I'm taking the liberty to repost here the correspondence with Richard W. Haines on IAMMMMW and film preservation in general for all the non-FB-users and the still-not-friends circle:
https://www.facebook.com/globians/posts/132851693461703?ref=notif¬if_t=share_comment
27.06.2011
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• Curatorship Globians Doc Fest via The New York Times
• The "other life" was not only "Husbands" and "Woman under the influence" but also "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World", actually before Colombo. And that's also how his screen face became popular first. IAMMMMW is due for preservation as being an Ultra Panavison 70 shot anamorph in 65mm, one of the few.
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• Peter Falk, Rumpled and Crafty Actor on ‘Columbo,’ Dies at 83
• www.nytimes.com
• Mr. Falk, known for his signature role on television, had a wide-ranging career in comedy and drama in film and onstage.
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• Friday at 10:55pm ·
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• Richard W. Haines and Aimee Jennings like this.
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• Richard W. Haines The standard release version of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" is preserved. The 65mm anamorphic negative is still in good shape and they made a new print a few years ago. They also have a low fade 35mm Interpositive and 65mm black and white separations. What isn't preserved on the film is the original 192 minute Roadshow version which played briefly before being permanently cut to the current 154 minute version taht most people saw back in 1963, in the 1971 re-issue and in the various video versions. They found some faded 70mm scenes cut from one of the Roadshow prints but many key scenes that were trimmed were still missing. MGM 'rejuvinated' those trims to remove scratches for an earlier VHS and laserdisc version which was labeled as a 'restoration' but wasn't. The rejunivation chemicals made those trims fade and deteriorate. The negative for those cut scenes and the others was apparently junked after UA re-cut the film back in 1963. Judging from the cut scenes shown in the old VHS tape, most of them were just extensions of scenes already in the movie. There were a few sequences that would've been good to have including the scenes where Mazursky pulls out Silver's steering wheel center to force him down the hill and some extra footage with Dick Shawn acting like a lunatic. The important sequences of Dick Shawn stealing the red convertable and the Buster Keaton phone conversation with Tracy are still lost. It would be interesting to see the complete 192 minute version shown for the first few weeks of the Cinerama version although it might have played somewhat like a 'rough cut' with the standard version a 'fine cut'. The 154 minute version works fine as is. It's highly unlikely the 192 minute version can ever be restored now with the trims decomposing and the negative of those scenes junked. Even if they found an original uncut 70mm print (as they did with "The Sand Pebbles" and "South Pacific") it would be totally faded by now. The 35mm and 16mm Technicolor prints are still unfaded but they are all of the standard release version.
• Saturday at 7:23pm · Like
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• Richard W. Haines They did find the radio broadcasts that played during the intermission. Hopefully they will be included in some future Blu Ray release of the film.
• Saturday at 7:24pm · Like
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• Curatorship Globians Doc Fest Thanks Richard, for this in-depth and up-to-date report on preservation efforts for "IMMMMW". I still like to have and watch my LD letterboxed 192 min. version incl. the "making-of-remembering" featurette. One of the good reasons for me not to junk vintage Laserdisc player hardware.
• 23 hours ago · Like
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• Richard W. Haines Well I guess that version is a 'curio' but it's not the 1963 Roadshow. I was originally involved with Eric Federing's campaign to restore the movie. But we dropped out when MGM took over and did a half assed release claiming it was some kind of "restoration". Aside from not fully restoring the cut scenes that were found (while that was still possible) they just included them 'as is' complete with the Cinerama distortion and faded colors. They also found a demo reel of out-takes and put those in too even though they never appeared in the Roadshow. It was a patchwork mess. Because they rejuvinated the cut scenes they are no longer restorable and could now be considered 'lost'. The laserdisc is based on an analog master and thus not worth including in a future Blu Ray release where the standard version can be mastered directly from the 65mm camera negative or the preservation 35mm anamorphic reduction interpositive.
• 2 hours ago · Like
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• Richard W. Haines The complete 192 minute stereo soundtrack exists by the way. But the cut scenes do not exist in negative form or positive form that are usuable. I suppose they could do one of those seventies types of releases where they include faded and deteriorated footage with the preserved material and fill in the missing gaps with stills as they did with "South Pacific" and "A Star is Born" as a suppliment just for the historical record. But those versions are not entertaining because of all of the distractions from the faded or lost footage.
