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DVD Savant’s esteemed Field Correspondent Gary Teetzel reports from the A.M.I.A.’s The Reel Thing. The second day is underway now but we have the rundown on Friday’s program:

Friday’s lineup of presentations at The Reel Thing were:

1)
Recovering Early Optical Sound: Joseph Tykociner’s 1922 Composite Sound-on-Film System: The title sort of says it all–this was an early attempt to create optical sound, with a test demo. It was a form of variable density, and was recorded live to the film. It took up about a quarter of the area of the frame, forcing the image to be vertical. The audio we heard was fairly crude, and the poor quality of the elements didn’t help, but you have to give Tykociner credit for coming up with the system at such an early date.

2)
The Digital Post-It: Cataloguing Unstructured Metadata for Preservation in Distributed Databases Using Open Standards: Don’t even ask me to try to explain this one.

3)
Restoring The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez: The Result of a Long Partnership Between an Archive and a Festival: This discussed the work that the Academy did for years in association with the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. They restored several titles from different Latin American countries, and even a rediscovered 1935 Spanish-language film made by 20th Century Fox, Asegure a su mujer. (Antonio Moreno from Creature from the Black Lagoon was one of the stars.) The festival ended a few years ago, but inspired by those past projects the Academy has restored The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. The original neg existed, only as un-conformed Super 16mm. Edward James Olmos had a 35mm blow-up print, but it was in bad shape. A rights holder had an interpositive, but refused to grant access. So the Academy scanned all sixteen hours of original neg and used Olmos’ print as a guide to put it back together in the digital realm.

4)
Artificial Intelligence for Automatically Repairing Vertical Scratches. Another one where I could not hope to explain the science, but the demos they showed were impressive — perfect restorations of shots with running vertical scratches from Don’t Go In the Basement * and others. Most impressive was a 1907 short, Laughing Gas. Like most films from that era the source element was covered with countless light scratches; Algosoft got rid of all of them, making the film look incredibly pristine, like nothing you’ve seen from that period. It looked someone had gone back in time and grabbed a brand-new print from the lab, then traveled back to 2017. In fairness, a couple people in the audience noted that grain had been de-grained and then re-grained, and argued that all this work altered the character of the film.

* . . . because there’s a restroom down the hall.

5)
HDR Video Mastering for Classic Cinema. This was mostly a rep from Sony showing clips from different decades of films they have transferred in HDR: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ghostbusters and The Fifth Element. I was most impressed by CE3K. They showed the scene where Dreyfuss first encounters a UFO while in his truck. The added brightness that HDR gave to the flashlight, the headlights and, most importantly, the UFO made the scene really vivid; you could believe that half of Dreyfus’ face could turn red from the intensity of the light! The presentation prompted some healthy debate. A cinematographer in the audience had recently viewed a movie he had shot. Many of the aspects of HDR impressed him, especially color, shadow detail, etc. However, in close-ups and medium shots he felt that highlights on the actors sometimes looked unnaturally bright, and he worked with the colorist to try to tone it down and make it less (to him) distracting. He pointed out that he also felt the highlights on William Holden in the Kwai clip (Guinness and his men first arriving at the camp) looked excessively bright. With regards to CE3K he (or was it another audience member?) voiced serious doubts that Vilmos Zsigmond — a guy known to flash the negative to reduce contrast — would have approved. (Grover Crisp said that Spielberg had approved the HDR master.) The Sony rep emphasized that they get talent involved whenever possible to make sure they approve the HDR master.

By the way, since I’ve done such a lousy job of describing HDR in the past, here’s a better description from the presentation’s abstract:

6)
The Troop, Redux: An ACES Reformatting and Archiving Case Study Project: This discussed the restoration of a short film by the Academy to help develop its ACES system (Academy Color Encoding System), which aims to help maintain color consistency across a variety of formats — HDR, HD, SD, etc. — and work on long-term archiving solutions for digital content.

7)
The Sorrowful Spinning Saga of RCA’s SelectaVision CED Videodisc: A fascinating and funny look at the story behind RCA’s infamous SelectaVision Videodisc system, which spanned some 17 years. Studies to test the feasibility of discs with both picture and sound went back even further. There were some interesting bits about other technology along the way, like one offered in the ‘sixties in the Niemen Marcus catalog that consisted of a console TV with video tape recorder (reel-to-reel, of course) off to the side, plus a video camera. Cost? $30,000. There was also mention of the first consumer home tape system from the early ‘seventies (which I had never heard of) called Cartrivision. Here’s an article on it: How Cartrivision’s 1972 VCR Foresaw–And Forfeited–The Time-Shifted Future by Ross Rubin.

8)
Analyzing Image Bit Depth in Digital Archive Deliverables: See my description of #2.

9)
Finally, YCM Labs showed clips from a restoration they are working on, a 1924 Marion Davies film called Lights of Old Broadway. The film is unusual in that it mixes a variety of film stocks and techniques: black & white, tinted scenes, 2-strip Technicolor scenes and one scene with Handschiegel color. –Gary

Thank you Gary, and I wish I could be there tonight for the restored premiere of Hawks’ Scarface, Shame of a Nation. —

I’d also like to point out a really important note from Michael Schlesinger about the truth behind the withdrawal from distribution of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. The idea that Frank Sinatra pulled the movie over issues with the assassination of President Kennedy has been debunked for some time now, but Michael was in charge of the film’s re-premiere in 1988 and has the straight dope on the subject. It’s in a comment at the bottom of an article on The Manchurian Candidate at Joe Baltake’s The Passionate Moviegoer, from August 21.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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Altair Four’s eclipse was good, but there’s nothing like witnessing the real thing. Yes, Monday’s solar eclipse was fun to watch — a glimpse of the sun’s orb was partly blocked here in Los Angeles, and we saw a lot of viewers become either elated or disappointed in the various network coverage. The experience of darkness at noon is pretty strange; I remember an overcast feel for some eclipse witnessed in my past, but never real darkness such as we saw on TV.

