Salvagers of Old Films Find It Pays to Preserve : Hollywood: Studios have cracked open their vaults, allowing conservationists to bring aging movies and TV shows up to today’s standards.

Picture the opening scene of “On the Waterfront.”

Marlon Brando is setting up his pal Joey, who has squealed on the mob. Brando stands in an alley, looks up to Joey’s window, and out of his mouth comes . . . a scarcely audible voice.

“You could barely hear him,” said film conservationist Peter Williamson, explaining that a musical score drowned out Brando’s voice. He worked for 15 months with Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. to restore the 1954 classic.

Restoring Brando’s voice to its proper level is only one of the trials of Williamson and other conservationists who repair the damage time inflicts on film and bring classic movies and TV shows up to today’s technical standards.

But Williamson’s vocation feeds into a growing trend in Hollywood. The advent of home video, cable television and the ever-expanding universe of computerized technologies is adding new value to items that did little more than claim storage space in the catacombs of The Walt Disney Co., Paramount Pictures and MCA Inc.

“There’s been a turnaround in the attitude of all of the studios toward the value of [their] libraries which has been economically driven,” said Robert Rosen, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. “The preservation of film really pays.”

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“Waterfront” cost less than $50,000 to restore, but has grossed at least eight times that since being released a year and a half ago on videocassette and laser disc, Sony said. “Gone With the Wind” cost about $125,000 to restore, not including sound, but cleared more than $50 million in sales, industry journals reported.

Preserving aging films and restoring them to suit modern standards for quality is also an obsession of Scott MacQueen, the manager of library restoration for Disney’s Buena Vista Visual Effects in Burbank.

From a snug office stacked with film tins marked with such titles as “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” and “Winnie the Pooh,” MacQueen directs the Disney effort.

He makes sure Snow White appears as dazzling as she did in 1937. And he took the same care restoring the first film produced by founder Walt Disney--a 1920 short on dental hygiene called “Tommy Tucker’s Tooth.” (The company wanted the short restored because of its historical significance to the studio, rather than for commercial release.)

“They sparkle now,” MacQueen said of the post-restoration results. “They look as if they were made yesterday.”

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” proved to be a particular coup for MacQueen, who discovered a previously unused sequence of the film tucked unnoticed in a corner.

In it, animated skulls rise from the vapors of the wicked queen’s magic brew. The sequence was cut before the film’s release because, MacQueen presumes, it was “too frightening.”

The skull sequence was added on a deluxe videocassette collector’s edition of the cartoon feature, retailing for $79.99.

Disney’s library contains 7,000 titles, though not all need work. Last year MacQueen supervised restoration of 50 titles, preparing them for wider commercial release. The films include the 1958 Academy Award-winning short, “Grand Canyon.”

Though Disney has long noted the evergreen value of animated material, some studios were slow to realize the potential profits locked in their film libraries.

They are catching up quickly and restoring just about everything in the vaults. “We don’t know what will be of interest tomorrow,” MacQueen said.

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The idea of major film restoration began dawning on entertainment executives after Ted Turner bought the MGM library in 1986, UCLA’s Rosen says. The reappearance of the vintage films, without the scratches and splotches that used to characterize old movies on television, helped revive interest in cinematic classics. Soaring video sales for classics such as “Gone With the Wind” made executives realize an opportunity.

Since then, and especially as home video markets have grown, interest has been accelerating, executives, academics and preservationists say. These days, an academic symposium on film preservation can draw the likes of Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood to UCLA.

One studio executive put the value of his film library on equal footing with the buildings on the lot.

Studios did not realize for many years that nitrate film--the standard until the 1950s--decays when exposed to high temperatures. Of the 21,000 Hollywood-produced shorts printed on that stock, half have been lost, experts say, including 90% of all silent films.

Newer film stocks, with an acetate base, fared somewhat better, but can decay as well if not stored properly. Conservationists hope for better results in the future with new, tougher polyester-based film stock.

Technology has been good for nostalgia, as studio executives have been forced to return to original prints to make duplicates that stand up to a modern audience’s insistence on precision in image and clarity in sound.

Take as an example the work of Williamson, the film conservation manager at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

After examining “Waterfront,” Williamson raised Brando’s voice to the proper level by re-balancing the music and the dialogue from the film’s original magnetic master so that a scream came out sounding like a scream.

“We’re in the Information Age now,” he said. “Laboratory work has improved enormously. There really is no excuse for massive losses of quality.”

Some films are not that old, but feature special effects that can be perfected with better film stock and printing techniques. Some films now undergoing restoration are “Taxi Driver” and “Star Wars.”

Burbank film company YCM Laboratories, which is working on the “Star Wars” restoration, said audiences of the 1990s are tougher than those of 20 years ago.

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Pete Comandini of YCM said he wants to make certain Luke Skywalker’s space vehicle shows no sign of wear. “Our younger movie audiences have just come off ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Waterworld,’ ” Comandini said, noting the advanced special effects of the later films. Comandini, who worked on restoring “Gone With the Wind,” for Ted Turner, said he and competitors, like Burbank’s Cinetech, don’t often feel at odds in the specialized niche of film restoration. “There’s more work than there are people to do the work,” Comandini said.

The work is also expensive. Rosen guesses that if the 100 million feet of film sitting in UCLA’s archives were to be preserved for $1 a foot, that would match the budget of two present-day medium-budget movies.

UCLA recently estimated it has 400 feature films, 5,000 hours of newsreels and 300 videotaped television titles that are in urgent need of preservation.

Like bankers working on a security combination, executives gleefully launch into descriptions of climate-controlled vaults. They know details of recent research indicating that film stored at 35 degrees will remain intact for 100 years.

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Disney, like other studios, scatters copies at various sites around the country, in case of fire, earthquake or other calamity. It keeps copies of films in the same Pennsylvania vault used by the federal government to store documents.

Sony has films stored around the nation, including one vault in Kansas that is 400 feet underground and features an elevator that goes to the bottom only once a day, said Bill Humphrey, the senior vice president of operations and corporate administration at Sony.

“[The library] is something we’re trying to preserve as part of our heritage as well as something that is part of our business,” Humphrey said.

Studios are also sitting down with archivists at UCLA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., and the Library of Congress to form public-private partnerships.

“One of the things that’s clear is that all kinds of materials that people have discounted in the past have value,” Rosen said. “It’s penny-wise and pound-foolish to let it deteriorate.”