Griping the Light Fantastic
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Griping the Light Fantastic by Nick Zegarac Once a year V.P in charge of DVD production Ned Price, and his colleagues at Warner Home Video get together with Turner Classic Movies to launch a ‘DVD Decision’ contest that anyone who has access to the internet can participate in. But prior to that, and in conjunction with Home Theatre Review, they yearly generate an open dialogue for several hours on the net with anyone who loves films as they do. This sort of shopping their consumer base for suggestions is, to say the least, admirable. Not only does it allow Warner to better tailor its roster of pending projects to increase their overall profit, but it gives the average consumer a sense that he/she is in the driver’s seat. At least, that’s how it appears on the surface. And although Warner Home Video continues, arguably to have its finger on the pulse of market research, what they have been giving the average consumer on DVD of late hasn’t exactly been as diverse an investment from their illustrious film catalogue as one would perhaps hope for. But to understand Warner Home Video’s DVD output today, it is perhaps prudent and ironic to first take a look at the MGM Studios of yesterday. PAST IMPERFECT: Part One The Trouble with Movies as a Business… Back in the early 1980s cable media mogul Ted Turner did a very blessed thing; he briefly acquired the rights to MGM’s beleaguered studio that, for at least two decades prior, had been the subject of a slow decline into entertainment oblivion. That slow fade to black was made complete when Las Vegas financier, Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM in totem in the late 1970s and then proceeded to dismember its illustrious history with all the tact, concern and preservation savvy of a buzz saw cutting into a snow pea. Kerkorian sold the back lot, populated by sets recapturing the essence of roughly every conceivable architectural standpoint of the 20th century (including those from ‘The Andy Hardy’ series, ‘Meet Me In St. Louis’) to housing developers. He bartered away MGM’s prop and costume department to the highest bidder at a Sotherby’s auction. Garbage bins were left brimming with discarded animation cells from classic Tom & Jerry cartoons, conceivably because Kerkorian could see not immediate resale value in them. Original sheet music with penciled notations by Jerome Kern, Max Steiner, Gershwin and others, scripts with annotations and hand written direction from Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood, interoffice communications in the form of letters and memos between Irving G. Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer and so on – gone forever. All this ruthless pillaging was done in service to Kerkorian’s lavish Vegas casino empire and his pending project of a hotel bearing the MGM logo and name. His issued statement in 1976 that “MGM is a hotel company and a relatively insignificant producer of motion pictures” was a bitter and tragic death knell to what had once been the most profitable and vital film studio in all of Hollywood – responsible for at least half of our cultural collective memories and with a roster of talent once boastfully declared as ‘more stars than there are in the heavens.’ Charlton Heston once said in an interview, “I know Kirk. He’s a great guy. But making movies isn’t what he does. It’s not what he’s interested in.” This reviewer’s rebuttal to that quote is, “then why buy a movie studio and turn it into one’s personal garage sale?” Kerkorian’s pillaging effectively wiped MGM off the face of the map. There is no MGM anymore. Although the lion periodically roars on the screen, it no longer has a production company behind it. It is merely a ‘Leo for rent’ – a catchy and resilient logo, easily one of the most identifiable trademarks in the history of film, that gets slapped for prestige sake onto many a contemporary and independent production. The studio facility currently belongs to Sony Pictures and, thanks to a recent merger, so does the MGM library of post 60s films. But back to Ted Turner; it is primarily because of his love for great movies that we and Warner Bros. today have the MGM library of classics in tact. Although Turner was much maligned for his insanity to colorize black and white movies (a move that rightly outraged film purists and the Hollywood community at large, so much that they filed a federal injunction to stop colorization from ruining cinema art), in Turner’s misguided zeal he did manage to nevertheless save approximately 2000 vintage movies from becoming part of Kerkorian’s pick n’ save. When Turner’s broadcasting empire was acquired by Time/AOL, and hence Warner Bros. Warner Home Video became the recipient of a rich cultural heritage dating all the way back to the dawning of motion pictures. This grand collection, coupled with Warner Bros. own body of filmic entertainment, and the acquisition of the old RKO/Selznick Studio libraries, has today made Warner Home Video the greatest archive of vintage American cinema in the world. They are, to put it bluntly, the top. PAST IMPERFECT: Part Two The Trouble With Movies As An Art… Although the art of motion pictures is more than one hundred years old Hollywood’s concerted effort to preserve its own heritage is less than twenty. Not until the late 1980s, when VCRs and movie channels began proliferating cable stations did studios realize their celluloid assets might have lives beyond a limited theatrical release. The lucrative binge of the late 1950s to rent, or in some cases sell off, whole chunks of film libraries had cooled by 1979, leaving the future of Hollywood’s past in a state of utter and total deterioration. For executives, classic movies held little interest as anything more than teaching tools for universities or infrequent loan outs for late night television – neither particularly profitable. But by 1990 the cable, videocassette and Laser Disc revolutions, with their economic demands and rewards, had convinced studios of the prudence in preserving their own films. Independent archives, once struggling for cash, simply to maintain their private – and often bootlegged - collections, now found studios eager to invest money and time in the preservation and reissue of its own art form…imagine that. Depending on one’s viewpoint, this renewed interest can be described as either “better late than never” or “too little, too late.” All early B&W movies were shot on nitrate film stock. Nitrate produces a gorgeous image, largely because it contains actual silver content. Unfortunately, that silver also makes nitrate highly unstable and flammable. After a rash of nitrate fires in film vaults in the late 1940s, studios began copying their stock onto acetate-based safety film or, in some cases, simply began pitching their collections into the trash. Nearly eighty percent of film history has thus gone the way of the Dodo. This is one reason why many films like Frank Capra’s masterwork, Lost Horizon (1937) have no original camera negative from which future prints of the movie might be struck today. Worse still, the studio’s half hearted attempts in the 50s and 60s to maintain collections of their old Technicolor films by transferring them to acetate was discovered by the late 1980s to have developed a pronounced color fading known as vinegar syndrome decay. Color Reversal Intermediate (CRI) stock that had earned Kodak Inc. an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement in 1968 and had been touted as the protection element of the future was now widely being panned as the most unstable film ever developed. There also has been considerable debate over how to restore older films, particularly when the filmmaker’s participation is no longer available. The vast majority of film preservation and restoration today is achieved with photochemical techniques. When such techniques fall short, digital processes are utilized. But it’s costly to say the least, $30,000-$35,000 just to start, and that’s to say nothing of the man hours it takes to digitally remove tears, rips and scratches that time has added as its own artifacts against the art form. One of the universal dangers in overseeing a film restoration is, as expert, Robert A. Harris has suggested is “foist(ing) your own aesthetic sensibilities onto the work of art. Films are works of art, but they're not our works of art, and we need to guard against the impulse to make something better than it was. Restoration shouldn't be about making an older film more modern and it definitely shouldn't pander to the less demanding tastes of contemporary audiences just for the sake of making it more accessible to them.” This opinion is shared by Fox film archivist and preservation expert, Shawn Belston who adds, “You can never really bring a film back to what it was originally. We don't have nitrate print stock any longer, black-and-white film has changed many times over the years, color intermediates have changed, and print stocks have changed. All you can do is use the gauge of today and do the best you possibly can.” WARNER HOME VIDEO: Gatekeepers of the World of Entertainment This may be an arguable point, but I will venture a guess that few stand in greater admiration of the restoration and preservation work done by Warner Home Video since 1997 than yours truly. Under Ned Price, Chris Cookson and Rob Hummel, among others, the studio has really gone to town on its vintage films – releasing box sets and singles that, at least for the most part, stand head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.