CineSavant Column
Hello!
The response to last Saturday’s Sinbad review was positive … the disc is due very soon, so I’d like to hear reactions to it. I’ve personally stayed away from Sinbad for a number of years. When re-watching films that are just too familiar, I tend to free-associate and find myself mentally somewhere else. But this time, it was like watching it anew.
For those in Southern California, and especially Orange County, the new restoration of 7th Voyage is going to be screened at the Frida Cinema, on July 25. It’s an extension of the ‘George Pal’ screenings organized by promoter Arnold Leibovit. Full details are at The Frida Cinema Page. I’d like to hear from any correspondents that attend … to find out how the experience went!
… And … the always-surprising Michael McQuarrie forwarded a link to something I haven’t seen in a long time … a digital copy of the entire 1957 7th Voyage shooting script, by Kenneth Kolb.
It follows the movie fairly closely, most of the time. It’s a good filmmaking / editorial exercise to read along with the movie, noting when dialogue speeches have been dropped or shortened. Did they red-pencil the script on the set, paring down various speeches … or is there editorial evidence (cutaways, truncated lines) suggesting that cuts were made in post production? Also, it’s amusing to see where a fancy effects setup in the script has been replaced with whatever stock shot was available.
A nice touch in the digitized script are pages with thumbnail storyboards … I assume they were put there by Harryhausen, not director Juran.
And we were sent another very good link by Mr. McQuarrie, that coincidentally connects to Ray Harryhausen as well.
It’s a documentary that either has had its titles cut off or is part of a larger film, about the rise and fall of London’s film laboratories, starting in the postwar period. It’s a bit dry and it rambles, but the information looks accurate and the examples it gives are very good — plus the photos and descriptions of lab work are a rare record of the ‘lost art’ of photochemical miracles.
The piece doesn’t have many film clips, but the ones that pop up in the special lab effects section (about 11 minutes in) are 7th Voyage and, because of its excellent traveling mattes, Konga.
‘Lost Art’ is accurate; I’m happy that, at the end of working on Star Trek The Motion Picture, I didn’t take an offer to learn to become an Optical Printer ‘optical lineup’ specialist. Except for labs restoring old films with odd formats, optical printing mostly disappeared just a few years later.
In my Sinbad review I suggested reasons why Ray Harryhausen and Charles Schneer moved their production company to England. The documentary asserts that they moved to be close to English labs that worked with the Sodium Vapor travelling matte process, which saw so much use in Harryhausen’s films.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson