Recovering lost films and TV shows

[DRW50]

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/kathleen-collins-lost-1982-classic-losing-ground-to-be-screened-for-the-first-time-in-nyc-feb6-20150113

[DRW50]

Extremely rare 1919 Houdini film was finally sold last year by the man who owned it (he'd bought it from Houdini's estate in 1949), has been restored, and will be premiering on TCM.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harry-houdini-movie-set-tcm-766234

I had to laugh when I saw some sneering AV Club article insisting that if this were the 80's, TCM would have colorized it. Apparently no one told AV Club that TCM wasn't around in the 80's.

[DRW50]

You can find a lot of great info, and even some clips or films to watch, from the preservation project New Zealand had that resulted in the discovery of nearly 200 different American films.

http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/lost-and-found-new-zealand

[Vee]

According to a colleague of mine, the release of Orson Welles's final film, The Other Side of the Wind, may finally be happening after years of researching Welles's notes, legal wrangling and BTS strife. At last check, the film is still slated to be aired on Showtime when and if it is assembled from its raw footage and completed.

Here's a recent article (10/14) about the completion process. It has been a very long time getting here.

This assembly plan is not dissimilar from how Welles's friends and colleagues, including longtime confidante Peter Bogdanovich, re-assembled his masterpiece Touch of Evil from Welles's own editing notes in the late '90s.

Beatrice Welles, Welles's notoriously litigious daughter from his marriage to Paola Mori, seems to have finally agreed to not challenge the film's future development. Hopefully this will finally work out. (She is also doing a Q&A this weekend for a screening in New York of Welles's rare and beloved Shakespeare pastiche, Chimes at Midnight with Jeanne Moreau, so that is sure to be an interesting room.)

Edited February 1, 2015 by Vee

[DRW50]

This is really interesting. He had a lot of projects that never finished or took forever to finish, didn't he? What did you think of their Touch of Evil remaster?

This talks some about that Losing Ground movie I mentioned to you.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/lost-found

[Vee]

I think the Touch of Evil restoration is a masterpiece. Seeing that on the big screen was one of the very first films I saw in school.

He had many unfinished films - one was a film called The Deep, sort of an old take on the same source material that later became the film Dead Calm in the early '90s with Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill and Billy Zane, a three-person thriller on a boat at sea. His version starred Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau. They couldn't finish some key FX scenes in the climax - Welles was always out of money - so it languishes forever, sadly. Wind, hopefully, will finally have a happier ending. Supposedly all that was left to shoot was a car crash or something. Sadly I don't think we will ever find the rest of his footage for The Magnificent Ambersons, which was taken away from him by the studio and recut by Robert Wise, his editor. The film as is is still incredible, but it is truncated.

His version of Othello, which ran in town last week, also took years to film piecemeal, around the world, with various money-saving maneuvers. His Macbeth was filmed on the backlots and leftover sets from various Republic pictures; at one point he supposedly stole props and wardrobe from pictures he'd acted in to use in these productions. Both are excellent.

Edited February 1, 2015 by Vee

[Vee]

Incidentally, your linked article mentions another Bill Gunn retrospective, featuring his extremely rough, guerilla-esque PBS soap, Personal Problems. I saw a very rare screening of that several years ago and wrote about it here, I remember us talking about it. I may have to go see it again - maybe they're showing more, who knows (nevermind, the Lincoln Center link says they're only showing 75 minutes' worth; at BAM Cinematek, they showed almost three hours). The cast and crew will be there, so I may check it out. You have also convinced me to hit Losing Ground, and I hate going all the way up to Lincoln Center.

Edited February 1, 2015 by Vee

[DRW50]

I hope if you go you tell us what you think of it.

[Vee]

If I can I will do that. I also wish everyone could see the Personal Problems footage I saw a few years back, but after seeing, say, AMC 2.0, with its renewed focus on the Hubbards and social issues, that feels like less of an elegy for good soap potential lost. It got realized again.

[DRW50]

Given the cynicism of marketing, maybe someone can convince a company to buy it and bill it as Empire before there was an Empire.

[Vee]

I do love Empire and it's an idea, I suppose, but it bears little to no resemblance, and I mean, it's barely releaseable, frankly - it's very, very, very roughly made. We're talking home video recording or something. I think the only way that could happen is if someone packaged it as an extra on a future release of Gunn's great Ganja & Hess, but that already has a nice Blu-Ray. And who knows what the rights issues are like.

Edited February 1, 2015 by Vee

[DRW50]

Definitely. That's why I said cynical marketing. It would just be nice to see some of the old material given a new chance now that the industry might see it can make money.

[Vee]

Oh, I understand. But I think the market for that would be basically nil, sadly. Even if you somehow got the rights to put it on a disc with his one other somewhat well-known film, though, that's still super-super-niche. What I hope for is that it eventually ends up streaming on that Archive.org site or whatever it is, in the public domain someday. Or someone could leak it to YT.

[DRW50]

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/03/11/blade-runner-screenwriter-made-long-lost-film-of-moes-books/

[DRW50]

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/the-hunt-for-a-lost-anzac-film-20150416-1mk1dm.html