Godfather trilogy restored by Robert Harris
Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 9:38 pm
Some pretty scary comments...
http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/ ... /page1.php
Quite the fascinating read.
http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/ ... /page1.php
Best known for meticulous restorations of Vertigo (1958) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Film Preserve began work on The Godfather in the fall of 2006. Paramount delivered the film’s surviving elements — original camera negative, YCM separation masters, intermediate separation masters and thousands of feet of miscellaneous elements — to Pro-Tek Preservation Services in Burbank, where an inspection confirmed that radical surgery was required. Held together with tape, the original negative was filthy and riddled with scratches, rips and tears, some of which broke into the image area; in some sections, parts of the image had actually been torn away. An entire reel (1B) had at some point been removed and replaced with a dupe. Scenes were even missing from the final separation masters because they had been made before the cut was final. (Today, studios routinely combine separation masters or at least portions of them before tucking them into the vaults, but “until the mid-1980s, separation masters were typically made and never looked at or not made at all,” notes Harris.)
Quite the fascinating read.