Big names teaming up to restore films
Scorsese, Spielberg and Universal Pictures fight to save crumbling footage
Movies aren’t just a career for filmmaker Martin Scorsese — they are an obsession. He and his pal, Steven Spielberg, are in the forefront of trying to save some of America’s early motion pictures that are crumbling before our eyes.
“More than half of the films made before 1950 are gone,” he says. “I don’t know how we’ll catch up. We’re trying to have a systematic form.”
Part of that form is his work with the Film Foundation (which he founded) and a new agreement with Universal Pictures. They will restore a handpicked collection of Universal movies, including two versions of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, My Little Chickadee, Destry Rides Again and Winchester ’73.
Scorsese says he first became aware that film had been manufactured on an unstable cellulose nitrate base when he attended a 20th Century Fox retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “They were showing all nitrate studio prints and black-and-whites, and they were glorious,” he says.
“Then . . . I went to see Niagara and The Seven-Year Itch, and the prints were pink. You could hardly see the eyes. You lose all the expression and emotion . . . that’s when I first realized.”
The nitrate base is not only unstable, it’s highly flammable. Through his Film Foundation, the 75-year-old producerdirector has been leading efforts to convert the fragile re- sources to a more stable matrix.
Scorsese was born in New York’s Little Italy, and he remembers his first movie (and his first cinema crush) Duel in the Sun, when he was only 4. For the man who made such classics as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino, filmmaking has always been about learning something. That’s why he champions the works of some of the more obscure filmmakers.
But for him, the three American movies that influenced him the most were On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane and John Cassavetes’ Shadows.
“There are foreign films, too,” he adds.
“The two that come to mind, for example, are 8 1/2 and The Red Shoes ... When I was 5 or 6 years old, I saw neo-realist films. And they also influenced me a great deal.”
One of his failings, he says, was avoiding silent movies.
“I disregarded completely silent cinema until the late 70s, early 80s and mid-90s,” he says.
Now the silent images of artists like D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage fill Scorsese with admiration.
He says he’s trying to introduce younger filmmakers and cinema fans to the early masters and to some underrated B movies.
The problem is budding movie buffs have little concept of the past, he says. “I talk to some student groups sometimes, I’ll mention Sweet Smell of Success. I’ll mention Andre De Toth, and I’ll mention John Ford’s Wagon Master, and suddenly I realize they don’t know what I’m talking about.
“And so I have to say, ‘OK, how many here have seen a De Toth film or Jacques Tourneur’s The Cat People? And you find that, unfortunately in many cases, film history starts with maybe Forrest Gump. Maybe. But I said that yesterday, and I was told, ‘That’s too early,’ ” he smiles.
Most people would be surprised to learn that the grand scale Hollywood spectacle is one of Scorsese’s favourite genres.
“I always admired the big epic films like The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur and, to a certain extent, The Robe,” he says.
“I’m predisposed to these spectacles,” he laughs, “and when I started making movies, they’re all close-ups.”