George Stevens Jr. and His ‘Giant’ Undertaking

George Stevens Jr. vividly remembers the Academy Awards ceremony in 1952 when his father won the best director Oscar for his classic “A Place in the Sun.”

“My father drove the car and my mother and grandmother were in the back seat,” recalls Stevens, founding director of the American Film Institute and a filmmaker in his own right.

“Coming home, there was an Oscar on the seat between us,” he says. “I was 17 years old and pretty excited. I remember my father looking over and smiling at me and saying, ‘We will have a better idea what kind of film this is in about 25 years.’ [His words] got into my synapses or genes or something. He always had this idea for a film to be the kind of film he wanted to make, he wanted it to be something that would live.”

Thankfully, the majority of Stevens’ films--”A Place in the Sun,” “Alice Adams,” “Swing Time,” “Gunga Din,” “Penny Serenade,” “The More the Merrier,” “The Talk of the Town,” “Shane,” “Giant” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”--have lived long past 25 years.

And since Stevens’ death in 1975, his son has diligently kept alive his memory and films. He’s received acclaim for two documentaries he’s written, produced and directed about his dad: “George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey” and “George Stevens: D-day to Berlin.”

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The past year, Stevens’ main focus has been the restoration of his father’s 1956 epic “Giant,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean, in his last screen appearance.

Stevens was thrilled when he received an enthusiastic reception from Robert Daly when he approached the Warner Bros. chairman about re-releasing “Giant” for its 40th anniversary.

Warner Bros. is celebrating the re-release in a major way. After a premiere in Dallas on Friday, the studio will reissue the 201-minute epic on Sept. 27 in New York, Toronto and Los Angeles, where it will open at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Warner Home Video will release the spruced-up version on tape and laser disc later this year.

Based on Edna Ferber’s 1952 bestseller, “Giant” follows the lives of three generations of a wealthy Texas ranching family and the outsider whose obsession with greed leads to his downfall. Besides being a big, juicy, sweeping tale, “Giant” also offers a social commentary on racial and ethnic discrimination.

Released a year after Dean’s death, “Giant” was the studio’s top-grossing film until 1978’s “Superman,” and was nominated for 10 Oscars. Stevens won for best director.

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“Giant” is the first restoration project for Technicolor, which is making prints by utilizing a prototype of its revitalized dye transfer process. The last film to use dye transfer was 1974’s “The Godfather, Part II.”

Warner Holllywood Studios also used digital technology to restore the soundtrack (the original separated magnetic tracks were lost). Stevens, who worked with his father on the film, has been supervising the new soundtrack, which was created by using a soundtrack in which the dialogue and music effects have been combined.

One recent morning, he was in a screening room at Technicolor with the company’s president, Ron Jarvis, comparing a regular print and a dye transfer print of “Giant.” The difference between the two is remarkable. Whereas the regular print is faded and blurry, the dye transfer print is vibrant, rich, colorful and in focus.

The original negative, Jarvis says, was not in great shape because Warners had made more than 300 prints off the original negative in 1956.

“So we had an original negative that has been somewhat used,” Jarvis says. “We had to take the negative and in some cases reprocess the negative to get rid of some of the debris and the stains of the ages.”

The color also had faded. “The saving grace is the fact that what we were able to do for George and Warner Bros. is provide a dye transfer print which compensates for the ills of the negative,” Jarvis says. “It compensates a lot for the fade. What we have been able to do with this process is put back a lot of the color that has been lost. The sharpness is unbelievable. It has made the picture in focus.”

Plus, the new prints won’t fade. “If they are stored anywhere close to what they reasonably should be,” he adds, “they should last forever.”

“Bob Daly has built a cold storage facility at Warners, and when we finish this, it will go into the cold storage,” Stevens says. “So we have done work not only for this year, but for the future of this film.”

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“Giant” holds special memories for Stevens. He had just graduated from college when his father made the deal with Warner Bros. to do “Giant” as an independent production.

“I was supposed to go in the Air Force and the Korean War ended, so my commission was postponed for a year,” he recalls. “So I spent that year working with my father. Then I went into the Air Force for two years.”

Stevens got out of the service “just in time to work on the sound and the completion of the picture. My father spent three years on ‘Giant’ and took no salary. But in exchange for that, he had total control and made the picture he wanted to make.”

Stevens has now contacted every studio for which his father worked with regard to restoring his films. “Each one has written back and said they would cooperate. Over the next years, I will spend some time on each of them.”

Stevens discovered the desperate state of “A Place in the Sun” two years ago while attending a conference on film preservation in Washington, D.C.

“Somebody told me that they heard that Paramount had lost the negative,” he says. “I didn’t want to believe that and then I got into it. It turns out that Paramount along the way lost the negative. It was just heartbreaking.”

After informing Paramount Chairman Sherry Lansing about the missing negative, Stevens has been working with the studio on making the “best possible new negative and prints” of the drama, which starred Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters.

Stevens says people always ask him the most important thing he learned from his father. “It’s always come back to me--the respect for the audience,” Stevens says. “I think there is a lot of respect for the audience in ‘Giant.’ With ‘Shane,’ people were saying to him, ‘You made this obviously as a mythic western’--kind of suggesting that he made it for educated people. He said, ‘I made “Shane” for a truck driver in Kansas. Somebody who can’t articulate all of his feelings. But someone with a mind and a heart who can respond in the dark.’ ”

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“Giant” will have a special screening Sept. 24 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Members of the cast and crew are expected to be in attendance. $6; $4 for Academy members. Information: (310) 247-3600. “Giant’ opens Sept. 27 at the Cinerama Dome, 6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 466-3401.