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Facing the Digital Dilemma
Are you creating films to stand the test of time?
It was still the dawn of the motion picture industry in 1913 when a newspaper critic asked Sarah Bernhardt why she was wasting her precious time acting in films produced for “lowbrow” movie audiences instead of concentrating on performing in stage plays in the “legitimate” world of theater. Her prescient response was that she performed in movies for posterity.
The legendary actress must have had a crystal ball; there are at least 10 documentaries featuring clips of her performances in films, beginning with 1900’s Hamlet.
Try this experiment: Ask your next-door neighbor if he or she remembers the last name of the Lucy who starred in “I Love Lucy.” You can bet the farm he or she will know that the answer is Lucille Ball, who portrayed the zany housewife in the long-running television series. Though the last new episode aired half a century ago, the memory of the seminal sitcom endures because that series—and other programs produced by Desilu Productions—have lived on in syndication for five decades.
“Consolidated Film Industries had the edited negative and outtakes for ‘I Love Lucy’ and other Desilu Productions in its vaults,” says film preservationist Milt Shefter. “That was standard practice, though I don’t think anyone realized how valuable those films would become both as a record of the early history of television in the United States or as a revenue producer in syndication.”
Industry historians estimate that half of the motion pictures produced in the United States from the 1890s until the early 1950s have been lost. The tide began to turn domestically during the 1960s, when a burgeoning television industry created a lucrative marketplace for repurposing films that were produced for the cinema. That trend has gained increasing momentum with the evolution of home theaters, which have steadily evolved from laser discs to VHS tapes, DVDs and now Blu-ray discs.
Shefter observes that the seven major Hollywood studios have been archiving their films in humidity- and temperature-controlled environments for the past 40 years, and in some cases longer. He supervised the design and construction of a 40,000 square-foot archival vault on the Paramount Pictures lot in 1987 and implemented a strategy for preserving the studio’s film assets. He subsequently assisted various other studios with the same process.
Shefter says that today it is standard practice for the studios and other mainstream producers to archive all of their original negatives (including outtakes), the intermediate film used to generate release prints and YCM (yellow, cyan and magenta) separations that are recorded on stable black-and-white polyester film. Shefter notes that properly archived negative and intermediate film will generally retain the original imaging characteristics for at least 100 years.
He explains that YCMs are a comparatively inexpensive insurance policy that can be used to create a new negative that is an accurate reproduction of the original film. Each YCM contains a record of the density of one of the three primary colors. Put them together on a contact printer and you can make a faithful duplicate negative. The current cost for making YCMs for a 90-minute movie in 35mm format is approximately $33,600, according to Beverly Wood, vice president of technical services at Deluxe Laboratories.
Journalist Michael Cieply put this issue into perspective in an article published by The New York Times on December 23, 2007. He cites a report issued by Global Media Intelligence stating that approximately one-third of the $36 billion in annual revenues earned by the seven major Hollywood studios comes from re-releasing films in their libraries to broadcast, cable and satellite television outlets and on DVD. It is widely anticipated that the rapid emergence of HDTV will create a ravenous new marketplace for repurposed films.
That was the upside of Cieply’s story about “The Digital Dilemma,” a 75-page report issued by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in November 2007. The foreword to the report succinctly describes a primary motivation for the project: “Even some of the artists who are the most evangelical about the new world of digital motion pictures sometimes seem not to have thoroughly explored the question of what happens to a digital production once it leaves the theaters and begins its life as a long-term studio asset.”
The report was co-authored by Andy Maltz, director of the Academy’s Science and Technology Council, and Shefter himself. It compares requirements and costs for archiving motion pictures produced in film and digital formats. The report also explores the effects of the growing use of digital intermediate (DI) technology for mastering content.
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This story was published in the Future of Moviemaking 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Facing the Digital Dilemma / Are you creating films to stand the test of time?
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