Nearly as Good as New

 

The past thirty years have been a golden age of film restoration, starting with the 1989 restoration of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Robert Harris led that work, and he has had a hand in restoring many films since then, including Vertigo (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964). It’s a shame that great movies need restoration at all, a state of affairs principally due to neglect by the very studios that made them, often at a cost of millions of dollars. Hollywood studios were far less concerned about art or historical preservation than they were about business, and movies retained little value for the studios after their initial theatrical release.

Peck Moby Dick
Publicity still of Gregory Peck from the 1956 film Moby Dick. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.

 

Indeed that was the situation for movies until home video opened a new and lucrative avenue for the studios in the 1970s and 1980s. Until then, to the extent the movie studios kept original film elements at all, they kept them in slipshod conditions which allowed the films to deteriorate to one degree or another. By the time demand returned for some of the better movies, restoration was necessary to have a salable product. VHS (Video Home System) tapes could skate by with no restoration because of the low resolution of the format, but laser disc was several steps above VHS in quality and created the first push to restore old films.

Laser disc never caught on the way VHS did, however, and its appeal was limited to cinema buffs. The biggest nudge toward film restoration came in the 1990s with the popularity of DVD (Digital Video Disc), an improvement in quality over VHS at about the same price for content and playback equipment. With that change in the market, movie studios saw the value in packaging their backlog of films in the new format, creating a greater need to restore at least some of those in highest demand. Since the turn of the century, high definition televisions and further improvements in home video resolution have brought the home theater experience into the mainstream, and the demand for quality restorations of old films is at a peak and will probably stay on a plateau hereafter.

There is a limit to how much detail the human eye can discern in the limited space of the typical home theater. DVD was a huge improvement over VHS, and Blu-ray was almost as big an improvement over DVD. 4K resolution is not quite as great an improvement over Blu-ray as numbers alone would suggest, simply because the law of diminishing returns starts to take effect. In the confines of a home theater, even using the best equipment, viewers are less able to discern the finer detail there on the screen. 8K resolution is overkill for all but the most dedicated home video enthusiasts with deep pockets.

Another reason for home video improvements driving film restorations less in the future is the switch by consumers from owning content on physical media, such as a Blu-ray disc, and streaming content in a rental agreement over the internet. Already the rollout of 4K discs has slowed to the point that many good old movies may never be remastered for the format. The potential sales aren’t high enough to interest the major movie studios. As to streaming 4K content, that is subject to the vagaries of the consumer’s internet connection. Some of the 4K content may not be as advertised because of the huge bandwidth requirements, and streaming true 8K content would probably require a 5G internet connection and an actual unlimited data plan from a viewer’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).


In any event, these are good times for fans of old movies. Some classic films, like director John Huston’s 1956 version of Moby Dick, which have long deserved restoration but were nonetheless neglected for whatever reason by the major studios, have been restored by smaller distributors of home video content who have determined it would be worth their time and effort. The movie studio Paramount last year restored It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and remastered it in 4K, though in a sign of the times they have released the new version only for streaming and have not pressed discs of it. Another classic film, Life with Father (1947), awaits true restoration, and viewers should meanwhile beware the versions for sale which trumpet digital remastering or restoration.

Life with Father (1947)
Screenshot from Life with Father (1947), with Irene Dunne and William Powell. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Life with Father had also fallen into the public domain; unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, Life with Father has not attracted anew the attention of the major studios. While Paramount has lavished care on restoring It’s a Wonderful Life, slapdash outfits have been appropriating Life with Father for the sales catalog, offering horrendously bad versions of it and relying on the phrases “digitally remastered” and “restored” to dupe the ignorant. They hope naive consumers will infer that “digitally remastered” means “improved”. It means no such thing; it means only that the film has been scanned to a digital format, a necessary step in making analog movie film available for home viewing on a DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K player. “Restored” is a relative term and can mean the absolute minimum amount of work was put into it, as is usually the case with the shadier outfits.

