Stopping films’ big fade

Film preservationists are the modern-day equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe -- celluloid sleuths who span the globe to find the best possible elements to preserve and restore our movie heritage. But they just aren’t shamuses; preservationists also have to be technical wizards and film historians. And if they do their job correctly, audiences won’t even be able to see their painstaking work in the finished product.

“I think it’s important that when you are looking at a preserved film that everything that went into preservation and restoration is absolutely invisible,” says Michael Pogorzelski, director of the archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. “It’s kind of ironic that if you do your job well in restoring the film there is absolutely no sign you are there at all.”

These unsung heroes of cinema, though, will get a chance to showcase and discuss their work in UCLA Film and Television Archive’s new festival, “Out of the Past: Film Restoration Today,” which begins today at the James Bridges Theatre on the Westwood campus. The festival features restored newsreel footage, feature films and documentaries, and highlights the work of such archives as UCLA, the motion picture academy and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with L’Immagine Ritrovata, a film laboratory in Bologna, Italy, specializing in film restoration, and Sony Pictures.

“The festival,” says Pogorzelski, “is a great opportunity. It provides a context where you can step back from the film and talk about the preservation process.”

“Out of the Past,” which continues through March 6, is the brainchild of Steve Ricci, professor of the Moving Image Archive Studies at UCLA and curator of this event. UCLA’s annual film preservation festival, says Ricci, “is limited to films preserved by the film and television archive.” This festival, he says, give other archives a chance to show their recent work. He also thought the event would “create a kind of debate around the different approaches to restoration .... I thought it was a good idea to combine the interest in restoration theory and show the films that have been restored and have the restorationist there so they can explain how they made the decision.”

Most individuals, says Ricci, still believe film restoration is about saving silent films from turning into dust. “But films made a dozen years ago quite often need help because the color has faded and there have been cuts in various edition of the film.

“There are also a series of critical issues that I think really need to be talked about. There are different and valid approaches to film restoration. I think we need to demand that restorationists are explicit about what they are trying to achieve.”

On Jan. 23, Pogorzelski is showcasing the academy archive’s restoration of Peter Davis’ 1974 Oscar-winning documentary, “Hearts and Minds.” Pogorzelski explains that documentaries and other independent films are particularly vulnerable to film deterioration.

“The cracks that independent films can fall into are much more numerous than they are for studio films,” he says. “At least a studio or any kind of company that has been around for five or 10 years there is usually a system -- one person if not a group of people whose job it is to keep track of material over the years. With independent films everyone kind of comes together for the production of the film but when it’s released, they go on to other things. There isn’t anyone minding the store.”

Which is what happened with “Hearts and Minds.” Five years ago, the academy archive went looking for a print to screen at a documentary series but there weren’t any 16-millimeter or 35-millimeter prints that still had color. “All the original release prints form 1974 were faded,” he says. And no one they contacted, not even director Davis, knew where the original materials were. After about six months of searching, they tracked the original materials back to Consolidated Film Industries Hollywood. “Warner Bros. distributed the film in 1974 in 35-millimeter and they had made a blown-up negative from 16-millimeter originals to make those release prints. The material had been shipped to Consolidated to make that blow up and then abandoned there.”

Thankfully, the 35-millimeter negative was in better shape than any of the other prints they had uncovered. “There wasn’t as much color fading,” says Pogorzelski. “There were a couple of shots that were damaged and torn and we had to replace that from the 16-millimeter material.”

The original sound mix, though, was deteriorating and the archive restored it digitally just in the nick of time. “Another unfortunate part of doing documentaries and independent t films is that they are always skimping on the budget,” says Pogorzelski. “Usually at the end of the film process if they have burned all their money trying to shoot as much stuff as they could, by the time you get to the final sound mix, they are really pushing pennies.”

Even though “The Times of Harvey Milk,” the award-winning documentary on San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor was made only 19 years ago, the film, which screens Feb. 27, was in the throes of disrepair.

“With ‘Harvey Milk’ we did a lot of legwork, says Ross Lipman, film preservationist at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Lipman, who specializes in documentary and independent films, says he has rescued movies from extension from labs, filmmakers’ garages and distributors that are about to go out of business.

In the case of “Harvey Milk,” the original magnetic soundtrack was suffering from something he calls “sticky-shed.” The soundtrack gets “sticky and the iron oxide particles -- that is where all the sound information is stored -- falls off.”

When it came time to restore the 1959 Tennessee Williams drama, “Suddenly, Last Summer” (with Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift), Grover Crisp, vice president of asset management & film restoration at Sony Pictures Entertainment, found himself in a quandary when two different prints were found in the vault. The restored version screens Jan. 30.

“We had the original negative,” says Crisp. “There was one whole reel that was missing since the early ‘60s for whatever reason. In 1965, there was a replacement duplicate negative made for one whole reel as well as other duplicate negatives cut into certain parts of the original negative, I am sure to replace damage. This studio, like most studios, used their original negatives as their printing negatives unfortunately.”

They printed the negative and discovered “there were literally six places throughout the film in three different reels where there appeared to be little jump cuts. In some cases it appeared to be jarring and in other cases, it was very slight. But the [sound] track was in sync with it, so the assumption was that the cuts were a post-production decision.”

But in the case of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” Crisp also found another negative in the vaults -- a fine grain negative that wasn’t used for printing -- that was made prior to the cuts. “Fortunately, the fine grain was made with a soundtrack on it so we were able to compare the two versions to see literally what the differences were.” The film was controversial when it was released because it dealt with murder, cannibalism, homosexuality and insanity. .

“We realized what had been cut or censored were things that would have been even more controversial. In some cases the cuts were crucial to the understanding of the story and in two instances the picture had been edited to camouflage the fact that they had cut dialogue.”

So Crisp didn’t know ethically if he should restore the film in the uncut version or the release version.

The files at Sony and at the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library had no information on the film’s cuts. And director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was dead. So Crisp contacted the director’s son, writer-director Tom Mankiewicz, who told the preservationist that his father always believed the script was the Holy Grail. “He said if his father shot it, it was supposed to be there,” says Crisp.

With this ethical question answered, Crisp restored the film with the six scenes -- approximately one minute of footage -- edited back into the film. So now, more than 40 years after its release, audiences can see the film as Mankiewicz originally intended.