operating officer of Turner Entertainment, told a luncheon meeting sponsored by the accounting firm Deloitte and Touche recently, speaking of how that company creates its own events. His talk, appropriately, was billed as “Mining the Gold of Entertainment Libraries.”

Turner’s people annually look for ways to celebrate their movies--a 50th anniversary of a “classic” qualifies. They might develop a book about the movie, find survivors from the movie, set up media interviews. They create an event, usually the premiere of the return of a movie to a theater, then a follow-up commemorative edition of the movie in various video forms.

Turner’s idea was that these old movies and later old television series had “a greater value than many people in this town thought.”

While not in the same financial league as Turner, Martin Scorsese Presents, an exhibition company started by the film director, is trying to do something similar: educate audiences about old movies and get the people and the movies back where they belong, in theaters. The emphasis is on those French and Italian movies of the ‘50s that influenced mid-century American filmmakers--particularly Scorsese, who continues to play a strong role in restoration and preservation efforts and in getting film studios to protect their libraries.

Raffaele Donato, the Scorsese archivist--the director has a collection of 16mm films at the George Eastman House and 35mm films at New York’s Museum of Modern Art--says that “The Proud Ones” by director Yves Allegret is the Scorsese company’s third theatrical release and the film that required the least amount of restoration. It will be shown for a week starting next Thursday at the NuWilshire in Santa Monica.

“We were lucky,” he said. “Pathe had almost a perfect negative and the rights were clearly owned by Pathe. The film, which was also titled ‘The Proud and the Beautiful,’ was debated so strongly in France that it help set off the New Wave there.

“Many of the films in our collection have not been as easy to restore and trace as ‘The Proud Ones.’ Some are in bad shape and we have to turn them over to restorers. Others have unclear title, so we have to go through a tedious effort to retrace ownership, through companies that folded and rights that were sold and trace owners so that we can get exhibition rights. Our first re-release, ‘Golden Coach,’ was owned by a German company although it had had French and Italian owners. Many of the Italian companies that made films we are interested in are no longer in business, their libraries sold off.

“We are hoping to have a steady stream of re-released European pictures. Next, we’ll have Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Contempt,’ and then in September, two films by Fellini that were never released in this country.”

Robert Gitt, who heads film preservation at the UCLA Film and Television Archives at the old Technicolor plant in Hollywood, believes a new generation of studio executives is far more concerned about the safekeeping of movies than earlier generations.

“There’s been a growing movement in the past 10 years to restore and preserve film. All the studios now realize the commercial possibilities in their libraries--cable, video, laser. This generation of studio executives grew up with film; many went to film school and understand the heritage.”

He points out that the major studios now have film preservation programs, working with UCLA or the Library of Congress or the Museum of Modern Art or industry groups. The investment, of course, preserves the studio library. It also keeps motion pictures healthy so that they may yet play again.

He is concerned, though, about “orphan” films that have gone into public domain or were enmeshed in ownership issues and are unprotected. “That’s a major concern for us,” he said. “Here, we don’t have big sponsors. Our funding is shrinking. The labor costs and film stock costs are rising. The nitrite films of the teens and the ‘20s and the talkies are deteriorating. Somebody will always take care of a ‘Casablanca’ or a ‘Maltese Falcon’ but who will help so many other films that may disappear forever?”

Gitt was responsible for the restoration of the first full Technicolor film, the 1935 “Becky Sharp,” a demanding project that required the locating and merging of pieces of the film from a number of sources into a playable version.

More recently, he has worked with Universal Studios on the 1946 movie “To Each His Own,” and with Columbia Studios on the restoration of the 30-year-old “The Guns of Navarone.”

There’s more than feature movie “orphans” that concern Gitt. There are in the UCLA archives 27 million feet of pre-’60s newsreel film from a Hearst company, a virtual visual history of half a century, plus a kinescope and 2-inch tape collection of television shows from the ‘40s through the ‘60s that have to be preserved.

Lots of magic moments there. Just waiting for the right event.