American Cinematographer - May 2000 - 102

Jndelible

Compressions

DVD

technology is driving efforts to restore

and preserve

classic films.

by Bob Fisher

bother with this

never

safeguard.

Archivists say a better solution is to
make yellow, cyan and magenta

(YCM) black-and-white separations,
using the original negative as a
master.

Each of these black-and-

white films contains

a

record of the

density of the three primary colors. If
they are put together on a contact
printer, one can make a faithful
duplicate negative. Beverly Wood,
vice president of technical services
and

client

relations

for

Deluxe

Laboratories, estimates that it costs
$40,000-$50,000 to make black-andwhite

separations for a feature-length
(depending on its length). That's

film

less than Vio of

percent of the
budget for a studio film.
The good news is that the
surging DVD home market and the
anticipated demand for HDTV
content are driving a renaissance in
film restoration, according to Rami
Mina, vice president and general
manager of the Technicolor Film
Restoration
Company in Los
Angeles. The bad news is that if cine¬
matographers aren't involved in the
one

average

n

1913,

legendary

Sarah Bernhardt

stage actress
accosted

by
I a
newspaper
critic, who
demanded to know why she was
■ wasting
her valuable time
performing in films. Bernhardt
replied that she made movies for
posterity. If she only knew.
According to Michael Friend,
archivist for the Academy of Motion
was

Picture Arts and Sciences, at least half
of the films made in the United States

during the industry's first 50 years
are probably
irrevocably lost. One of
the

reasons

1950s, all
was

96

May 2000

motion-picture emulsion
on a
highly flammable
base. Films occasionally

coated

nitrate

for this is that until the

caught fire, but much more often, the
gradually dissolved into a
jelly-like mass. (Kodak scientists
invented a safety base during the
1920s, but it took the industry about
30 years to accept it.)
Color negative film came into
vogue during the 1950s, and by the
nitrate base

1970s, Martin Scorsese and other
filmmakers were sounding the

alarm, pointing out that dyes in color

negatives, intermediate and print
were
fading and thus destroy¬
ing the heritage they were creating.
Color film will resist fading for as
long as 100 years if it is properly
stored in a cool, dry environment,
but many content owners simply
films

restoration process, new
are

audiences

likely to experience those
the way they were meant to be

not

films
seen.

Technicolor
on

recently worked

the restoration of Oh, God!,

a

1977

comedy directed by Carl Reiner
and photographed by ASC President
Victor J. Kemper. The film stars John
Denver as an assistant manager of a
grocery store who has an encounter
with God (played by George Burns).
One key scene, in which Denver's
character

meets

God for the first

Enteraim.

ABnocchauofrtreysy

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