Deep Throat

It is 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and I'm hear to talk about porn. You see, the Cinefamily theater is running a 35mm print of Boogie Nights tomorrow night, hosted by Doug Benson, and the whole screening got me thinking about the porn chic era of films, and how infatuated I am with this genre.

There are so many classic films that came out by these pornographic filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. Before the advent of home video, it had become common for people to attend them with their significant others and discuss the films as if they were a form of high art. From Deep Throat, to Debbie Does Dallas, to an entire series devoted to a well endowed detective, Johnny Wadd, these films paved the way for a more liberal sexual revolution in the United States. Filmmakers who devoted their art to making these films did so with great artistic value. Although the majority of films were done in a time span of a few days, they always had a great sense of artistic style to them. The acting and storylines may not have always been the best, but they were definitely watchable, and had some merit to them. From New Wave French edit styles to experimental angles with 35mm and 16mm cameras, there was a dedication to the art of filmmaking in pornography. When videotape came around, however, as discussed in Boogie Nights, the artistic quality seemed to quickly fade away. People were no longer seeing the films in the theater, they were watching them in the privacy of their own homes on VHS. Pacing was no longer an issue as purpose was no longer an issue. For the sake of keeping this blog PG-13, I will simply state that couples were no longer going to the theater, watching the movie beginning to end, and then going home to 'discuss' what they learned. These types of 'discussions' were done while watching the films in the privacy of their own homes while the film was being screened on their own private boudoir television set in their boudoir VCR.

Today, because rights revert back and forth between distributors so quickly with pornography and it is such a disposable format, a lot of the films have been lost, even though it has been less than 40 years since they were made. There is no pornographic film archive. There are video archives that stream the films from time to time on their websites, and institutions like the Library of Congress and UCLA do keep a small number of titles in their collection from time to time. However, in terms of a full preservation, with a new internegative, I doubt very much that this has occurred for a film like Deep Throat.

Deep Throat is definitely a favorite film of mine, but being a homosexual, much less than its concept interests me. Linda Lovelace wants to hear 'bells ringing' during intercourse and cannot. A doctor, through demonstration, tells her the reason is her clitoris is in the back of her throat. That's the premise. The film was a huge smash at the box office and the only reason was because it was also one of the most banned films in the United States. The more people wanted the film to be declared obscene by the government, the more money it pulled in. Soon, celebrities were going. Shirley Maclaine, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, and when Jackie Onassis was spotted at a screening, everyone wanted to go!

The film does have some points worth discussing in regards to alternate versions. Beyond having a rated R release to appease people who wanted to see the film but without all of the lewd content, the opening of the film has a troubled history. Originally released by Vanguard Films, the original film opened with a text prologue, including a Sigmund Freud quote, and then went to a long track shot of Lovelace walking by a pier and getting into her car before the main titles start. In 1981, the rights of the film were assigned to Arrow Film and Video, another porn distributor. Because Vanguard Films appears both in the prologue and in this opening shot, both were removed from the opening in most releases, and the more common opening is what you see in the clip at the top of this post. The music varies in different releases too. The music used for the opening in the clip above is different than some other copies I've seen. A rock version of Ode To Joy is used instead while Linda drives around Miami, but I've only heard this music in versions that use the longer opening.

The Italian opening of the film is completely different altogether. The text prologue is in Italian with a different font and color, and the theme music used in the clip I posted is laid against stills of Linda Lovelace in different lingerie poses before cutting to the story of the film. No shots of Linda driving are featured in this version. Because the music used in the original Italian version matches the music in the Arrow rerelease, I am unsure what music was used in the original domestic release. If anyone has more info, I'd be happy to hear about it. Beyond purchasing a 16mm print on Ebay for $1300 or buying the soundtrack to the film (yes, the film does have a soundtrack featuring songs written and performed specifically for the film), it would be hard for me to know this.

The other question I have about the film is the aspect ratio. Different sites have insinuated that while the film was shot 1.37, this was an open matte film and would have been projected at 1.85 in theaters. I have a hard time believing this, though, because if one watches the 1.37 DVD, there is no overhead on the image that could get cropped for a 1.85 release. If the film had been cropped, we would lose foreheads, mouths, and even genitalia, God forbid! I have heard of 1.37 open matte films being blown up to 5% on all edges, but the idea of someone doing that with a cheap film like Deep Throat seems a little extraordinary. Another mystery I have always wanted to solve....

Signed,

The Celluloid Avenger

King Kong Kolorized

So, there are really no words to start this blog piece. All I can do is introduce you to a clip of King Kong Kolorized:

Now, I'll be the first to admit that the horror of this film is the color of King Kong's Kostume (okay, that'll be the last time I do that pun). If you are a true cinefile reading this, I'm guessing the chance of you taking the time to look at that clip was close to 10%. There are certain rules we must abide by in the film historian world. We must all admit that The Graduate was the first modern film (I had a professor who threatened to fail me for denying this in a lecture). We must all admit that Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's is an atrocious portrayal of an Asian, yet think that Peter Sellers in The Party and Apu in The Simpsons are 'cute' and 'endearing'. Most of all, however, we must all admit that the colorization of films is the worst form of graffiti one can do to a piece of art. We applaud at 5.1 upmixes of films that are mono or 2 track stereo, ironically, but veto the colorizing. To me personally, I'll take the colorizing over the 5.1 mixes, but that's a different story.

I, as a cinefile, know that the colorizations are wrong, and that they look awful. But there is something so ridiculous about how they look that I can't help but collect them. To this date, I have over 30 VHS tapes of black and white films that have been colorized, from Hal Roach's It's a Wonderful Life, to King Kong, to all of the Cary Grant films, and my absolute favorite, Metropolis. Growing up in Milwaukee with parents who were incredibly against cable television and where weekend afternoon syndication goes for the cheapest product possible, a lot of colorized films would pass through the stations. Of course they looked goofy, and I hardly ever wanted to tune in, but I couldn't help it. It was like hearing that my mom was going to pop a blister on my sister's finger. I knew it was going to be a painful disgusting experience, but I couldn't help but watch-- I was so curious!

You can imagine how happy I was when I got my VHS to DVD recorder and found that most of the MGM/UA colorized VHS tapes were not macrovision encoded, meaning I could transfer them to DVD without any issues. King Kong was at the top of the list. The Turner colorizations seemed to favor a yellow palate for some reason. During a dissolve, the color will switch to black and white, and come back as color as soon as the optical trick is finished. As you can see from the posted clip, the palate of colors wasn't a wide variety either. And for being of a limited variety, there were some WACKY colors chosen. The cute orange masks that the plane pilots wear always geeks me out. Isn't it interesting that the lead female has a dress that is the exact same color?

Leonard Maltin, bless his heart, once said in an interview, 'if you're bothered by the color, you can just turn the color down on your television set.' Well, here's the issue with that. To do a colorization back in the 80s and 90s, the film needed to be transferred to a 1" video (this VHS has 1" video overhead plastered all over the right edge of the screen), put through certain filters, and have the grain washed out before the color is added to the image. Not to mention, the colors chosen are so bright and smudge the image so badly, that when you turn the color off, you have a terribly washed out, soft, blurry image.

Still, I do enjoy these colorized films for the simple reason that they are a part of our cinematic rerelease history. Just as the cropping of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz for rereleases was done, and years later these and a large batch of films were upmixed to 5.1 stereo for home video, we need to remember that there was a point in time when this was how these films WERE rereleased to the public, and while no one is happy to admit it, for a lot of people, this is how they remembered seeing the films on television, whether that was how the public wanted to see them or not. A former coworker of mine once told me that she had seen Arsenic and Old Lace colorized for so many years without knowing that it was colorized, and when she found out it was actually a black and white film, she was shocked.

Here's an interesting fact I'll bet you did not know. For Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the first couple seasons were originally broadcast in black and white and were later syndicated in colorized form. For the last 20 years or so, many people have seen these episodes colorized, not in black and white. So, when the DVD sets came out, it was no surprise that the colorized sets actually outsold the black and white sets!

Colorizing is wrong, it's bad, it's sinful, it's immoral. Is it? Let's take a look at an example where this so called evil force has been used for good. The BBC has a series of programs which were originally televised in color but only black and white copies of the program exist. You can read more about these tests here:

http://www.techmind.org/colrec/

In a case like this, by studying sources and restoring the color back into the program, the engineers of the project were able to actually make a closer representation of the most original form of the program than when it was first released. Take a peak:

A totally different project done than the Turner colorizations, mainly because the proper research was done in this case. For Turner's work, the idea of turning Frank Sinatra's eyes from blue to brown didn't even phase them! This was noted in a Siskel and Ebert at the Movies episode about the dangers of colorizing movies. The value of these horrible blotch jobs, still, lies in the fact that they are now incredibly rare and out of print. Beyond the fact that VHS is so obsolete now, which is really the only format these existed on, only a select number of each of these were made as they failed so terribly with consumers and nobody wanted to pick them up. Beyond Ebay, it is hard to come across these unless you're a dedicated thrift shopper like myself. Still, when you do, don't turn your nose up. You might be picking up a one of a kind item that people will want to look back at one day...wondering of course how a video distribution copy could ever allow that to hit sales shelves, much like Debbie Reynolds workout video from the 1980s.

