THX on 35mm Tech IB preservation - HELP NEEDED (work in progress) — Page 8

msycamore said:

Mavimao said:

So I’ve watched the Italian broadcast and here’s my personal opinion of this particular version: it’s a fullframe 16mm print that’s been cut up, rearranged and shortened. All of the changes have tape splices and judging by the size they appear on the image, they’ve been done to a 16mm print. All of this points to an unofficial version done by perhaps the TV studio.

Here are the changes I’ve noticed compared to the 35mm print (after the obvious changes to the beginning):

At around the 11:30 mark, LUH says ‘THX is that you?’ and she appears from around the corner and then, it cuts to her info text screen. In the 35mm version, it goes from this shot of her coming around the corner to the medicinal cabinet security shot to a shot of a man at a surveillance station and then her text info.

At around 14:52; they cut out a shot of LUH with her face to a wall that cross fades into the nuns walking. In the broadcast version, it goes from a shot of LUH watching the hologram to the nuns halfway through the corridor. Again, there is that tape splice.

At around 15:40, there’s a splice after THX’s second ‘confession’. It’s missing a longer shot of him throwing up.

At around 19:15: Splice! Goes from the men jogging to the malfunctioning guard. Missing two shots: the man looking out the window and the man staring at numbers.

At around 20:46: There’s a minute and 20 seconds spliced out after THX and LUH have their talk in the crowd. It’s missing a surveillance shot and shots of THX at home before deciding to investigate over at SEN’s place. Again, tape splice.

At 23:12: Another tape splice. Missing shots: LUH asking for THX (“Tex??”) and then shots of them praying to the Jedi-monk hologram.

At 24:33. Tape Splice. Weird shower shot is cut.

(subtitle spelling mistake: ‘You’re loosing it’ should be: You’re losing it)

After THX’s arrest, the shot order of this section in the Italian Broadcast matches that of the 35mm and the 16mm.

I stopped here since we don’t have the rest of the film.

Nice detective work! For additional info on the Italian TV-Broadcast DVD, see my old detective work here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/THX-1138-preservations/post/588049/#TopicPost588049

Ah you had noticed the splices as well! They are there even at the beginning what with everything reordered.

Just to add to my opinion that this is a glorified fan edit: if you were reediting a film for major distribution, you wouldn’t use a pan and scanned distribution 16mm print! You’d go back to the original materials and start there! And not only that, but it’s an ITALIAN print (the computer screens are translated and are not just hastily spliced in. In fact this broadcast version “fixes” a mistake in the 35 print. When THX is being probed, there’s an information screen and then a second lf black leader frames - as though they’d run out of Italian screen footage! The broadcast splices this out.). This leads me to believe that this was done by someone in Italy.

While it may not have been the TV station, it could very well have been the Italian distributor who got this film, thought it was weird and created a “faster, more intense” version to sell to TV stations.

Oh man, looking through this… this stands to be a major historical achievement!

thxita said:

“So the scene of THX being messed with by the doctors and convulsing is not in the 35mm but is in the home releases?”

I’m sure it’s in the second part where he gets “jailed” for good. Check my TV broadcast version, they are probably in the same order. I remember subtitling that scene.

As for Lucas, all his THX story comes from the 2004 DVD. Enough said.

He does complain about it in the Maker of Films interview from shortly after the film’s release. There he’s largely bitching about how they disrupted the feel of the movie, how he was editing by feel and how their re-ordering ruined that. I think he was just being hypersensitive about it, though understandably pissed that the studio felt compelled to pointlessly fuck around with it. Even then, however, he makes it seem like it was brutalized beyond recognition, when the changes were (most likely) very minor and didn’t change the tone nearly to the degree that he suggests.

I’ve finished watching the rest of the film by watching the LD and the 1971 16mm print together. Here’s what I’ve found (although I’m sure you all know this already):

“Convlusion” scene comes last in the altered shot order on the 16mm and Italian broadcast, so I assume it will appear at the beginning on reel 3 on the 35.

Nothing changes until the extended SEN scene. The 1971 16mm contains this extended cut. The LD is edited down. INTERESTINGLY enough… The LD has an inserted cutaway shot of the boy when SEN says “Combined Primary Economics”. The 1971 print stays on SEN the whole time.

I went ahead and checked the Italian broadcast and it has the extended SEN scene.

Everything else is the same.

So, apart from an altered shot order in the middle of the film, nothing is missing between the two versions. In fact the 1971 version might have 30 seconds more footage when you take the extended SEN talking to children into account. There you go.

Oh and I might have been mistaken about the translated titles being part of the print in the Italian Broadcast… They also seem spliced in. I know the final shot is spliced in from another print. Someday I may check it out…

thxita said:

Mavimao, you know you just “won” the task of making a visual guide to all the known versions of THX? 😛
(once the whole scan is finished of course)
…oh by the way, second part of THX just reached the scanner. It will be scanned soon.

It actually wouldn’t be that difficult. The versions are not THAT different from each other: the 16mm, the 35mm and the Italian broadcast pretty much follow the same shot order after the beginning with the latter shortened here and there (not unlike modified for TV broadcasts of the time). While it’s true the LD modifies the shot order between THXs arrest and his placement in the weird insane asylum, and the scene between SEN and the children is slightly shortened, everything else is the same as the 16mm.

The Magnificient Ambersons, Greed… Those are films that were taken from their creators and irreversible and severely altered by the studios. From what I’ve seen, THX has just has tweaks.

Spaced Ranger said:
“Coppola insists that THX was barely cut, but to Lucas, they might as well have chopped up the entire movie into little pieces.”

Our evidence and this quote seals the deal for me. THX was barely altered by the producers and GL made a significantly bigger deal out of it than was necessary.

Perhaps he continued with this fiction (and dialed it up!) when the film bombed since it shifts blame from him to the producers.

I sympathize with GL a bit on this one since I would probably have a similar reaction. I write songs and I could totally see myself bitching up a storm if a song I wrote (and that I was really happy with) got tinkered with by my producer or for a radio edit, just because I tend to get really attached to the structure and build-up that I put down. Finding the right momentum and build is like the song telling me that this was the way it was always meant to be, so I totally sympathize with GL reacting in horror to someone fussing with that.

What I really don’t understand is that in the Maker of Films interview GL is acting like they changed the tone of the movie, taking out the humor and the romance. It’s so weird because those qualities are absolutely NOT present in the film. Oh, it does have bits of subtle humor, like the robot cop walking into the wall, or the chase being called off because of budget concerns, but it is absolutely not a warm, romantic movie by any definition. It’s about a world that’s entirely numb and cold, told in a very detached, European fashion. If he really thought those qualities were there…I don’t even know what to say to that, except that it would affirm that, on his own, he has no idea how to make a rousing, romantic, funny, audience-pleasing movie.

" … THX was delivered to Warner Bros. Coppola came by the Mill Valley house on the evening before he was to take the film down to Burbank. Murch showed him a reel, and all Coppola murmured was ‘Strange, strange.’ "

I wonder if Coppola was thinking something like “why oh why did I decide that this was going to be Zoetrope’s first project?”

I guess from my view, if the 16mm is the Warner cut and the LD is Lucas’ original cut, why did Warner go through the trouble of simply re-ordering shots in the middle of the film? If I was a studio head and wanted to make THX more ‘commercial’ I would make a lot more changes to that film than what was supposedly done.

Studio execs often feel the need to change ‘something’ to justify their existence and exert control, it is often arbitrary.

Here is a sample at 1080P of probably the cleanest scene in the scan, it gives an idea of the condition of the film. A lot of the damage isn’t visible once you downsize and compress to NTSC rez like in the previews.

https://we.tl/ZPYsFjpozs

silverwheel said:

I wonder if Coppola was thinking something like “why oh why did I decide that this was going to be Zoetrope’s first project?”

According to Murch:

In November, Coppola came by to collect the final product. After I screened a reel for him, Coppola shrugged, saying: “It’s either masturbation or a masterpiece”

It truly is a masturpiece. I am so appropriating that word from now on, Mr Ranger.

I’m uploading a cleanup sample now, with my internet connection it is going to take 2 hours for the few seconds of footage to upload.

This is just a test, I’m establishing the best workflow for getting this done in a timely manner, the sample is about 80% cleaned up. There is some funkiness around the syringe movement, but I’m only seeing it in the compressed output, so I think it is a quicktime issue, I don’t get the artifacts when outputting uncompressed.

Anyway, this is not really how the final output would look, but I thought I would share some W.I.P. mostly on channel alignment and flicker/noise management. Colour hasn’t been touched much. The final will have more detail, the test scrubbed a bit away, hence the need for tweaking and testing.

I’m still waiting on my new CPU to turn up, currently I am stuck rendering on a much slower laptop, so am mainly working on the workflow at this stage so I’ll be ready to hit the ground running once the rest of the reels arrive.

Any donations more than welcome, I need to buy another 3 HDDs to back this up, and the replacement CPU was a US$540 cost, but the 12 cores should speed things along.
Processing requires a lot of grunt, this small sample is over 60GB (i.e. bigger than a dual layer BD for just these few seconds) in the raw scan format that I work with, so processing, or even just moving the files around is painful on a laptop, it is much, much better on the workstation, so I am looking forward to having it up and running again next week.

I’ll post a link as soon as my snail powered internet finishes uploading it.