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RESTORING FILMMAKERS' VISIONS www.postmagazine.com 37 POST NOVEMBER 2015 "The restoration edict is 'Do no harm' but we asked ourselves what to do and decided to digitally remove all her dental work," Harris says. A different creative decision was made for the scene just before Eliza's father sings "Get Me To The Church On Time" as he heads to his wedding. "You can see that Audrey is gauzed heavily and Stanley Holloway is sharp and contrasty," says Harris. He asked cinematographer Gordon Willis, who passed away in May 2014, if they should soften Holloway to better blend him in as the scene cuts back and forth between father and daughter. Willis, who had worked with My Fair Lady DP Harry Stradling, recalled that Stradling used black silk in a matte box as a softening agent. "Nobody cared that Audrey didn't match Stanley," Willis told Harris. "Harry's women had to look beautiful. The two actors didn't match in 1964, and they shouldn't match today." In several cases, including a jump cut in the stylish Ascot racecourse sequence, digital technology enabled the replace- ment of frames that had been removed from shots because they were simply impossible to repair in 1994. On the audio side, Warner Hollywood found the original six-track master, which it dubbed on polyester. But they discov- ered the entire high-end was missing, "presumably because [the master] had 150 runs on it," Harris says. "We later found out that a slight layer of wax was still adhering to the magnetic particles and holding away the playback head. Neverthless, Nick Bergh at Audio Mechanics in Burbank was able to get an audio image from it. That was a very good surprise! Not only getting the orig- inal tracks to run but hearing things in the high-frequency, like bells in the score, that we couldn't hear before." 54 Sometimes restoration means more than preservation. It means restoring the director's vision as much as safeguard- ing image and sound for posterity. That was the case with 54, the 1998 cult film about club life in the era of Manhattan's famed Studio 54, headlined by a very young Ryan Phillippe and Salma Hayek. The new 105-minute director's cut restores 44-minutes of original foot- age and deletes all but a few seconds of studio-mandated footage inserted before its release. It was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year; Miramax and Lionsgate Home Entertainment released 54: The Director's Cut in digital HD on streaming video providers in June. After its release, writer/director Mark Christopher had his own cut of the film "cobbled together on VHS" containing the material excised from the original cut. Over the years, demand built for the film's re-release in a version with Christopher's intent — and the once controversial love triangle — intact. To do a true director's cut, Christopher needed to find the dailies for his 17-year-old title. Post supervisor Nancy Valle discovered VHS dailies in a California warehouse on a palette labeled "to be destroyed" that very day. "The fact that Miramax kept the dailies was a miracle," Christopher says. Still, it was a close call. Next, Valle had to locate the 35mm negative, "another giant project," he con- cedes. She found most of the negative spread out among various warehouses, but "we couldn't find all the material," Christopher says. "In editorial we had to make choices: what we could live with and what we could live without. I'm a pack rat and kept every version — D-2, DigiBeta, VHS — at a friend's house. I looked at certain shots to determine if they'd work or not being uprezed. I decided the grittier shots would work — they step you out of the good negative into the grainy shots then step you back again. FotoKem (www.fotokem.com) made these transitions as smooth as possible; the shots feel very organic and look very underground, very '70s." Christopher was lucky that the dailies tapes — sourced for just about every shot that was up-converted — survived "in pris- tine condition. Blown up to match 35mm film, the tape looked degraded, of course, but it was in fantastic shape." FotoKem telecined the 35mm film to HDCAM SR using Sprit. The dailies were up-converted to HDCAM SR via Teranex. FotoKem senior DI editor Eric J. Wood conformed the project using Christopher's original source tapes, the up-converted material and telecine transfers. FotoKem colorist Kostas Theodosiou used Quantel Pablo for the color correc- tion, meeting the challenge of matching scenes where the tape dailies cut back and forth with the film. Christopher located all the sound and music tracks for a completely new mix at Deluxe with Mark Rossette. "He did a fantastic job; it was one of the most fun parts," Christopher reports. In the big kiss scene between Shane and Greg (Phillippe and Breckin Meyer), which had been deleted in 1998 and was restored in the new director's cut, a strange electronic sound could be heard over Shane's side of the encounter. "It was in all the bootleg cuts, so I put a song over it," says Christopher. "But in the new mix I couldn't turn up the song that much — it was ruining the scene." Fortunately, Deluxe applied its expertise to solve the noise problem. Christopher also had an opportuni- ty to record a new opening voiceover with Phillippe based on the premise that Shane was now Phillippe's true age looking back at his edgy Studio 54 days. "It's rare that an actor gets to look back at his real younger self," Christopher notes. "Ryan's voice is deeper and more gravelly now, and we recorded it in the morning, which also helped," he chuck- les. "The voiceover goes in and out at the top of the movie: Ryan's 20-year-old self and his older self." 54 is currently playing the festival circuit worldwide to critical and fan acclaim, and is also available on iTunes. 54: The new 105-minute director's cut restores 44-minutes of original footage. Director Mark Christopher is inset. www.postmagazine.com SEE MORE RESTORATION ARTICLES ONLINE AT: