Picking up the pieces of the long-lost ‘Liza’

FRIENDS don’t let friends forget their Emmy Award-winning musical variety specials.

Six years ago, as Liza Minnelli’s copyright to her 1972 Bob Fosse-directed “Liza With a Z” was about to expire, her good friend, film preservationist Michael Arick, gave her a nudge. “He said, ‘You might want to take a peek at it,’ ” Minnelli said. “My lawyer at that time was smart enough to say, ‘She owns the whole thing,’ ” recalled the 60-year-old Minnelli. “But I forgot about it.”

Good thing Arick didn’t. On Saturday, the restored, remastered one-woman concert -- which hasn’t been seen on television in more than 30 years -- will be unveiled on Showtime, with the DVD release the following Tuesday.

It took a herculean effort, though, to return “Liza” to its former glory. One big problem was that the original negative was missing.

“What had happened was that occasionally the people who worked on the show would say, ‘I’d like a print of that,’ and then get it out [of the vault],” Arick said. “In one of those situations, the negative went missing. A lot of the New York labs went under [in the 1980s], and the materials were shuffled around.”

Arick and Minnelli agreed to partner on the restoration of the special, which features Minnelli looking fabulous in Halston and dancing and singing at the peak of her powers in a variety of genres, including the music from her Oscar-winning “Cabaret” and even the rocking “Son of a Preacher Man.”

So Arick played Sherlock Holmes and set out to find the missing negative. “It took me three months,” he said. “Liza With a Z” -- filmed with eight cameras in front of an audience on May 31, 1972, at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway -- had been scattered among labs in Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey, Arick said.

Though the color stock was stable, the fragile 16mm negative was terribly damaged. “It was horrifying,” said Minnelli.

A lab in L.A. stabilized the negative. “Part of the problem with 16mm shows is that when you hit a splice or a jump, the picture tends to jump,” Arick said. “Now it is rock solid and steady. Then we were able to clean up most of the dirt that had been ground into the negative over the years in the lab.”

Arick then gave the special a final polish digitally. “There was one particularly bad full-frame tear that I was able to fix well,” he said.

Thankfully, Minnelli did have original sound rolls of the special in storage in Los Angeles.

“I was able to go back and remix it for 5.1 [stereo] from the original recordings that Phil Ramone made that night,” said Arick.

“It was 16mm mono, which was pretty low fidelity. But he recorded it in a multitrack format. I was able to break it down and rebuild it without having to do any kind of fake stereo.”

Minnelli couldn’t be happier with the result.

“This is Fosse’s best stage work,” said Minnelli. “It’s his best film work. It’s a lost Fosse masterpiece.”