The Race to Save the Films We Love

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/movies/the-race-to-save-the-films-we-love.html

Version 0 of 1.

If you have ever seen the 1931 film of “The Front Page,” based on the jauntily cynical play, you might have been startled by the moment when a wisecracking newspaperman silences his machine-gun-fast patter to raise his middle finger at the mayor and sheriff. Is this what the New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall was thinking of when he wrote that the film’s humor is “frequently harsh”?

Probably not. That’s because in the version of “The Front Page” that New York papers likely reviewed back in 1931, that hack keeps his middle finger in check and instead mock-salutes the mayor and the sheriff. As it turns out, the film seen in the United States for decades isn’t the same version that American audiences guffawed through back in the day. The one that Michael Pogorzelski and Heather Linville took out of old film cans in 2014 was surprisingly different from the familiar one.

Mr. Pogorzelski, 44, is the director of the Academy Film Archive, which is part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars; Ms. Linville, 38, is one of its film preservationists. In 2014, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, deposited the Howard Hughes film collection with the academy archive, and the preservationists zeroed in on “The Front Page.” Archives are designed to store film under proper conditions, which is why collections like this sometimes land there. Other titles are piling up at the academy archive because people are dumping their films.

The industry shift from film to digital has been swift and dramatic and — despite the activist efforts of the high-profile likes of Christopher Nolan and the patron saint of preservation, Martin Scorsese — film on film has almost disappeared from theaters. Even features shot on film are digitally projected. (Almost all theaters worldwide are now digital.) Last year, I started following after Mr. Pogorzelski and Ms. Linville to understand the complexities of film restoration, largely because the medium is fast becoming a relic. More than 50 years ago, André Bazin asked “What is cinema?” But what is film?

It’s a question worth asking, because for most of its history, cinema was medium-specific — it was shot, processed and distributed on film. The movies we watch today, by contrast, are rarely made through mechanical and photochemical processes, but with computer code, with strings of zeros and ones: bits. Each medium has its advantages, although for many lovers of film the crucial difference is its vivid, alive look. Much of the cinema I love — Buster Keaton comedies, Fred-and-Ginger musicals, Stan Brakhage avant-garde landmarks, Charles Burnett’s masterpiece “Killer of Sheep” — was made with film. What happens to an art when its foundational medium disappears? We don’t yet know, because it’s happening right now. If you care about movies, you should be wondering.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play “The Front Page” first opened on Broadway in 1928. The writers were former journalists, and the story they whipped up hinges on a hard-boiled Chicago reporter, Hildy Johnson, who’s planning to leave the city and the newspaper racket, only to be reeled back into action by a jailbreak and his conniving editor, Walter Burns. Profane and funny, the play was a hit, and it’s returned to Broadway several times since; a new production opens in October. Howard Hawks redefined it by casting Cary Grant as Walter and Rosalind Russell as his ex-wife, Hildy, in the 1940 dazzler “His Girl Friday.”

Hawks’s brilliant gender-flip has helped eclipse the 1931 film, but the older one has charm, snap and great performances, as well as intelligent, fluid direction from Lewis Milestone, all of which can be hard to appreciate when watching battered copies of copies. The print from the University of Nevada was, by contrast, in fine shape by the time Mr. Pogorzelski and Ms. Linville started work. (The George Lucas Family Foundation footed the bill.) Yet while this restoration didn’t involve visually dramatic differences, it produced its own aha moments when, while comparing the University of Nevada copy with the Library of Congress print, they saw variations like the middle finger.

In one version, a character quips about Pocahontas, while in the other the wisecrack involves Lady Godiva. Other changes involve camerawork, staging and performances. Some of the differences seemed intentional, others accidental. Ms. Linville did some sleuthing and discovered that the production files for “The Front Page” include references to several versions of the film: “Scene Take 5 – OK – English Version Print” reads one line, “Scene Take 6 – OK – Amer. Version Print” reads another. And while the budget includes costs like wardrobe ($2,858.53) and railroad fares ($1,438.28), it also refers to an American negative, a British negative and a “general foreign” negative.

It was common practice to shoot multiple versions in the silent era, one for the domestic market and the rest for export. Talking pictures complicated matters, and, with subtitling and dubbing not yet a workable solution, companies shot multiple-language versions. In the case of “The Front Page,” the multiples may have been shot more for cultural and censorship reasons, which may be why the middle finger isn’t in the American version. The best takes were reserved for the American version: That’s the one in which the camera crew keeps pace with a speed-walking Adolphe Menjou, as Burns; in another version, he slips out of frame. The other version is good, yes, but the American is the film at its greatest.

The academy archive restores 40 to 70 movies a year, which means that the staff is usually handling several titles at once. When Mr. Pogorzelski and Ms. Linville started on “The Front Page,” she was already several years into restoring “Cock of the Air,” another Hughes title. Directed by Tom Buckingham, this delightful 1932 sex comedy is largely a vehicle for its female star, Billie Dove, who was Hughes’s lover back in an especially frenetic time in his movie career. She plays a French actress partial to low-cut gowns, Champagne and conquests, and the film is one long teasing encounter between her and a pilot and Lothario (Chester Morris).

