Restoration Work Gives Old Movies New Life

Where the medieval alchemists failed, Hollywood is succeeding.

Studio film libraries, such as Ted Turner’s 3,400-film back catalog, are fast turning their old silver nitrate negatives into gold.

Long after nitrate was phased out because of its extreme flammability, old movies are, in fact, hotter than ever. “The Wild Bunch,” “Gone With the Wind,” “My Fair Lady” and “Lawrence of Arabia” are just a few of the classic films that have been refurbished by film preservationists to their original glory and released again in theaters to blockbusting business.

Now “Doctor Zhivago” has been lovingly restored and opened over the weekend in a 30th-anniversary engagement at the similarly restored Alex Theatre in Glendale, Calif.

“We were one of the top-grossing theaters in L.A. the weekend we did ‘Gone With the Wind,”’ said Alex Film Society spokesman Brian Ellis. “When you get the word out about these old movies, people come out of the woodwork.”

There are several reasons why people violate all the conventional wisdom of the post-video era to drive to a theater and pay more for the same movies that have been available at Blockbuster for years?

First of all, they’re often not the same movies at all. Many of them - “The Wild Bunch” (now playing at the Beverly Center Cineplex), “Spartacus,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Blade Runner” - contain additional footage chopped from the original-release versions. Others have been restored by teams of preservationists to a pristine quality often surpassing the original prints.

And some people just miss the experience of the big screen.

Few movies could be better-suited to the wide screen than “Doctor Zhivago,” with its Oscar-winning cinematography, historical pageantry and classic love story. “Doctor Zhivago” contains no previously unseen footage, but preservationists have reconstructed and cleaned the original negative, creating a brighter, clearer print than those from which most video versions were made.

“They’ve regenerated the soundtrack, too,” Ellis raved.

Look for Turner to release video and laser editions of the print when the theatrical release has run its course. And Turner has commissioned Rhino Records to release a new version of Maurice Jarre’s haunting soundtrack, including previously unreleased scoring and some intriguing reinterpretations.

It is due out later this month.

The task of overseeing “Zhivago’s” restoration fell to Turner executive Richard May. This involved tracking down the actual fragile negative from Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Young’s camera, making an “interpositive” from that, and finally a duplicate negative from which the 17 prints now playing around the country were struck. It also entailed watching the three-hour film more times than May can count.

“I have an ironclad rule that I won’t see a movie more than once a week,” said May, who introduced Friday’s grand opening at the Alex.

Not surprisingly, May anticipates an ever-increasing market for rereleases. He’s already begun work on his next project for the company, the 1954 musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

“‘Zhivago’ looks and sounds probably better than it did when it was new,” he said. “Good things have a life of their own.”

Many pundits originally thought the $1.2 billion Turner paid for MGM’s titles a few years ago was excessive, but with all these ancillary markets booming. plus the rollout of his Turner Classic Movies cable channel challenging American Movie Classics’ primacy in that field, the investment looks smarter by the day.

Turner also owns the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog.

“The studios are doing more to save their old films,” said Robert Gitt, chief preservation officer of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. “Some of the old films are genuine works of art that people enjoying seeing properly, in a good theater and with good projection.”

Perhaps the real reason for film preservation is to give filmgoers the opportunity to see good movies as their makers intended for audiences to see them, preferably in buildings designed for that very purpose. Gitt has a VCR and even a laser disc player in his Studio City home but doesn’t get much wear out of them.

“I don’t use them all that often,” he admits. “I prefer seeing movies the old-fashioned way.”

So, apparently, do increasing numbers of the general public. The same video stores that were supposed to kill off movie theaters years ago have made old movies, once the province of a few revival-haunting bohemians, a going national concern.

A cynic might say that old movies might exert less of a fascination if only new movies were a little better. But regardless of how they measure up from a critical standpoint, the films of today are chemically much more durable. That’s because most prints are struck on a new stock called Estar, a derivative of a much better-known compound - polyester.

To be sure, they don’t make ‘em like they used to. At one time, the silver screen took its name from the actual silver content of the emulsion projected.

Some studios even melted down now-lamented footage for its mineral value or to minimize fire-insurance costs. Ironically, even as today’s movies are made from leisure-suits material, what survives of the world’s film heritage has become more valuable than ever.