Restored to Splendor, Films Get a New Re-Lease on Life

When Grover Crisp set out recently to restore the classic 1969 film “Easy Rider,” he got bad news. Two reels of the original negative were lost. The remaining reels contained scratches that could not be corrected by traditional chemical methods. So Crisp, chucking convention much like the main characters in the film he was restoring, headed in a new direction.

A team at Sony Pictures, where Crisp is vice president of film restoration, converted backup negatives into digital format. Then graphic artists used a software painting program to fix the damage. The repaired digital version was then scanned back to film, producing a restored print shimmering with visual clarity and luminous colors. In a particularly striking scene early in the film, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda are seen riding through a picturesque canyon and then silhouetted against a gorgeous darkening sky of rich purples and reds.

Viewing the results in a screening room recently on the Sony lot in Culver City, Crisp noted: “Digitally, you can do just about everything you want. We are right on the edge of a lot of good work that can be done with film restoration.”

Crisp’s spruced-up version of “Easy Rider” will be screened in a UCLA Film and Television Archive series called “Out of the Past: Film Restoration Today.” The series presents newly restored films every Wednesday evening through June 2, including the North American premiere on May 26 of “The Cook,” a 1918 short film starring Buster Keaton and directed by Fatty Arbuckle. After each screening, the preservationist who resurrected the film will discuss the project.

Among the films being screened are “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919), on Wednesday, and “Don Q, Son of Zorro” (1925), on May 12.

Money to Be Made in Oldies

Breakthrough techniques are revolutionizing the way blemished vintage movies are being nursed back to pristine viewing condition. These new methods have arrived during a period of rising demand for restoration work. That’s mostly because studios have discovered that there’s money to be made by cleaning up old movies from their vaults and then offering these spiffed-up versions for cable, home video and theatrical release. Recently polished works include “Gone With the Wind,” “Vertigo” and “The Wizard of Oz.”

While the recent surge in movie restorations is a welcome sign to film historians, it’s also generated controversy. Advanced techniques raise the question of whether the preserved work faithfully restores the original version or creates something new entirely. George Lucas, for example, used computer techniques to replace stationary creatures with ones that moved in the restored version of his “Star Wars” epic, released in 1997.

Other restorations have added stereo sound to films originally released in mono format. When “Lawrence of Arabia” was restored in 1989, the new version included 10 minutes of dialogue re-recorded by the original cast. Their voices were filtered to hide the fact that the actors had aged since the film was first shot.

Michael Friend, archive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, worries that some preservationists have gone too far, adding elements to restored versions that were not in the original release. “One of the problems is that a lot of preservationists are Hitchcock wannabes,” says Friend. “I’m against heroic preservation. Our job is not to inject creativity. It’s to protect and preserve the original achievement so that a film looks the way it looked when it was originally released.”

In the early part of the century, studios basically disregarded preservation, believing that there was no economic value in a film’s master negative once prints were shipped out to be screened in theaters. It’s estimated that as much as 90% of all films from the silent era have been lost, many deteriorating into brown dust because of improper storage and neglect. As the Turner documentary points out, sometimes these early films were willfully destroyed, either to recover their silver nitrate content or to supply stock footage for later features.

In addition to natural causes, original film versions were corrupted by human hands. Censors often cut films before their public release, generating incomplete versions of circulating prints, which are sometimes the only surviving copies of a film. Jan-Christopher Horak’s restoration of the German film “The Joyless Street” was hampered because existing prints found in several countries were severely sliced up by censors. Most were missing up to an hour of footage from the original three-hour-plus version.

“None of the versions were the same. You could hardly recognize the film sometimes,” says Horak, director of archives and collections at Universal Studios. The original version of the movie followed 12 characters affected by economic turmoil in Vienna during the 1920s. But the American version features only two main characters, including one played by Greta Garbo.

Horak was able to reconstruct the film by using the available prints and looking through censor records, shooting scripts and other documents. It wasn’t easy. Censors often just spliced in any footage they could find to cover gaps created when they removed offending material.

It All Comes Together for Professor

The reconstructed version of the film has allowed viewers familiar with earlier versions to see it in a new light. A film instructor who saw the restored version told Horak: “I’ve been teaching this film for 20 years and I could never make sense of it. Finally, all the characters and subplots come together.”

Equipment costs alone for Horak’s restoration project, funded by the Munich Film Museum, were around $50,000, he says. Other restorations can run as high as $300,000 and take several months to complete. Crisp’s restoration work on “Easy Rider” required the digital manipulation of more than 80,000 frames of film.

It took more than two years for Michael Friend to restore “In the Heat of the Night,” which will be shown at UCLA on May 5. Norman Jewison’s 1967 tale of Southern racism and murder won five Oscars, including best picture.

Friend restored the movie using photographic and digital techniques to clean up damage, including a scratch on the negative that marred the scene containing Sidney Poitier’s memorable retort: “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”

“What I want as a preservationist is to be completely and wholly invisible,” he says. “Hopefully, they will notice nothing except that this is quite a terrific movie. If I’m lucky, it will be as good as it was.”

*

* “Out of the Past: Film Restoration Today” offers screenings at 7:30 p.m. every Wednesday through June 2 at the James Bridges Theater, on the northeast corner of the UCLA campus. Tickets are sold one hour before show time and cost $6 for general admission and $4 for students and seniors. Parking is available in Lot 3 for $5. For more information visit the Web site at https://www.cinema.ucla.edu or call (310) 206-3456.