Incidentally, if there are people reading this who are shaking their fists in anger because I am attracting attention to colorized movies, I encourage you to channel your anger to another source. There still are colorizations being released, and they look just as terrible as the Ted Turner releases. Sony Pictures released a box set of very orange versions of The Three Stooges. Reefer Madness has now been colorized and released on DVD, with different colors of smoke blowing through the air. Some films, such as It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th St, and Night of the Living Dead, which have established their mark with audiences who remember watching them on TV in color, have now been released in NEW colorizations on DVD. And, while they may look a little better, they still will make you cringe.

Signed,

The Celluloid Avenger

Ultra is a Chor when it came to the colorization of Chori Chori

Okay. Avenging with a vengeance when it comes to this blotch job. The film is called Chori Chori. Here's the backstory. In Indian Cinema, technology didn't develop as fast as it did in the United States...understandably so as the budgets weren't there. Widescreen experiments were done but weren't common practice until the 70s, and it took until the 1960s before color film was commonly used (Indians preferred to use Eastman Color, although one would never guess it watching a DVD today, as the color correction done represents ANYTHING but Eastman Color).

Chori Chori was a 1956 film and a musical remake of It Happened One Night. The film was shot mostly in black and white with the industry's common aspect ratio at the time, 1.37:1. I first saw Chori Chori on VHS. My parents had a copy they had purchased from a vendor on Devon Street in Lincolnwood, IL. Looking at it recently, it looks to be at least 2 generations of VHS transferred from a Umatic 3/4", indicated by the frequent dropouts on the source tape. This film holds a special place in my heart as it has one of the most beautiful music numbers in a Hindi film, called Aaja Sanam. Take a look:

Now, while the VHS we owned was atrocious in many ways compared to the DVD rip above, it did have two musical numbers that, as I mentioned before, were shot in color. One is Pancchi Badun Urit Phiron, which takes place in a park (our main female lead, Nargis, decides to venture off there during her bus layover, which results in her tagging along with Raj Kapoor for the rest of the trip) and another is when the two leads are hitchhiking and come across a puppet show. In 2009, when I was studying at UCLA, I started a project trying to find out what happened to these color elements. The VHS we owned, which included the numbers, was from the early 80s, and it appears that every DVD release that had come out up to that point had them in black and white! Did these color elements still exist? Where was this magical print that was used for this horrendous video transfer? No one knew. But a thorough search found that no DVD included them in color. Here is the puppet number in black and white:

Then, one magical day, a press released was announced. The ENTIRE film was to be colorized and matted to 1.78 for a new HD release. Whaaa? I.....just......wow. That's all I can say to that. Personal opinion only, I believe in keeping things as true to form as they can. And this goes for all ends of the spectrum; upmixing a film to 5.1 is no better than colorizing it. You are tampering with the director's work. For years we nagged about pan and scan being an issue, and now people are cropping because a wider image will appeal to modern audiences. If the people in charge of this project had done a little research, they would have seen how terrible colorization projects were received in the United States and eventually abandoned because of the backlash on how terrible they looked. But, no. They felt that their colorization ways were 'magical'. Now, if this wasn't bad enough, here's where my real beef is. In NO WAY do the colors of the new colorization match the colors of the original sequences as they were shot in color. Take a quick peak at this:

I wish I could upload the original color sequence of this film as a reference. One day I will when I get my VHS to DVD unit working again, but just to give you an idea, I think we can all agree that Nargis did not have purple skin. Whose leg is being pulled into believing this was shot in color? Nor did she wear a pink and purple sari in this number. The blouse was red, the dupata was white. As I mentioned before, it's possible that there aren't any more copies of the original color sequence to use as a reference, but I am sure that there are press photos, reference stills, or something of the sort that could have been used. It's such an insult to the original film-making team to release something like this, and to market it as an impressive project.

