It was arguments over money that caused the film to be "lost" in the first place. It's a shame that it's still all about money and greed could cause it to be lost again. The best thing to do would be to release it online for free so that everyone could see and learn from it. That way, if others want to restore it using modern methods they still can. I'd rather see it as it is anyway. Before the inevitable re-edited (perhaps even censored) AI "enhanced" version a "serious producer" would shit out and overcharge for.
How is someone who "keeps it locked away" even an option if he believes it "must be seen"?
This seems like the perfect candidate for going on archive.org, if the goal is for it to be preserved and for people to see it.
I also find it odd that he's been screening it for friends since the 80s, yet has only shown it to 24 people.
So you might be waiting a long time.
> he could release his "work output" and own the copyright on that
Probably not in the united States, but other countries (i know UK at the very least) this would be true. The united states requires "creative decisions" to grant copyright. Work output by itself doesn't count.
You could still distribute it, you just couldn't copyright it.
While all those decisions may feel creative to you, its highly questionable whether they are "creative" according to the law (in usa anyways)
For the dreaded special editions of Star Wars, only Jabba's stupid face or the specific shot of the Death Star exploding with that ugly-looking ring would have a copyright of 1997. The original scenes cleaned and restored would still have a copyright of 1977.
I don’t know what I was expected, but it was higher than 25 over 45 years.
He was terrified of the consequences of too many people finding out about the theft; a lot of those views were quite recent.
What this guy has is workprint - someone in the production office probably hastily assembled the available footage into a rough draft. So it's true this could be a 1 of 1 copy but all of the source material is still available.
“The footage, which has been made available to scholars, was screened last August for The New Republic journalist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, who reported that the footage was fragmentary and does not constitute a complete film, leading the industry to conclude that the full film did not exist.”
How do you pitch that?
Nazi Germany and the Holocaust was a living memory for most adults, including Mr Lewis who was Jewish.
How do you help people remember? By showing the horror.
https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/November-2016/Chicago-N...
Using exactly the text you quoted. Since it's about Hitler, Nazi and camps the TV channel ARTE will fund it in a heartbeat. (The current top movie on arte.tv/fr/videos/cinema is "Lili Marleen, un chant d'amour dans l'Allemagne nazie)
> In 1997, Italian director Roberto Benigni won Oscars for “Life is Beautiful,” about a father who uses humor to comfort his young son when they are imprisoned in a concentration camp. ”Benigni stole the idea from me, but he did it well,” Lewis adds.
https://qz.com/613084/jerry-lewis-has-broken-a-40-year-silen...
Yes that’s different.
Both are about humourous men keeping children happy in a concentration camp, with the dark irony that they know (and the children do not) what is to happen.
Please do post a link to the film, if it finally leaks online.
Former 35mm projectionist here. I suspect there are a lot of old stashes like this. In our booth we had a gigantic reel of old 1960s and 1970s horror film trailers that previous projectionists had spliced together until there was no more space on the reel. We were not supposed to save trailers, but no one checked what we did with them after removing them from the film reels at the end of the run and returning those prints to the distributor.
On a quiet summer night, after the last showing had ended and the customers had left, we employees would sometimes lock the doors, get some snacks, and watch these old treasures from previous decades spool by.
The trailer reel included several versions of The Shining trailer, including one that had a slow-motion scene of blood pouring from the elevator that was waaaay longer than the clip in the movie (possibly from one of the alternate cameras, see https://geektyrant.com/news/the-story-behind-the-infamous-bl...). The reel also had some long-forgotten stinkers, including for the 1966 British horror film Psychopath which I only remember because the trailer featured an unusual song structured like a nursery rhyme that I can still partially recall.
A corporate chain took over (Lowes) and sometime in the early 1990s the theater was closed. The space is now a Staples. This illicit reel, if it wasn't thrown out during the closure, is probably in someone's basement. The only way to know the contents is to play it, which is hard to do as not many traditional 35mm projectors are still around or available for screening a 50-year-old reel that might be brittle, gunky, or otherwise damage the machine.
I've heard of similar stashes. For instance, around the same time, I had friends who worked in a photo shop. They had several binders of, um, special photos that they had copied from customers' negatives during the on-site development process.
I visited this basement lair once, which was dominated by a modern color processing machine. I remember flipping through one of the binders. It was very, very strange stuff, like something out of Blue Velvet.
I've used 16mm film with audio on separate magnetic tape, but my god was that a pain to deal with.
Was it a Steenbeck? That's what I used when I was working on a documentary I shot on 16mm film. As I said earlier, it was a PITA. Here's one in action: https://youtu.be/Iiw86naTOPw?si=eu5wcZXWh5oPIqKu
More details here, including about the company's bankruptcy last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steenbeck
[0] https://www.next-archive.com/product/mb51-mwa-albrecht-16mm-...
[1] https://hollywoodfilmsupplies.com/film-supplies/kodak-35mm-m...
And though I wasn't one of the techs that made the prints, I do seem to recall they would spin off dupes for their own private collection(s).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_Film_Find
> In 1929, Clifford Thomson, then employed by the Canadian Bank of Commerce and also treasurer of the hockey association, solved the problem of the library's stock of film and the inadequate ice rink. Thomson took 500,000 feet of film and stacked the reels in the pool, covered the reels with boards and leveled the rink with a layer of earth. The DAAA continued to receive new nitrate films which would later fuel the destruction of the entire complex in a fire in 1951. The films stored under the ice rink were preserved by permafrost and were later uncovered in 1978 when a new recreation center was being built.
“This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.”
“It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic. No one will ever see it, because I'm embarrassed at the poor work.”
I wonder how one goes about engineering a "time-locked safe" such that it opens, reliably, only after 100 years...
It's just an ad. I'd be willing to bet that there is nothing in the safe and the film is just a file in some corporate cloud that will be deleted in 10 years when everyone involved in the marketing stunt has moved on to other jobs.
ocschwar•1d ago
JKCalhoun•1d ago