My joke is that, if some uncomprehending person got the time confused and ran out to see the eclipse at 11:30 last night, they might say, “Wow, it really IS an eclipse — it’s pitch black out here.” That’s a spin on the old joke about alien invaders: How did they get through the Solar System without being detected? — They snuck in after darkness.

Every picture tells a story. A colleague of my wife ran out to get some eclipse glasses yesterday, and bought an extra pair ‘just in case.’ They proved to be useful, as demonstrated by the family dog, Riley. I think Riley has the appropriate attitude for a special day.

Reviews coming next: ClassicFlix’s The Noose Hangs High with Abbott and Costello, Twilight Time’s Kid Galahad with Elvis, directed by Phil Karlson; and Kelly Reichart’s Certain Women from Criterion. Langushing on Charlie Largent’s to-review plate are Visit to a Small Planet, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, La Poison, They Shoot Horses Don’t They and Suddenly, Last Summer

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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I haven’t seen a lot of discussion on the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly disc I reviewed a week back, but I was pleased to read this The Edit Room Floor article on various versions of the film. It jibes closely with my own memories of what happened with the versions at MGM, and also agrees with my assessment on the film’s color. I have heard from a couple of European contacts that, in their opinion old IB Tech prints from Italy were a little more yellow — but that they were nothing like the 2014 Fox disc, with its green skies.

A couple of nice items from This Isn’t Happiness, a challenging image & ideas page I’ve been looking at almost daily for at least 13 years now. This item “Oh Boy” is a quote from an old ABC News broadcast, about the impending solar eclipse, but also about a future that happens to be our present.

The second This Isn’t Happiness item is Harry Frankfurt’s Bull****, a frank and concise appreciation of the difference between fact and baloney in modern discourse. Whups — those were two non-film related links, even though the second uses some prime film clips to make its case. My quota for the summer is now filled.

Is it true what correspondent Andrew LeBlanc tells me, that a particular Warner disc of King Kong Skull Island is now hitting astronomical prices online? The disc in question, says Andrew, is a Best Buy Exclusive, containing a 4K + 3-D + Blu-ray + Digital. Mine doesn’t have the 4K, so I guess I’m out of luck for the Big Payday.

And collectors have found out that Kino’s expected Blu-ray of William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (due October 24) won’t be overloaded with extras, but will be favored with a new commentary from Troy Howarth. I’m hoping Troy supplies more insights into the film’s twisted, convoluted production and release history: I’ve been following it ever since reading an article in one of the very first Cinefantastique magazines. Actually, if Kino delivers a high-quality transfer and audio track, that will be more than enough to rock my jolly meter: The Wind Blows — The Sea Flows — No — bo — dy knows.

Over at the new page Current Thinking on the Western, Italo-western connoisseur Tom Betts has a new article up detailing the history of his ‘zine Westerns… All’Italiana!, from its origins in 1983, when typing and photocopying pages gave way to primitive first-generation home computers. Mr. Betts was an inexhaustible and generous resource for the documentary featurettes we cut on the Sergio Leone movies fifteen years ago, but I was only tangentially aware of the scope of his network of Italo western fandom. Tom’s terrific 21st century online ‘zine iteration, the Westerns… All’Italiana! webpage, goes into incredible detail on the genre and its colorful stars and filmmakers.

And Gary Teetzel closes out the column with a link to a new trailer for a thing called Godzilla: Monster Planet. You’re on your own, brave Kaiju fans…

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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The Cohen Collection’s new Blu-ray of the long-missed The Old Dark House now has a street date, October 24. Gary Teetzel found the blurb on a Barnes and Noble page. I’m already thinking about a nice po-ta-to. They dropped the video promo from YouTube, the one that made the famous James Whale horror show look better than new.

And just in: Kino has announced that its new Avanti! disc will have new interviews with actors Juliet Mills and Clive Revill!

Here’s one for the ‘it isn’t always me’ department. Craig Reardon pointed out that in the review of Duel in the Sun, I had written ‘Joseph Cotton’ numerous times instead of ‘Joseph Cotten.’ It’s one of the various spell-check programs that changes what I write as I write it, ‘correcting’ me. So just remember when you read my error-ridden texts, I’m not (quite) as incompetent as I seem. Or, now that I’ve established plausible deniability, I can behave as if I never make mistakes. Win-win.

Civic wisdom and political sanity are in short supply these days, so here’s a genuine boost for your morale. Joe Dante is circulating this link to the short subject Don’t Be a Sucker!, which Joe reports was at one time edited into his epochal comedy marathon The Movie Orgy. Done in the earnest style of an educational picture, it’s an anti-fascist film, a scary, patriotic 17 minutes with excellent work from Paul Lukas, Felix Bressart, Kurt Kreuger, Richard Lane, George E. Stone, Ivan Triesault and everyone’s favorite Nazi swine impersonator, Martin Kosleck (right). As a news report on the nature of Fascist slime, it’s highly pertinent today, and who better to teach us basic American values than our favorite character actors from the 1940s?

Produced by the Army, the short subject is dated 1947, but some of its content indicates that it is a slight revision of the 1943 original listed in the IMDB.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson