hooray - hooray - for the Scarlet A!

[Harlett O'Dowd]

Finally working my way thru the TCM gish-a-thon from the other week. This is the first time I ever got to see Gish's The Scarlet Letter (or anyone else's for that matter.)

Could someone give a bit of background on the source material? Half of it looked great, while the other half looked like 500th generation 16mm dupe.

Not that I'm complaining - the most complete original release that can be cobbled together is usually my motto (THe Patent leather Kid being an exception.) But why so many holes in the *good* print? Censorship issues? Decomp? Something else?

Thanks in advance.

[Rodney]

Could someone give a bit of background on the source material?

"Well, it's based on a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, often considered one of the classics of American... oh.... what?"

"Psst, psst, psst"

"Oh.... I see. never mind."

[DShepFilm]

Well, the half that looked great came from fragmentary original material preserved by MGM, but the rest of the film had decomposed years ago.

I have a 16mm print made iin 1935 which I loaned to UCLA, where the restoration was done. I urged them to transfer this print and the MGM material to video and stitch them together, since the 16mm print is not bad although of course no match for the lovely 35mm portions.

Instead they decided to dupe the 16mm print up to 35mm negative, then assemble and print the film in 35mm, then do a telecine; which took the 16mm images down an extra couple of photographic generations.

Too bad for THE SCARLET LETTER, but inadvertently, the loan accrued some brownie points which helped grease the skids getting permission for BARDELYS.

David Shepard

[azjazzman]

Instead they decided to dupe the 16mm print up to 35mm negative, then assemble and print the film in 35mm, then do a telecine; which took the 16mm images down an extra couple of photographic generations.


David Shepard

I am perplexed by this, David. I have seen 35mm blowups from 16mm at UCLA that were hard to tell from original 35mm. I suppose, technically, blowing up from 16mm involves a loss of a generation, why do you say a "couple" of generations? Where is the other generation lost?

[greta de groat]

I caught the end of this the other day. I could have sworn that the version i saw before ended suddenly when Lars Hanson exposed his version of the "A" and i thought it looked truncated. This one had a lot more. Am i remembering that wrong? Anyway, the ending at least looked a lot better than i remembered it, though it was clear even there that some shots were from an inferior print.

greta

[Richard P. May]

I'm sorry that I can't remember the details, but while at WB we found that original negative material existed at Geo. Eastman House.
Together with UCLA, we did a restoration that was more definitive than what had been circulating.
That was about six years ago, and as I say, the specifics escape me, and I do not have access to the records.

[George O'Brien]

I didn't see it this go round, but I have seen it before several times. Certain scenes, such as the Reverend stting at his fireside branding himself with an A, were not in the film the first time I saw it.

These , I imagine, had been cut and were now being restored. They were muddy and of inferior quality to the rest of the film, much like some of the added scenes in the latest incarnation of "Metropolis".