WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 1998
By Jamie Portman
Southam Newspapers
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.
There are sound reasons for bringing Gone With The Wind back to the big screen. First, the newly restored version seeks to correct decades of abuse. Second, because of this abuse, 90% of the population has never seen the film as it was intended to be seen.
The big movie camera occupying an honoured place in the lobby of Technicolor Corporation's headquarters seems incredibly ancient, a clunky forerunner to the sleek equipment that dominates today's Hollywood soundstages.
But 60 years ago, it created visual magic, because it brought colour to the movie screens of the world. The technology reached its zenith in 1939 with Gone With The Wind, which is about to return to the cinema screens of the world in a restored version that seeks to undo much of the damage suffered over the years by one of the most famous movies of all time.
Richard P. May, an expert in film restoration and preservation, says there's a sound reason for bringing Gone With The Wind back to the big screen: "No more than 10 per cent of people have ever seen it in a theatre properly."
That early Technicolor camera hosed three separate spools of film which, during shooting of a scene, would roll simultaneously in perfect register at 90 feet a minute. Once the image entered the lens, it would be split by cube-shaped prisms and pass through three filters before being absorbed by the three film rolls, each sensitive to one of the three primary photographic colours: yellow, greenish-blue cyan, and the purplish-crimson magenta. From these negatives, technicians would create positive relief images or matrices which in turn led to a full colour print. The process was slow, cumbersome and extremely exacting, but the results were magnificent.
"This camera was felt rightfully to deliver one of the most superb colour processes ever invented," May says. It is also the reason that early Technicolor films continue to be visually stunning more than a half-century after they were made, while many later colour films show marked deterioration because of newer techniques and the use of unstable, chemically produced dyes.
When Gone With The Wind starts going back into theatrical release Friday, New Line Pictures hopes to show moviegoers the virtues of the original three-strip Technicolor process. The epic, which starred Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, captured eight Academy Awards, including the Oscar for best picture.
Recently, May showed journalists just how good Gone With The Wind looked back in 1939. A special presentation at Technicolor headquarters offered 20-minutes of footage on a split screen. One half, typical of more recent revivals, revealed a colour that seemed curiously unnatural, even garish. The other half of the screen provided an example of the same scenes after restoration: here the colours were sharp and vibrant, with a crispness of detail and improved contrasts.
Since its original release, Gone With The Wind has been shown in various versions which have denied the film its full impact. The colour process used has frequently been inferior, the soundtrack was allowed to deteriorate, and contemporary projection methods resulted in a cropping of the film's original images at both the top and bottom of the screen.
"We are undoing the gravest of errors done over the years and presenting the movie as closely as we can within today's technology," says May.
"There had been a fair amount of damage to the original three-strip negative because of all the reissues," says May, who currently is vice-president of film preservation for Warner Bros. but whose efforts to restore Gone With The Wind date back a decade to when he held a similar position with Turner Entertainment.
"Every time the movie came out again, things happened. Somebody would leave a fingerprint on the film, which when not corrected made some moments seem blotchy. There were also numerous scratches." Computers were able to correct this kind of damage.
The latest reissue will contain a multi-channel stereo soundtrack digitally reproduced from the film's original outstanding mono mix. Most importantly, the film will be shown it its original formatting, or aspect ratio -- with no chopping off of the characters' heads. Indeed, the new prints have been struck in such a way to ensure that theatres have no option but to show it as it was meant to be seen.
"It's very important to show it in that ratio," May says. "We're going to change nothing. We will still have the overture, we will still have the intermission.
"Theatres have changed, technologies have changed, but we really feel this ethical responsibility to use the new technology only if it's able to give audiences an experience as close as possible to what it was when the film first came out."
Gone With The Wind crops up frequently on television and is available on video, but May aruges
that its biggest impact will always come through the theatrical experience.
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