Gaining Ground in Film's Reel War

By SUSAN KING

June 16, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The statistics are still sobering--half the movies made before 1950 no longer exist, having been lost, destroyed or having deteriorated beyond repair. But these days film preservationists don’t feel like they are fighting as much of a losing battle.

In the past decade, studios and audiences have become far more savvy regarding the need for preserving film--an awareness driven in part by cable’s American Movie Classics’ annual Film Preservation Festival, which begins today on the cable network.

The festival, which airs restored films, raises money for the Film Foundation, a decade-old organization comprised of several noted film directors, including Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Robert Altman. All money earned goes to the Film Foundation, which in turn splits it among seven film archive members: the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division, the Museum of Modern Art Film Department, the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, the UCLA Film and Television Archives, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the National Film Preservation Fund.

The eighth annual festival kicks off today with a four-day, 32-film tribute to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Included in the festival is the world cable premiere of the restored version of his 1954 classic “Rear Window,” as well as such Hitch favorites as “Psycho,” “Notorious” and “Rebecca.” Several of the titles--including “Marnie,” “Vertigo” and “Torn Curtain”--will be aired in the letterbox format.

Scorsese will provide introductions for “The Birds” and “Marnie,” and Sharon Stone will introduce four of the films, including “Rear Window” and “Frenzy.” Four Hitchcock documentaries and a documentary on film preservation, “Keepers of the Frame,” also will screen during the event.

“Very early in the game, we realized one of the missions of the Film Foundation was to get the word out,” says Robert Rosen, chair of the archivist council for the foundation and the dean of UCLA’s School of Film, Theater and TV.

“When we talked with AMC about making this [festival] an event, we knew it would do three things simultaneously: It would celebrate the cause for film preservation, it would mobilize the creative community and it would actually raise money. Every year, a pretty sizable donation comes into the Film Foundation and every cent of that goes back out to the archives to actually do restoration preservation.”

During the last seven years, AMC has raised about $2 million for preservation. Earlier this month, AMC held a star-studded movie-memorabilia auction in Los Angeles that raised $250,000.

“The whole festival, I feel, has really hit a chord with both studios and the public,” says David Sehring, senior vice president of acquisitions and programming for AMC. “The fact that Universal spent $1 million on the restoration of ‘Rear Window’--it is just great to see the studios are paying attention [to film preservation] as they should be. I think we have made it clear to folks that even the smaller films need help.”

AMC plans include interstitial segments between the films on so-called “orphan films”--documentaries, newsreels, home movies and small, independent films--which are still in dire need of preservation.

“Those are the ones that are really in need of some help because there are no commercial markets for it,” says Sehring.

Films Before 1950 Are Doublechecked

Bob O’Neill, director of preservation for Universal for the past decade, points out that the standards of film preservation in general have changed in the past 10 years. When O’Neill joined the department, the studio’s preservationists were busy checking to make sure they had good safety copies made from the highly unstable nitrate negatives. All films made before 1950 were shot on nitrate film stock.

“We were always looking at endangered titles,” he says. “Now that we have gotten the nitrate pretty well backed up, we are looking at the library, making sure that if we got titles that have safety copies that these copies are adequate with today’s standards.”

Pat Hitchcock, the director’s only child, is thrilled AMC has chosen her father’s work to raise money for film preservation. “It’s so wonderful his movies have lasted,” she says of their continued popularity. “I think the reason is that he made his movies for the audience and audiences basically don’t change. They stay the same.”

AMC chose Hitchcock because of the availability of the restored “Rear Window,” which had a brief theatrical run earlier this year, and the fact that the director is a favorite of Sehring’s.

“I am a fan of the horror and suspense genre,” he says. “Alfred Hitchcock, to me, is one of the kings and made it an art. He can’t be topped.”

Sprucing up “Rear Window” took two years. O’Neill points out that Universal has worked on several of Hitch’s titles in the past eight years. “We are in the process of working on 1956’s ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ ” he says. “We are doing digital work on that. We have worked on ‘Frenzy,’ ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ and ‘Psycho.’

“They have been good titles to work on and good challenges,” O’Neill says. “When you do restorations, every title has its own personality and a lot of variations on a theme.”

“What is fun about film preservation and restoration,” adds Sehring, is it is “all a mystery and a lot of detective work.”

Money earned from the AMC festival has helped finance the restoration of such classic films as “Stagecoach,” “My Darling Clementine,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “How Green Was My Valley” and “Night of the Hunter,” the only film directed by Charles Laughton.

“I don’t know if you know this,” says Rosen, “but Steven Spielberg has said that that movie was the single most important influence on the making of ‘E.T.’ ”

Rosen says film preservation is no longer perceived as an esoteric or antiquarian activity. “What you realize is that these movies are not dead storage but are alive as part of the creativity of the present.”

In fact, Rosen is quite convinced that 500 years from now people will look to movies to understand mankind during the 20th and 21st centuries.

“One of the objections people make is the movies very often didn’t tell the truth,” he says. “But myths are just as much part of our contemporary reality as kings and battles. People in the future--it will be easy for them to know about kings and battles. But how are they going to know how we thought about things? How we even deluded ourselves? They will know through the movies.”

The AMC Film Preservation Festival schedule:

Today

“The Birds”: 5 p.m.

“Marnie”: 7:15 p.m.

“Rope”: 9:35 p.m.

“Topaz”: 11:05 p.m.

Saturday

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith”: 1:30 a.m.

“The 39 Steps”: 3:15 a.m.

“The Lady Vanishes”: 5 a.m.

“Keepers of the Frame”: 7 a.m.

“Rebecca”: 8:30 a.m.