George Feltenstein

George Feltenstein

George Feltenstein and Ned Price of Warner Bros. on Making Truly Classic DVDs
Fans of classic Hollywood movies have had plenty to shout about over the past year or so, as superior new editions of such venerated screen treasures as Citizen Kane, All About Eve, Singin’ in the Rain, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs have arrived in lush, remastered editions with impressive DVD extras. Casablanca’s recent digital restoration, presented on disc together with a savory feature package, inspired us to visit with the people behind the disc and thank them. So Barnes & Noble.com contributing editor Ed Hulse spent some time with two kingpins in the DVD classics arena, George Feltenstein and Ned Price of Warner Bros., a company with a uniquely impressive vault. Feltenstein, as Warner Home Video’s senior vice president in charge of its classics catalog, and Price, the company’s vice president of mastering and technical operations, bring considerable insight into the process of finding and restoring the legendary movies of a bygone era.

Barnes & Noble.com: Love the restored Casablanca, and I’m glad to see The Adventures of Robin Hood finally make it to disc. But what took so long?

George Feltenstein: When DVD first came out in 1997, Warner Home Video knew that availability of a wide variety of titles would be the key to the format’s success. We tested the waters with a few classics, but they didn’t sell very well. Later we found out that DVD’s “early adopters” [adventurous consumers who are usually the first to try new products] were not classic-movie fans. They were interested in newer blockbusters that showed off DVD’s enhanced picture and sound quality. They wanted to play movies with stereo tracks blasting from their home-theater speakers. Well, you don’t get that kind of sound from 60-year-old black-and-white movies!

B&N.com: No, you don’t. So Ned, what can you do to spiff up these movies for digital presentation?

Ned Price: Well, of course, the first challenge is coming out with something that’s significantly better than the last version of a movie that was available to consumers. A fair number of classics eventually made it to laserdisc, but the bulk of them were available mostly on VHS. We usually wind up revisiting the oldest and best surviving film elements -- including, in some cases, the original camera negative -- and applying digital technology to make them look better than they did on the last go-round. A full-blown restoration of a feature-length movie could take two to three years and involve the efforts of a hundred people or more.

B&N.com: Where do you begin?

NP: We begin by gathering up all the existing material on a given title. That can include elements in our own vaults, but it can also include archival holdings from around the world. Sometimes you can find material in a foreign archive that’s better than what we have here. I’ll give you an example. For years, everybody thought the best existing material on Citizen Kane was a slightly used fine-grain print in the Museum of Modern Art’s film collection.

B&N.com: Let me interrupt you there. What’s a “fine-grain print”?

NP: That’s a print struck from the original camera negative of a movie after it’s been spliced together. The fine-grain, which is also called a “protection master,” can be used to make duplicate negatives from which other prints are struck. Also, if the original negative is damaged -- and many of them eventually are -- you can copy a segment of the fine-grain and insert a new section of “dupe” negative into the original. The fine-grain print yields a negative that looks almost like what you would get from a camera negative. There’s very little loss of sharpness or detail.

B&N.com: Okay. Continue, please.

NP: The last video version of Kane, a laserdisc, was prepared from this MoMA print. Since, then a pristine fine-grain turned up in Brussels. It was probably sent there to be copied for a negative that would include a French-dubbed soundtrack. Well, that print was loaned for digital transfer when the DVD was prepared, and it yielded much better results than did the MoMA print. Also, in the old days there were separate elements for picture and sound. Sometimes we’ll have the original nitrate-film soundtrack elements but a second-generation dupe picture. It’s not uncommon to use elements from a handful of prints and/or negatives to get the best-looking, unified whole.

B&N.com: Are you concerned only with obtaining a digital master than can be used to produce DVDs?

NP: Oh, no. We complete a full photochemical restoration in addition to digital transfer.

B&N.com: Which means…?

GF: It means that we preserve the movie on film. Today’s technology enables us to produce cleaner and crisper film elements.

B&N.com: So, once you’ve got a composite of the best elements, you make a digital transfer?

NP: Right. And we make those transfers with the very latest high-definition technology.

B&N.com: How high?

NP: Well, up until relatively recently we would make transfers with 525 lines of resolution, which is fine for most TVs. But with high-definition TV coming along, we want to make sure our DVDs will continue to look good in the future, so now we’re mastering at “2K,” which is 2,000 lines of resolution. After the initial transfer is made, we go back and process the movie through our computers, where we can “repair” damage to the original film elements with digital technology. We can remove lines and blemishes and pieces of dust and whatever. But this has to be done on a frame-by-frame basis. There are 24 frames per second in a movie projected at sound speed, so you can imagine how many frames there are in a 90-minute feature film [editor’s note: 129,600]. That’s why the process is so time-consuming. We also use digital technology to improve the sound tracks. We can make tracks sharper and clearer, and get more fidelity to the original recording in range and tone. The soundtrack on the Casablanca DVD has things you never heard before, either in a movie theater or on TV. And with color films, we want to restore the rich, saturated colors that typified the old Technicolor prints, but we don’t want them to be too garish.

B&N.com: I recall The Adventures of Robin Hood being a particularly spectacular Technicolor experience. What were some of the challenges in that transfer?

NP: For The Adventures of Robin Hood, we used a pristine Technicolor print at the UCLA Film Archive. It had rich colors, but it also had a lot of earth tones, and we were very careful not to make the greens and browns look unnatural. We continually reference the source print to make sure we make our digital transfer look as good as possible while maintaining the integrity of the original film elements.

B&N.com: It’s no wonder that DVD collectors are getting excited about the new releases.

GF: Yes, but the problem is that everybody wants everything now. Even so, we’re taking the time to do the restoration work properly. To give you an example: this is the 70th anniversary of the theatrical release of King Kong, which is another title everybody is dying to have. But we have too much respect for fans to release something that’s substandard; and rather than release something just to commemorate the anniversary, we’re taking our time to restore newly found film elements.

B&N.com: What are some of those most-requested titles we can expect to see in the future?

GF: We’ll be releasing some Best Picture winners such as Mutiny on the Bounty and Grand Hotel. Also things like the Tarzan films starring Johnny Weissmuller, the Thin Man series, Warner Bros. gangster movies starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and even some silent movies with Lon Chaney Sr. In fact, we’ve got three Chaneys coming out later this year.

B&N.com: The new Casablanca disc has nearly ten minutes of previously unseen footage that was recently uncovered. Do you think there will be additional discoveries of unseen sequences cut from classic movies?

GF: Well, we always hope we’ll find more. Sometimes those things are stored where they weren’t supposed to be, and in looking for the best elements we go through everything we have. So we could open a can tomorrow and find something amazing. But, obviously, we’re always looking for odds and ends that can be included as extras on the DVD. On Robin Hood, we’ve actually got home movies that somebody took while visiting the set. Imagine that -- home movies from 1938!

B&N.com: It’s a great time to be a collector of Golden Age Hollywood movies on DVD.

GF: Oh, yeah. And believe me, like one of our most famous stars once said, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

August 2003