One day, hopefully, the color elements will be found, the film will be returned to its original aspect ratio, and a reasonably decent release that would do Raj Kapoor and Nargis proud will hit the market. Until then, I hope people enjoy watching the beautiful noir like number I posted above looking like an Easter extravaganza, as seen in the newly restored colorized clip below:

Signed,

The Celluloid Avenger

My cinefile moment through Yaarana

Welcome to my brand new blog. I have been thinking about starting one for a long time, but today, the power of the Madhuri Dixit Youtube frenzy I got stuck in inspired me to actually start jotting down a few words. Who knows where it will take me? If this starts to ramble, apologies.

Let me introduce myself. I call myself the Celluloid Avenger. I have been working in the film and video preservation world for roughly 10 years. Film and video images mean the world to me. There is nothing like the moving image as a historical document to take you into a specific time and place. And it all started with Bollywood.

My grandfather owned two second-run movie theaters in Pune, India. My mother would go to the theaters every day and catch whatever films were running in the theater and knows more about Indian cinema than most people would, as she has seen practically every Hindi film that has come out from the 1950s to today. While I was growing up, most of my friends were renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Mom, insistent that my sister and I get in touch with our Indian roots, would rent Bollywood films from the local Indian store. Of course, these films would not be subtitled. My mom would sit next to us on a Sunday afternoon, after working a 50+ hour week as an OB/GYN, and with very little sleep, would translate the films to us line for line as the actors spoke them on the screen. Now that, my friends, is dedicated motherhood.

Of course, there was the occasional Bollywood screening at the local theater. My mom would take us and whisper through the lines of the film, my sister sitting on her left and me on her right. I will never forget these precious memories, and the night we went to see Yaraana was one of the most influential evenings of my life, paving the road for what would eventually become my profession. I remember distinctly that when the film started, the projectionist had put the wrong lens on the projector (1.85 instead of 2.35) and my mom was the first to notice. Soon, other people noticed and a near riot started in the middle of the theater (thanks Mom). An important moment in my film education, however, as it taught me the difference in aspect ratios and what anamorphic prints look like. Tweaking the focus throughout the film, the projectionist obviously had no clue what kind of audience he was dealing with. Indian film audiences are known for their loud interaction with the film...cheering after epic monologues, whistling and dancing in the aisles during songs, and shouting randomly at the screen for no apparent reason. Rocky Horror Picture Show has nothing on a Bollywood audience.

The number that you see at the top of this post had a huge impact on me. Hindi films are shot on a cheaper film stock than Hollywood uses. The film gets scratched and worn quite easily as a result. In addition, it is not uncommon, to this day, for 70mm blowup prints to be made. To compensate for the grain of the blowup, plus the fast deterioration of the prints, Indian filmmakers will use EXTREMELY bright colors in the costumes and sets. When the "Mera Piya Ghar Aaya" song came on the screen, it was unlike anything I had seen before. The colors on Madhuri Dixit's orange dress and the dreamlike quality of smoke against the neon pink outfit she wears jumped out on the screen. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. That sharp image quality seemed so 3D, and the music was blaring through the speakers, making my soul dance. Years later, I would learn that the quality of watching a film print, when shot with the perfect exposure and color saturation, can do this. At the mere age at 11, though, all I knew was that I was seeing something special.

The video included above cannot do it justice. Watching it actually pisses me off because I remember what it was like to see a mint print, compared to the shoddy faded piece of crap I included. Sadly, being nearly 20 years old and a B picture, I doubt that the film has been preserved to its glory and that memory will stay as that....a faded memory. Indian cinema is not treasured as much as American cinema. While there is a national archive in Pune, many negatives are stored with the original producers and directors. Every time a print is made, it is taken directly off of the original negative, as confirmed by my sources from the Association of Moving Image Archivists. You can see it too, if you look carefully. The splice marks are always present on every shot on a Bollywood film if it's shot on 35. A proper preservation of internegatives and dupe negatives is never done, which is probably why the colors on the print I saw were so sharp.

While Yaraana is far from a perfect film, it would be a joy to see it on film once more, if anything just to catch this beautiful dance number. Video releases, which we'll discuss on another day, were horrendous before DVDs hit the market, and when they did, a lot of older films were already on the road to decaying. I cannot stress enough how important it is for people to invest in helping the Indian film market in saving their films. From talking to representatives of restoration facilities, it appears that people aren't going off of prints and negatives for restorations. An SD video source is touched up for an HD video release, and the product is then schlopped on the market with no regard to how the image is supposed to look. I hope and pray that an intervention is done at some point, or those of us who treasured these images when they first came out are in serious trouble.

Signed,

The Celluloid Avenger