criterionforum.org

tenia wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2023 8:16 am And as I wrote above, The End of Summer got a release in France in 2020.

andyli wrote:

tenia wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2023 8:16 am And as I wrote above, The End of Summer got a release in France in 2020.

But that one was from a rather dated master, no? This time it seems to be a (new) 4K restoration...

David Fear wrote:James Mockoski has been the restoration supervisor at Zoetrope Studios for more than 20 years, having overseen a number of reworkings and rereleases of Francis Ford Coppola’s work. (The incredible “final cut” of Apocalypse Now from a few years ago? That was his doing.) This past March, the archivist got a phone call from his friend Lauren Elmer, who happened to be running postproduction over at A24. The company just acquired a library title, she told him. Would he be interested in helping out with a 4K upgrade? The minute he found out it was Stop Making Sense, he jumped at the chance.

“It aligned so well with what I was doing with Francis’ work, in a way,” Mockoski says. “I wanted to know what they were working with, and she told me that the Talking Heads’ manager [Tomas Cookman] had got everything in from the previous distributor. They sent me a list, and there were almost no film elements included. There might have been, like, one screening print, and that was it. I asked, ‘So, where’s the negative?’ And the answer was, ‘Well, it should all be there.’ Which was … not quite the case. Not at all.”

“Keep in mind,” he adds, “this was back in March. A24 had already set a date for September; they had a trailer with David in the big suit, they had a deadline that needed to be met. And it was just like, we didn’t have enough to get this done.”

The first thing Mockoski did was call the Demme family, which had turned everything over from the estate to Wesleyan University. He began sorting through the archive, and found the materials that Palm had been using to make DVDs and Blu-Rays of the film for the past 20 years. The problem was, it was basically a second- or third-generation copy of the film. “It was like, we have a few copies now,” he says, “but where was the print that made those prints? The band wasn’t going to be in charge of the film elements; that was not their thing. I kept asking [producer] Gary Goetzman, ‘Are you sure it’s not sitting somewhere in your garage?’”

After going down a few dead ends, Mockoski finally ordered a “scan” of the best print they had and assumed he’d do the best he could with that. Time was running out. Then he decided to make one last-ditch effort to locate the original negative. On a whim, he called up Scott Grossman, who oversaw the library of titles owned by MGM. “I just said, ‘Look, I know you have no connection to Stop Making Sense; there’s no controlling interest, it’s not an MGM movie, and I can’t think of a single reason it should be there. But please, I’m begging you, can you just look and see?’ He told me, ‘You have no idea how many hundreds of ridiculous requests I get every day, there’s no way I can go chasing after every one of these.’ But I think I caught him on a good day, and he told me he’d check around and if he found anything, he’d reach out. I was like, that didn’t work.”

“Then 10 minutes later, my phone rings,” he continues, “and Scott has sent me a picture, with the caption: ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ And there was the original negative for Stop Making Sense. It had been sitting on a shelf in Burbank and no one had checked it for almost 30 years. It wasn’t even used for the version they put out in 1999; that copy they struck from prints that were several generations removed.” When Mockoski finally laid eyes on it, the negative was practically pristine. “It looked brand new. There was zero wear and tear. Being lost was the best thing to possibly happen to that negative.”

A similar thing had happened to the original audio for the movie as well. Todd-AO, the postproduction company that specialized in sound work for theatrical distribution, had gone out of business, and the property owners in L.A. were going to tear the building down. But there was a vault filled with various projects that had not been picked up, or remained in limbo thanks to unpaid bills, and the word went out that any unclaimed item would be destroyed as well. Thankfully, according to Mockoski, someone — “I think it was Sony” — stepped up, rented a semitruck, and drove the inventory to a warehouse in Kansas in order to store it. When he began making phone calls, he inquired about any materials they might have on hand. And once again, he was lucky enough to strike gold: The original audio tracks had been sitting in a vault for years, untouched.

This discovery ended up being a huge help to Harrison and Thorgren, who had already begun a Dolby Atmos remix on the songs featured in the movie. They had been using a combination of materials they’d gathered from Rhino Records (which had planned to rerelease the soundtrack this August) and Palm. “It helped that he and I had mixed the original Stop Making Sense back in 1984 — not the movie, but the album,” Harrison notes. “We already had the reference points.”

But they, too, had found there were gaps that were slowing them down and slightly hindering their work. “I’d get an email from E.T., and he’d say, ‘We can’t find any of the audience tracks. How do we bridge the songs to stitch all of this together?’ And thankfully, once we found the original audio tracks, they had all of that. The only thing missing from the original audio were the overdubs that Demme did when he was editing and sound-mixing the film, to fix some mistakes that were made at the concerts — but then Rhino happened to have the mix that did have the overdubs on hand. It was just a matter of combining all of these elements like jigsaw pieces and getting the puzzle put together.”

...

The fact that the band had the recordings transferred to digital tape — an unusual and quite prescient thing to do in 1984, especially for a live show — ended up being a huge help when it came to the restoration as well. It was a decision that the band made early on, Harrison says, “because we knew we were recording for film, and there are always reasons to rerecord when it comes to film. And we also knew that the more we did that, the more we’d wear down the tapes and lose fidelity, so the idea to do it digitally and not risk losing generations was the way to avoid that.” The only issue was that, when it came to using the DASH [Digital Audio Stationary Head] tapes for the restoration, it was near-impossible to find the vintage technology to play them, or find anyone who knew how to work the machines. “Luckily, our sound guy knows everything inside and out,” Mockoski says, laughing.

hearthesilence wrote: Wed Sep 27, 2023 6:35 pm Essential reading on the restoration of Stop Making Sense.

It really highlights how much of it is luck...

jazzo wrote: Wed Sep 27, 2023 9:44 pm What an incredible tale.

A small, selfish part of me wishes that the negative to Swing Shift could have been found, untouched over the forty years, and a Demme cut struck from that.

hearthesilence wrote: Mon Jul 31, 2023 3:33 am Andrew Davis has been working on a 30th-anniversary restoration of The Fugitive that will hit theaters this fall in a limited release.

furbicide wrote: Thu Aug 24, 2023 6:13 am Oops, major caveat to the above – the disc has a German dub and no original soundtrack option!

From the company's Facebook page, in response to the following customer query (auto-translated into English):

https://www.facebook.com/ostalgica/post ... HUm47KCvPl

Robert Sigl wrote:Without the original Russian version and without an explanation???

Ostalgica wrote:unfortunately there are legal issues. That’s why we can’t publish the Russian soundtrack.

Unfortunately that's pretty decisive for me. How disappointing!

furbicide wrote: Thu Oct 05, 2023 11:24 pm

furbicide wrote: Thu Aug 24, 2023 6:13 am Oops, major caveat to the above – the disc has a German dub and no original soundtrack option!

From the company's Facebook page, in response to the following customer query (auto-translated into English):

https://www.facebook.com/ostalgica/post ... HUm47KCvPl

Robert Sigl wrote:Without the original Russian version and without an explanation???

Ostalgica wrote:unfortunately there are legal issues. That’s why we can’t publish the Russian soundtrack.

Unfortunately that's pretty decisive for me. How disappointing!

So I've now heard from someone who's bought the Dead Man's Letters Blu-ray that it does, in fact, have a Russian audio option. Have ordered the disc and will report back!