Can't we like Kalat and Mad World? I love both
About 6 weeks ago I was invited by Mr. Harris to come visit him at FotoKem where the work was being done on this new reconstruction. Criterion has had this in the works for quite some time and I believe it's a personal favorite of Peter Becker's.
The situation with the missing footage is pretty dire. All that survive are various trims from 70mm prints from when the film was taken down to the shorter cut. Some scenes survive with picture and audio, but some only picture, and some only audio. All of the 70mm material has turned to magenta at this point and a good deal of it had already decomposed and warped past usability several years ago.
On top of this, as was seen in the laserdisc, some shots were from "rectified" prints, which means that they were squeezed on the edges and stretched in the center to properly project onto a deeply curved Cinerama screen. Other trims were from a Japan-prepared print and had burned in subtitles!
On the laserdisc, many scenes were reinstated, but not in the place they had been in the original cut. The rectified scenes were left distorted, continuous shots had scenes re-edited to hide the jump cuts due to missing frames, and the Japanese print material was zoomed in some 40% to avoid the subs. It was the best they could do at the time.
Now, some 20 years later, the trims have turned totally magenta, the other color layers are gone. What remains is the resolution and the magnetic 6 track audio. Thankfully it seems the stereo channels were located otherwise, but the possibility was there to get some sound off those prints if it came to that.
For this project every viable trim was scanned by FotoKem and aside from the color missing, they looked great. But how can you re-color shots? The secret is in the trims scanned 20 years ago. All that exists there is a 480 line color record. Robert Harris figured out a way to take that record and combine it with the new scans of the trims, giving as much color back to the shots as is possible.
The secret is in technology developed to convert films to 3D. The computer program takes dozens of points across the identical frame in both versions, and then warps them together into perfect alignment. This also accounts for any unusual shrinkage in either element, and because the eye doesn't see color at the same resolution, having them combined gives a result that would have been impossible only a couple years ago. The only hitch is that the 480 material didn't cover the entire frame, so you will know those shots by a small fringe of black and white all around the borders. This is great from a reference standpoint though as you can really see the different amounts of frame exposed in different transfers. At FotoKem we could see the sprocket holes on the film, so you knew that was EVERYTHING in those scans. The most evident scenes are those with the Japanese subs, where only about 60% of the image will have color due to the zoom in done 20 years ago.
Other scenes which were missing audio I believe have had some work done, I don't have the full information on those at this instant but I will add to this when I check with Mr. Harris. Scenes existing in audio only have been reconstructed using a variety of stills in the style of A Star is Born, but this time there were a LOT more stills to work with than they had on that project so the result is hopefully better.
All in all the run time of 197:40 with music means that only about 3 minutes of the full cut are missing from this reconstruction. Even now they are still finishing it up, adding frames of audio and such so that it is going to be the closest we will ever come to a full version and something most of us had given up all hope of ever seeing.
