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'Godfather' rescued

Restoring 1st 2 films takes a year

By Leslie Gray Streeter PALM BEACH POST | Monday, October 6, 2008

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A film preservationist can be a magician, restoring images thought to have been lost forever on ancient, decaying negatives. He or she might be an archaeologist, searching for a film's original negatives to make the director's work whole.

However, there's one thing nobody wants to be.

"I don't want to be the one to pick up the phone and say, 'Mr. Coppola? You know that shot everybody talks about that's so beautiful? We just ripped it up,'" says Robert A. Harris, who spearheaded the restoration of Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series, which has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray disc.

For about a year, Mr. Harris, a former film producer ("The Grifters") who helped rescue "Spartacus," "My Fair Lady," "Vertigo" and "Lawrence of Arabia" for future generations, worked on 1972's "The Godfather" and 1974's "The Godfather Part II" to restore the aged negatives and mistakes made by previous laboratories.

The 1990 third installment needed no restoration, but a digital intermediate, or digitized version, was made as well as backup tapes and preservation negatives from which future versions can be made. The effort cost "upward of seven figures," Mr. Harris says.

Most people think of decaying films as being from the '30s and '40s. However, even relatively recent films like "The Godfather" can corrode quickly without the proper care.

"The problem with "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Part II" is that the negative was just really worn out," Mr. Harris says. "We ran it through the machine at 2 1/2 frames a second, standing there with Chris, the fella running the equipment. We were making sure we didn't have to hit the button and shut something down very quickly. I just stood there in a white coat, sweating."

Mr. Harris worked with a team including archivist Joan Lawson and experts from Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging along with constant advice and help from the film's original cinematographer, Gordon Willis.

They found the negative of "The Godfather" "quite a mess," Mr. Harris says. In a way, it was a victim of its own popularity. Each time a print was made, the original negative was run, and the more it was run, the more damaged it became, much like "every popular film released in the mid-to-late 1970s. If you go back to the original negative, they're not really good," he says.

In the case of "The Godfather," all that wear left it torn, dirty and missing about 20 minutes. He says the staff at Burbank, Calif.'s Pro-Tek Preservation Services "meticulously" backed up the duplicate negative.

"There are two major things in restoring films. First, do no harm. Second, don't change anything," Mr. Harris says. "The filmmaker made the film the way they wanted it to look. You don't remove the grain, you don't go in and change the density. There are certain things you might do.... If you look at the early Chaplin films, like "City Lights," there were certain things with wires attached to them.... Shot-by-shot, what you're supposed to see is the magic."

A specific "Godfather" segment sorely in need of some magic was the sequence in which Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) shoots Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Capt. McCluskey (Sterling Hayden). Shot over two nights, the first part of the scene was push processed - meaning that the development time or temperature was changed to increase contrast.

Unfortunately, the lab inadvertently forgot to give the same treatment to the other part of the scene, leaving it underdeveloped and thin. Because the scene couldn't be shot again, Mr. Harris thinks staff at Technicolor Motion Picture Corp. tried to save the scene, leaving it looking "funky, three generations away from the original. It never looked right - there was always a little grainy midtone (and it looked) a little muddy. We called Willis, and he was very quiet for a moment, and then let out a stream of expletives with the name of the laboratory attached. It was like 'Gordon, are you trying to tell me there's something wrong here?'"

Still, the restoration team was able to recover about 80 percent of the original negative. "We pulled a rabbit out of a hat. In doing so, we saved that scene," he says.

Fear of causing irreparable damage to a film is not without precedent. During the restoration of "My Fair Lady," the scene where Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) comes down Henry Higgins' staircase in a shimmering ball gown, the negative split "right down the middle," Mr. Harris says. "We don't want to see that happening again."

For Mr. Harris, his passion for film restoration comes down simply to wanting every generation to be able to have the same awe-inspiring film experiences he had.

"It goes back to my teens. Whenever there was a 70-millimeter film out, I wanted to go down to the city and see these huge films, when it was an event with reserved seats," he says. "We are losing the original negatives, losing the event. I have a son living in Los Angeles, and a few Sundays ago, there was a special screening of "How The West Was Won" in Cinerama with the three projectors. He went in not quite knowing ... and he thought it was really terrific.

"What I'm very concerned about is that kids today have no opportunity to see films the way we saw them," he says. "There's a major problem with these negatives that were shot, every film from about 1954 to 1960, where the negatives are basically gone and faded. There aren't enough labs that know what they are doing. Look at 'The Godfather.'"

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