More frothy than scandalous, the film is best explained by the scene in which Dove runs around in a metal suit of armor while chased by Morris, who’s holding a can opener. Hughes managed to get “Cock of the Air” into theaters for its initial release despite the objections of the Production Code’s bluenoses (one deemed it “obscene and immoral”), but eventually it was heavily censored. The film’s history of censorship woes help explain how the academy preservationists ended up dealing with an uncensored yet silent master and a separate, censored audio source.

Preservationists seek out both the best-preserved prints and elements from different film copies, and often work with outside technicians. (Some handle the visuals, others the audio; some work with photochemical elements, others with digital.) It’s like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from many copies of that puzzle — pieces that sometimes need to be shipped from France and spruced up in Los Angeles. Flaws remain because, Mr. Pogorzelski said, he has “to stretch dollars as far as they can go.” Carrying out a “100 percent frame-by-frame cleaning” and focusing all of the archive’s resources on one film might mean ignoring dozens of others.

To help with the sound for “Cock of the Air,” the preservationists looked to John Polito, an engineer and the owner of Audio Mechanics. Together they worked on the sound using assorted elements they had gathered. After years of vainly searching for prints with the censored dialogue intact, they took the unusual step of hiring actors like Hamish Linklater to record the excised lines, using an onscreen icon to indicate what had been censored. (Mr. Polito played some piano music that had gone missing in a butchered seduction scene.) The results are probably close to what viewers saw and heard when they caught a show in 1932 at the Rialto in New York.

All movies are time machines, and restoration helps bring the moving-image present together with a past that is always — as prints decay, labs close and money ebbs — moving further away. “We want to preserve films for future generations,” Ms. Linville said. “So we try to think ahead and think about what future audiences may be interested in.” Some restorations play at festivals, museums and other archival-centric places. They’re available for research, and the preservationists hope that a museum the academy has proposed will be yet another place to see them. “Even if every cinema in the world can only show digital,” Mr. Pogorzelski said, “we know there are going to be at least four theaters that the academy runs that are still going to be showing film.”

In 2011, the historian David Pierce gave a talk on silent films at an annual event in Los Angeles called the Reel Thing. At one point, he showed a 1925 photo of a few dozen Universal Pictures stars next to a stack of crates holding that season’s negatives. He asked if anyone recognized these stars and was met with mostly bafflement. We soon found out why. Twenty years after this photo was taken, Universal sent a letter to its East Coast lab ordering the destruction of all but 17 of its silent-film negatives. The studio had already lost numerous older titles in fires, and now it was junking the rest of its silent features — hundreds — having decided that most were not worth keeping. It’s no wonder that those stars were unfamiliar: Their own studio destroyed their legacy.

Some legacies may be lost forever; others re-emerge or gain new luster when films that went missing resurface in a barn or an archive. In 2015, “Seven Sinners,” Milestone’s long-lost feature directorial debut, turned up in Australia and was passed on to the archive, which is restoring the film. Such rescue stories come wreathed in romance as a film is plucked from the brink, like a silent-screen heroine pulled from train tracks at the last minute. These stories are heartening if misleading, given the industry’s habit of destroying its history, which, of course, is our history, too. What wonders existed in the 70 percent of silent features that are lost? And the problem isn’t just the past or preserving it. It’s also about access. Film prints of recent releases are now hard to see, and the big studios keep a lot of titles in the vault. Many films have never made it onto VHS, DVD or Blu-ray, and the dream that the internet would turn into a comprehensive cinematic library remains a dream.

The upbeat platitudes that have often accompanied the shift to digital tend to obscure pragmatic considerations, including that film is easier and less expensive to preserve than digital and isn’t plagued by the same obsolescence issues. That’s why, even as major studios have stopped distributing film prints, they make film copies of the elements of their new releases, including those shot on digital. Studios like 20th Century Fox may maintain digital archives of their current releases, but the “analog solution,” in the words of Schawn Belston, its executive vice president, media and library services, “is still the most trusted and has well-established archival longevity.”

The studios can afford to safeguard their new and old titles, but an estimated 75 percent of movies in American theaters are made by independents. A few years ago, the Library of Congress and the academy released “Digital Dilemma 2,” a report on the digital preservation issues facing independent filmmakers and nonprofit audiovisual archives. “Most of the filmmakers surveyed for this report have given little thought to what happens to their work once it is completed,” the study found. Most were also not aware of “the perishable nature of digital content.” Preservation may not be foremost in the minds of these directors — or most moviegoers — but imagine 50 years from now when another archivist asks another audience to name the stars of our digital cinema present, like our own era’s screwball beauty, Greta Gerwig. “Who?”