Robert Harris worked on this 2014 restoration and remastering of the 1964 film My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.

Check reviews online, preferably not on Amazon because the reviewers there rarely get to the nitty gritty about the quality of the transfer, and instead prefer to bloviate about the movie itself, seeing it as their chance to be an authoritative movie reviewer like Roger Ebert. Better are the reviews on news sites or websites specializing in film industry or home theater matters because they generally do mention the quality of the transfer, though consumers still have to take some of those reviews with a grain of salt when they include affiliate links to sites selling copies of the movie. Be wary during research and you’ll have less chance to regret a purchase and better enjoyment of a great old movie given the attention it deserves.
— Techly

 

A Corny Time of Year

 

October is corn harvest time in much of the United States, and popcorn has this month dedicated to it in all its glory. The sweet corn harvest was earlier, in August and September, but for field corn and popcorn, October is typically the month when farmers cut the stalks. The Harvest Moon was on October 5th, and at the end of the month corn and corn stalks figure in Halloween decorations and celebrations. Corn will have a part in the celebrations of Thanksgiving and Christmas, too, though for Christmas its part will fall mostly to strings of popcorn for garlanding Christmas trees.

 

Popcorn is made from a special variety of maize, called Zea mays everta, the special popping characteristic of which Native Americans may have discovered long ago when some kernels fell near a cooking fire. It was a long time between that discovery and the one in the 1960s by Orville Redenbacher and his business partner, Charlie Bowman, of a hybrid strain that popped more reliably and twice as large as earlier popcorns. The “gourmet” description added to the packaging of their product was purely marketing. In the meantime, popcorn had become a favorite snack food in America by the early twentieth century and had even become ingrained in popular culture, with the merchandising of Cracker Jack caramel corn and peanuts in a box with a prize, and the baseball song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, which included a reference to Cracker Jack.

ShineOnHarvestMoon1908BayesNorworth
“Shine On, Harvest Moon” sheet music cover from 1908, with corn shocks included in the artwork. This songbook standard was written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. Norworth also co-wrote “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the same year, with Albert Von Tilzer.

The biggest boost to popcorn sales came from movie theaters, even though theater owners initially resisted selling popcorn in house because of the low brow connotations of the snack. Popcorn was cheap, and movie theater owners in the first few decades of the twentieth century sought a slightly higher class clientele. That changed during the Great Depression when theater owners took concession sales away from independent vendors out on the sidewalk and brought the selling of high profit items like popcorn under their own wing in the lobby. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that popcorn sales saved many a movie theater from bankruptcy during the darkest years of the Great Depression.

 

The next big boost to popcorn sales came in the 1980s with the simultaneous advent of home video rentals and the widespread appearance of microwave ovens in homes and, with them, microwaveable popcorn. Suddenly people could save money on a trip to the movie theater and still enjoy a facsimile of their favorite movie theater snack at home. There have been health concerns about both movie theater popcorn and microwaveable popcorn, each for different reasons. Lately there have also been alarms about the use of neonicotinoids, implicated in honey bee deaths and colony decline, as a seed coating for planted popcorn. The good news is that popcorn has not been swept up in the GMO madness.

Cracker jack newspaper ad 1916
1916 newspaper advertisement for Cracker Jack.


The Swedish Chef grooves to the tune “Popcorn”. For an added treat, turn on the captions.

The best tasting popcorn and the healthiest might have been the batches people cooked up themselves on their stove tops at home in the days before they gave in to the tempting convenience of microwaveable popcorn. It’s still possible to make it that way, of course, and it is really not that difficult. The home cook also has the advantage of controlling the amount of butter and salt added, the two ingredients that turn popcorn from a relatively healthy snack into a not entirely healthy one. What makes the concept of home cooked popcorn even more attractive and plausible is the addition to the home entertainment system since the 1970s of video recorders and DVDs, all with associated remote controls featuring pause buttons. No more rushing to pop up a snack during a commercial break! Take some time to relax and do it right.
― Izzy