Our story starts in 1967.
OK, all you furious pedants out there, getting ready to split hairs. Yes, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window was made in 1954, but… we’ve gathered here today to celebrate this masterpiece in anticipation of its limited theatrical reissue thanks to TCM’s partners at Fathom Events. Fathom will be screening Rear Window in select theaters on March 22 and 25 (click here for information or to buy tickets), but if you’re lucky enough to live near one of those theaters and go see this American treasure on the big screen, you won’t just be celebrating the good decisions Hitchcock made in 1954. You’ll be celebrating the good decisions other people made, much later, to unmake the bad decisions Hitchcock made in 1967.
In 1967, the rights to a set of classic films reverted back to Hitchcock. He now owned Rope, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, and Vertigo outright. But as any homeowner reading this knows, the downside of ownership is that you also own the cost of upkeep. And the cost of preserving films is staggering.
Let’s put those costs in practical terms. Back in 2001, I traveled to New York to screen the film noir Gunman in the Streets at the Anthology Film Archives. I brought the film with me on the train—it weighed 200 pounds and occupied a stack of metal cans that was exceedingly difficult to manage. And that was just one print, of one film.
The thing is, if you want to preserve a film, prints aren’t what should be attracting your attention. The print is the final downstream deliverable, to use some corporate buzzwords. If anything happens to the print—damage, fading, whatever—you’re stuck with the damage.
So what’s the correct upstream source element? Well, camera negatives are good—but there’s something you need to know about them. When you cut and splice film, there’s a join where the two pieces of film have been glued together. It’s visible, and ugly. So to hide the join, you splice the film to a piece of black leader of exactly the length as the next shot, and then splice it to the next shot. Then, you have a completely separate reel with black leader where the first shot was, and it’s spliced to the “missing” second shot from the first reel. And so you end up with one complete copy of the film, made of original camera negative, but which consists only of the odd-numbered shots, and an entirely separate copy of the even-numbered shots. You need both sets of reels (called A/B rolls) to make a print… and you need twice as much storage space as you may have originally thought.
Except, that’s not enough. Let’s say your film has effects in it. I don’t mean elaborate special effects, but anything you couldn’t do in-camera: credits that appear over the opening scene, for example, a fade to black, a dissolve, any optical effect or matte. These things have to be composited separately, so now in addition to your A/B rolls you may have some intermediate elements containing the composited portions.
Movie prints are not usually run off the original negative. That exposes the irreplaceable negative to too much handling and use. Instead, you’ll run it as needed to generate a Master Internegative, in which the A/B rolls and extraneous composited elements have been combined into one package—and it’s this that is used to run off the prints.
And that’s just picture elements. Soundtracks start off as raw recordings on magnetic tape, which are mixed and cut onto master mag reels. These are used to create an optical track (that squiggly white line down the side of the film) for printing onto final release prints.
Storing all the elements involved in preserving a single motion picture can easily require an entire room’s worth of available space, which has to be temperature- and humidity-controlled. Now multiply that by five (Hitchcock won back the rights to five films) and multiply it by the monthly fees that will be incurred, on and on, for years and years and years.
In 1967, Hitch was nearing the end of his career. Getting ownership of these five classics was a Pyrrhic victory. The cost of maintaining all that stuff was more than he could reasonably expect to make in rentals from decades-old pictures, in an age before home video.
So, he junked a lot of it. Just threw it away.
The things he threw away included: all the original soundtrack recordings; all foreign-language elements; all the trailers; all the intermediate composite materials.
These aren’t “lost” in traditional parlance, which generally refers to items whose whereabouts is no longer known, but which might resurface unexpectedly anytime. The recovery of some early Hitchcock silent film a couple of years ago came about because the supposedly “lost” films turned up in an archive.
But for these items, there’s no doubt about what happened to them. We know they were destroyed. They aren’t coming back.
All Hitchcock kept were his A/B rolls, the final composited masters, and a 35mm final optical soundtrack master. That’s all. And he stored them for fifteen years in a Los Angeles warehouse that he got for cheap because it didn’t have any temperature controls.
Hitchcock died in 1980, and a few years later Universal Studios acquired ownership of those films from his estate. In 1983, the materials were moved from the decrepit conditions of that warehouse to proper storage facilities maintained by the studio.
Our story skips ahead now to the late 1990s, when a team of restoration specialists including Robert Harris were working to revive a variety of old films for future preservation, and to make them viable for re-release on the technically more demanding home video platform of DVD.
The role of DVD in this shouldn’t be underplayed. Firstly, the potential revenues to be had from home video exploitation helped justify the expense of doing this at all (you could actually go and make a brand new, low-budget, movie from scratch for the cost of cleaning up Rear Window).
Additionally, DVD made doing this essential preservation work more urgent. When Rear Window was first screened back in 1954, it was most often shown in theaters that hadn’t upgraded their projection facilities since the switchover to sound in the 1930s. The haphazard quality standards in most theaters meant that any imperfections in the source material would generally be papered over.
If you put on the Rear Window Blu-Ray however, or better yet go see the Fathom Events screening, you’ll be seeing it in a projection environment that is more exacting and unforgiving than anything in place in 1954.
Personally, my first experience with Rear Window was on a VHS tape that had been recorded from an off-air broadcast from an independent TV station that ran a faded 16mm print. I remember when I saw the theatrical revival in 1999 of Harris’ restored version, and it was like seeing new colors. But getting there was anything but easy.
When Harris and his team got to Rear Window, their hearts sank. All those years of bad storage had taken their toll, and the colors were faded to almost nothing. The soundtrack was also a mess—the 35mm optical master had been manufactured improperly, and was just barely this side of usable. But Hitchcock had destroyed all other elements decades before, and they had to find a way to make do with what they had.
I won’t go into the details of how they achieved the magic they did—there’s a 50 minute documentary on the disc that does that if you’re interested. What I’m more focused on is why they had to do this magic.
There are some knee-jerk default positions in film studies, prejudices if you will. I tilt against those windmills in this blog from time to time. And this is a story that combines so many of these prejudices in one go. Here is a story about one of the greatest directors of all time (you’re welcome to delete the words “one of” from that sentence if you wish), who got ownership of some of his greatest works (again, strike “some of” if you’re so inclined) and then very nearly destroyed them, because that was cheaper. It took the intervention of a faceless corporation, motivated in part by greed, to restore Rear Window. And if you go see it tomorrow or later this week, expect to be dazzled by the richness of the colors, the careful nuance of the soundtrack’s multilayered texture. It has most decidedly been restored.
There are a number of online classic movie forums I frequent, and among them there tends to be a prevailing attitude that they are somehow owed perfect presentations of any movie they’ve ever heard of, and that any imperfection in a film’s presentation is the result of the incompetence of the people who presently own it. I think they would find it shocking to understand that it took many hundreds of thousands of dollars and teams of arcane specialists to make landmarks of pop culture like The Godfather and Star Wars anything other than a pile of vinegar and ashes.
Restoration is not something to be taken as a given. But Rear Window has been restored. It is an enveloping sensory experience, best appreciated with a crowd—and for a limited time this week that experience is available in a close approximation of its original form. And that is no thanks to the genius who made the film, but rather thanks to Mr. Harris and his team.