• 2 hours ago · Like
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• Richard W. Haines One of the mysteries of this movie is whether Stanley Kramer disapproved of the cuts. In his archive he had a mint 35mm Technicolor/anamorphic print of the 154 minute version, not the longer Roadshow version. He didn't iniated the restoration and seemed somewhat indifferent to the campaign. No one knows whether he actually supervised the cuts to speed up the action and give the film a better pace or not. For example, most people aren't aware of the fact that David Lean created every version of "Lawrence of Arabia". He made the cuts from the British Premiere of 3 hours and 40 minutes to the 3 hour and 20 minute version released to the public. He also made the cuts for the 187 minute 1971 re-issue version and of course created the new 1989 version which runs 3 1/2 hours. They were all 'director's cuts'. I guess what's strange about the "Mad World" cuts is why they actually cut the negative. By 1963 Technicolor offered 'auto select printing'. They created a printer that could skip over scenes if desired when making prints. In other words you could have a long version and then make shorter prints for different markets as required with this printer without actually cutting the negative. Since they could sell it to network television as an 'event' film shown over two nights (and thus selling more commercials for the broadcast), they chose to physically cut the camera negative. TV Guide announced that they were going to show the uncut version of "Mad World" in it's premiere but that turned out to be a false claim since it no longer existed by the seventies.
• 2 hours ago · Like
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• Curatorship Globians Doc Fest Richard, thanks so much for this in-detail in-depth report on IAMMMMW. Preservation efforts reports are always very fascination to me - and I'm sure for quite some folks, too.
• about an hour ago · Like
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• Richard W. Haines You're welcome. Film Preservation is a relatively new concept. For most of cinema history movies were a 'one shot deal' like a theatrical show. Movies played for about a year and then were forgotten about with few exceptions. Silent films were intentionally junked or left to decompose in bad storage once sound films were established between 1929-1931. It wasn't until the advent of television that there was any attempt to actually preserve motion pictures. It was discovered around 1950 that the aging nitrate film was decomposing in the cans. The rate was and remains a mystery. Nitrate films less than 30 years old had already crumbled to dust (i.e. "Lost Horizon") but nitrate films made at the turn of the century were still intact. It all depended on how carefully the film was processed and how cold the storage conditions were. Heat and humidity were the worst conditions and that's how most studios stored their movies. While films were usually cut for Television broadcast there was one major attribute. TV stations would not show nitrate. So the studios had to gradually begin to transfer their nitrates to tri-acetate safety film. It was done on a prioritized basis with the most potentially profitable films transferred first. B films, cartoons, shorts and silents were done last and it was often too late by then. Simultaneously they discovered in the seventies that there was another problem with the new film stock. The Eastmancolor negatives used from 1951 through 1982 were fading away. There was stable film stock which included Technicolor dye transfer prints, kodachrome, cinecolor and super cinecolor but they were being phased out over time. Under tremendous industry pressure on Kodak to improve their film stock they finally came up with low fade Eastmancolor negative and print film in 1983. But that meant that all of the earlier Eastmancolor negatives had to be color corrected and transferred to the new film stock...while they were simultaneously still tranferring the nitrates to safety stock. It was an overwhelming task. And to make things more difficult they discovered that many classic movies had been re-edited and cut over the years for re-issue or for censorship reasons. So now the owners had to do a worldwide search to find the missing footage as well as get it off of nitrate if it was a pre-1950 film and get it off of the fading Eastmancolor if it was a pre-1983 color movie. On top of that they also discovered that many negatives had lots of dust, dirt and scratches ground into the emulsion from sloppy labwork. Then came the digital technology in the nineties. The Walt Disney company contacted Kodak and asked them if it was possible to digitally paint out the colored dust on the animation cells of their cartoons. It was and they did it on "Snow White" as a test in 2K which was outputted back to low fade Eastmancolor. The film looked cleaner than when it was originally released. Then the other studios started transferring their old movies to digital 2K to get rid of the dust and dirt on their preservation negatives which was another way of improving and restoring the movie. However, even this was changed when they upgraded the technology to 4K which was considered the best for 35mm negatives. However, MGM used 8K technology to restore "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind" which show more detail than they ever did when they were made. The bottom line is that preservation is no longer considered a one time fix. It's an ongoing process over the decades as new technology is introtroduced to correct deteriroration and audio/visual artifacts like dust and scratches. It gets very, very expensive of course but we should be glad they are doing it on some of our favorite movies. Unfortunately not every movie will be restored and preserved because of the cost.
• 8 minutes ago · Like
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