The American Cinematheque made headlines nine years ago when it announced that it had installed a projection booth that the city of Los Angeles deemed suitable for projecting nitrate prints. There are only a few others like it, even in the city most closely associated with filmmaking. But if you’ve ever seen the way nitrate can burn (as dramatized in Cinema Paradiso) you know why so many precautions are necessary. Once, when I was working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I programmed a silent comedy short from the archives for a weekend show; a torn sprocket was all it took to ignite the print. The quick-thinking projectionist grabbed the film and the takeup reel below it and ran to the sink to get it out of harm’s way, singeing his eyebrows in the process—and salvaging the print. That’s when MoMA decided that showing nitrate would require two people in the booth.
Nitrate is not only highly flammable but it shrinks, congeals, and smells to high heaven. But if a print is “aired out” now and then and the fates are kind, it can last a surprisingly long time. When the Library of Congress’s nitrate vault was still in Dayton, Ohio I was able to hold the original camera negative for Thomas Edison’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) in my hands and it showed no signs of aging!
What’s so special about nitrate? The answer isn’t always obvious to the naked eye—at least, not to my naked eyes—but there are some films where the silver content adds a glimmer to the image that so-called safety prints cannot duplicate. I will never forget the first time I saw the Cinematheque Française’s 35mm copy of Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, hosted by the legendary Henri Langlois at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. It was a revelatory experience. Yet when I attended a recent showing at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre of A Portrait of Jennie it didn’t look especially lustrous. Go figure. The George Eastman Museum now hosts an annual program called The Nitrate Picture Show. If you’re curious, go to https://www.eastman.org/nitrate-picture-show.
I recently read that in June, the British Film Institute will be screening “an original, unfaded dye transfer IB Technicolor British release print of Star Wars (1977), preserved in the BFI National Archive, and ready to transport us to a long time ago, and a galaxy far, far away, back to the moment in 1977 when George Lucas’s vision cast a spell on cinema audiences.” This is doubly significant since Lucas no longer allows the original 1977 movie to circulate, because he has repeatedly tampered with it. That’s why some diehard fans cling to their VHS copies of the original trilogy, which include my introductory interviews with The Man himself.
An IB Technicolor print of Star Wars is a prize worth crowing about. Years ago, George told me he was shocked when he planned a theatrical reissue of his first Star Wars feature and discovered that the original 35mm negative was in rough shape. It even had splices coming unglued.
The dye transfer print only exists because it was processed in London, I presume. The Technicolor plant in Hollywood was dismantled in 1974. The last film to run through the imbibition (or IB) process was the trailer for Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, which was released in the U.S. by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Film buff supreme Joe Dante, who edited that trailer, took great pride in piggybacking that three-minute advert with the print run of Disney’s reissue of Swiss Family Robinson.
He recalls, “My trip through the last gasp of the Technicolor building was memorable, no less because there were scads of film cans and shippers in the hallways waiting for copyright holders to pick them up. Everything from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon to Satanic Rites of Dracula. Most of which would end up in Santa Monica Bay. But watching the colorists adjust the hues at the end of the building-wide roller coaster of rolling processors was like something out of This Island Earth and I’ll never forget it. Plus the color didn’t fade!”
Why didn’t someone do something to halt the destruction of the equipment? It was no secret that the only remaining laboratories would be overseas, in London and Rome. But Technicolor was a private company and no individual or organization stepped forward to encourage or fund such an effort. The company survived, but just barely, and went out of business a week or so ago.
Which brings us around to the subject of collectors, who are responsible for saving so much of film history. There wouldn’t be nearly as many opportunities to witness vintage movies the way they looked when they were new if it weren’t for light-fingered projectionists and other individuals who stashed release prints of silent films, early talkies, Cinerama, and IB Technicolor in their garages and basements.
It may seem odd to congratulate anyone on something so clear-cut as outright theft, but in this arena it seems appropriate. The TCM Classic Film Festival, with the help of the folks at Boston Light and Sound, showed two Paramount features in the long-dormant VistaVision process, using two lovingly restored projectors. (The process has been used for visual effects over the years until director Brady Corbet resuscitated it for his film The Brutalist.)
VistaVision was a forerunner of IMAX and followed the same principle: the larger the frame the more “information” it can capture, yielding a brighter, clearer picture—even when reduced to 35mm film. But the kicker is that it passed through the camera, and the projector, horizontally. It earned the respect of directors from John Ford (who shot The Searchers in this format) and Alfred Hitchcock (who used it for To Catch a Thief and three other features). If you wonder why North by Northwest looks so great, VistaVision is one good reason.
TCM is showing vintage prints of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and We’re No Angels as they were shot back in the 1950s… and I can’t wait to catch at least a glimpse of them. Next challenge: using genuine silver screens, which added brightness to the images for moviegoers of the 1930s and 40s. The introduction of Stereophonic sound in the 1950s demanded porous screens, and the silver coating went the way of the do-do bird, but I still yearn to see films of the pre-stereo era the way they really looked. Maybe next year…
