All interesting comments, but the title is THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH,
not "men".

Re-reading Jack's note about high speed projectors reminds me, again, of the Metrocolor Lab. They had a high speed 35mm machine in one of their screening rooms, with speed control handled from the auditorium. The projector went up to about 300 feet per minute. It could be heard in the auditorium whe...

Mr. Neame did an interview with Steven Fry about working with Noel Coward for the Academy only a few months ago. I saw this at one of their Coward tribute showings, and it is quite charming.
They have now posted the interview on the website: www.oscars.org.
It is worth watching.

I can't tell you anything about the content of the deleted footage, but having supervised preservation of the film at Turner, have seen it. It has all the trademarks of an attempted epic. The immigrant steel worker who ended up owning the plant and converting it to auto manufacture. His marriage to ...

To answer the second part of the question, Yes, tinting and toning were often used together with some fascinating results. You could have an orange base (highlights) with blue shadows, for instance.

Re Fuzzy Knight: There was (is) an MGM short from about 1929 entitled "Fuzzy Knight and his Little Piano".
The title pretty well sums up the act.

What I found amazing is the examiners watching the screen all day.
Two rows of image, high speed, and wondering how many hours of the day they couldn't keep attention on the screen.
MetroColor turned out very high quality prints.

Jack, Let's elaborate a bit on the printing of Technicolor originated pictures on 16mm Eastman: The general practice would be to make a 35mm interpositive from the 3-strip negatives. From that IP, an optically reduced 16m negative is made on color negative stock, along with a 16mm sound track negati...

Sorry, too early in the morning. I meant 90 feet per minute.

My comment about the running time has nothing to do with anything else. As far as I know, Photoplay has nothing to do with TCM's programming. They have certain licenses for European exhibition, thus their announcement on their website. I didn't think to look at last night's showing, but will bet it ...

Any change in the running time of THE BIG PARADE is due to changes in projection speed. When I supervised the restoration at WB in 2004 we used the original negative housed at Geo. Eastman House. Photoplay was supplied with a new print from this restoration, with original tinting reproduced based on...

Ed, Re your suggestion regarding "colorizing" those sections of MAMMY where color elements don't survive: Two things come to my mind - the first is cost. Even though CZing is faster than it was in it's early days (now about 20 years ago, gad!), it still costs plenty. Second, I think the contrast bet...

A full restoration was done by UCLA Film Archives around 20 years ago.
The upcoming showing includes a presentation about color in movies given by Bob Gitt, who supervised the BECKY SHARP restoration.
Take a look at today's L.A. Times, which has an article about it.

Let's turn Jack's comment around. Most of the restoration/preservation work done in the labs is photo-chemical. Digital is used for high-profile or extremely difficult movies (RED SHOES, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, etc.). Digital is extremely expensive compared to...

Some of the MGM silents which were preserved in their own lab during the 1970s had dialog cards replaced with plain "typewriter" font. Apparently the MGM optical department did not have the choice of many fonts as we have had later with computers. The text was just typed on a piece of paper and phot...

Danny, Yes there were some superimposed titles during the chariot race in the 1931 reissue version of BEN-HUR. drednm, Titles were often shot on different film stock which decomposed faster than the action scenes. In working on restoration of silents we find the titles often on DuPont, and the actio...

It's been a while, but as I remember it was just the case of the surviving elements being beat up, with scratches, digs, etc. It was an entertaining picture if you just turn on your internal "film repair" state of mind.

Nigel de Brulier appeared in the 1941 Republic serial CAPTAIN MARVEL. It was reissued under the title THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN MARVEL. Although his name appears in the credits of every chapter, he actually is only on screen in Chapter One. He plays Shazam, the wizard that gives Billy Batson (Frank Coug...

Turner Entertainment Co. preserved the 35mm existing elements on DANGER LIGHTS as part of the RKO library. There was no sign of any 70mm elements remaining at that time (early 1990s).
The 35mm was in pretty rough shape.

Another trivia note none of us has mentioned (unless I missed seeing it),
GOLDEN DAWN was filmed in 2-color Technicolor.
As with most of these, the color elements do not survive.

Sure there were, but the volatility of decomposing nitrate still went up occasionally. By the mid 1950s nitrate had not gone out of use very long, and since it was the common film stock people were not uncomfortable handling it. All negatives and protection material up to 1951 were nitrate. The bigg...

It's really interesting watching these comments, and seeing GOLDEN DAWN come back to life again. About 20 years ago we had in the Turner Entertainment library maybe 25,000 prints for TV syndication (before the common use of tape). Among these was a shelf of never circulated film. I was curious about...

When I was at Turner and WB, Texas Moon and Viennese Nights were not part of the pre-1950 collection. There were original prints at UCLA which they preserved.
It's possible music rights or some such thing kept these out of release.

DM

Tyrone Power Sr. had a fairly big role in THE BIG TRAIL.
He wore a beard, and played a grizzled pioneer, but even looking hard I didn't see any resemblance to Jr.

They're not meaningless if you are a recipient. (Not me)

Well, the good part of this story is that the playback discs themselves, the studio copies, were copied to optical tracks and matched to their respective films. This gave them a practical use, reproducing the sound.

As long as we're on the subject of discs for MGM's early sound features, we had a large number of "masters" for pressing these that survived when Turner took over the MGM library. These were chrome plated, mirror like, metal discs with ridges instead of grooves. They were used to manufacture multipl...

It was probably not recorded on disc, as MGM used film. My guess on MADAME X would be only a preliminary work copy of the track survived. Preservation would possibly have been done at the MGM lab in the 1980s, and the nitrate original material didn't survive much longer. A good number of the early M...

Rob is right about using an existing one of a kind print as a source for a new preservation negative. This is a common practice with restoration labs. I'd guess the problem with the Cinematek is money. UCLA and LOC along with individual labs need funding for these things. In addition to its supposed...

Good idea. I wouldn't want to see an "early film Wikipedia", but there are a whole lot of people who have become "Nitrateville acquaintances" than can productively contribute.