Hello!

It’s our last column before the New Year … are we ready for 2026, a year that to me seems far, far in the Future?  Well, who is ready for anything any more?  The best of luck for everyone, is what we’re hoping for.

We start with a happy report about a 70mm revival. We have friends who work for companies that take care of studio film libraries, and oversee remasters and sometimes restorations. It’s not something that I write about because I don’t want to ask too many questions — everything they’re doing is proprietary information, which we all know is sacred.

Well in this instance I’m free to call out a friend who has worked hard and long on restorations of some pretty important pictures.

An article at Variety covers the restoration — in 70mm — of the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. It’ll be screened at the Academy Museum a few weeks from now in January, introduced by both George Stevens Jr. and Guillermo Del Toro.

The special news is that Variety reporters Jazz Tangcay, Payton Turkeltaub and Giana Levy call out Amazon MGM as the initiator of the restoration, which included an 8K scan of the original 65mm Ultra Panavision negative. They name the people behind the project — work that too often remains anonymous: Schawn Belston, Scott Grossman and Darren Gross.

I met Darren 28 years ago and have watched his career with interest. The only previous opportunity to call out one of his achievements was when he found and remastered an important group of outtakes for  Blue Velvet.  David Lynch was all but ecstatic — he’d been looking for them for decades. The article carries more information about the 70mm screening.

The generous web researcher Michael McQuarrie has found yet another page that pegs our juvenile interests — a site by a UK graphic designer who has an incredible volume of 007 paraphernalia on display. I couldn’t find his name on the page.

Michael wanted me to see the Record Album vault — it was practically my whole album collection in 1967. The page has giant photo files of toys, games, cars, model kits, figurines and guns; other galleries give us trading cards, badges and stickers, plus publicity promos, banners, standees and displays.

Yet more pages give us an impressive set of photos of the graphic designer visiting Bond 007 locations. The basic front page:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson