Free "farewell" Screening of 1977 Star Wars collector's print (British I.B. Technicolor) — Page 5

Y'know, 2012 would make more sense as a release date for the bd at this point. Indy was rumored to be hitting the format this year and .... still no announcement. A lot of big catalog titles are hitting this year, but not all of them (for example, still no word on Lawrence of Arabia). 2011 is Raiders' 30th and '12 is Star Wars 35th. If they actually end up remastering the OOT, we'd get it just in time for the mayan apocalypse.

oh yeah, totally forgot about C5.

Baronlando said:

Mielr said:

I made a thread:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/forum/thread/302634/senator-theatre-farewell-screenings-of-star-wars-technicolor-ib-print

The more eyes that see this- the better. :-)

Good idea. (The force.net and the official site have a blurb every time a new sticker book comes out but didn't mention this.)

Yeah that bugs me too. Every time Peter Mayhew shows his face in public or every time there are more than two Star Wars fans dressed in costumes standing in the same room, this site will post it as news, while ignoring important stuff like this.

Yup, I gave up going to tfn and posting in their forums a looooong time ago.

The force.net and the official site have a blurb every time a new sticker book comes out ...

LOL how true

This confirms one other thing: the Death Star interiors are not neutral grey. They are frequently green and blue tinted. I had suspected this from other sources but this just further confirms it.

People tend to think they should be a neutral colour because of the GOUT. But the GOUT/DC is not a good colour reference in this respect. The print is so washed out and pink shifted from fading that any colour that was originally there would not be detectable.

Now, the Technicolor print might have a tinge to it, and the photographing camera white balance may shift things more. But they could not possibly be responsible for the entirety of the green and blue tint. The rest of the image just looks so...right. The skin tones in particular are a dead giveaway--they look vivid and natural.

Here are some examples from the I.B. print.

Don't those look fantastic? So vivid! These shots are some of the more extreme examples--the green and blue tints vary in intensity from shot to shot. There's little consistency. And this should be considered a valid element of the original cinematography. Again, the print and the camera white balance might exaggerate things a little, but they could not possibly explain all of it.

Further proof? The 70mm cells collection from the 1990s. The Death Star is incredibly green in those. I thought maybe it was a bad print, but not any more. Also, in their 1979 book The Movie Brats, I always remember that the authors refer to the Death Star as a "grey-green" world. Not grey. Grey-green. Coincidence? Doubtful.

To confirm this, I re-timed the GOUT to natural levels. Here is the same shot of Han from the GOUT. The DC is even more pink and washed out than this.

Pretty gross looking. The 1985 IP is fading, so the image is washed out and pink shifted. First, I boosted the saturation by 40 points to get it to a level of vividness that matched the Technicolor print. The walls of the Death Star began to look pink; the tinting is otherwise hidden because the colours were so washed out. Then I dialed out the pink until skin tones looked natural, like on the Technicolor print. Dialing out a pink shift means adding green and some yellow (complementary colours) to neutralize the shift. The result looks something like this:

This is not exact; by Han's skin you can see it needs more green to get rid of some red hues, and a bit of yellow might make it better too, and the walls maybe need more blue and less green. The image lacks the deep contrast of the Technicolor print, which would bring out the colours further. But you can see--the Death Star walls here have a green hue that is very similar to the Technicolor screencap.

Now, as I mentioned, not every shot is like this. In fact, a couple shots are pretty neutral. But most of them aren't. So the green and blue hues of the Death Star interior are the original cinematography.

Didn't it turn out that the death star walls were straight black but then Gil Taylor had them quickly repainted to be something, anything, that would show up better. And the throne room in Jedi was like a do-over attempt, like "how black can we get away with? (and the answer is none. none more black.")

Anyway the new website looks to be really cool, zombie. For what it's worth I still had this still of the 77 theater screen, can't remember exactly where I grabbed it though.

I think you're partly in the wrong thread, but yeah I have that too. It was posted by one of the x0 people years ago to demonstrate the new starfield of the 1981 crawl I think. This is the series of photos I am looking for though.

Also, re: death star. I don't think he had them repainted. He mentioned in an interview with American Graffiti that when he showed up on set and saw how dark it was his solution was to cut holes in the set walls and have the set light itself (the trademark light panels), so that he could motivate the light and also be able to shoot more quickly. Return of the Jedi had similar struggles because the characters (all three of them) are dressed in black from head to toe so its hard to get edge definition. But as far as I know the Death Star wasn't repainted.

Yeah, the camera or print definitely shows a minor colour shift. As I mentioned, that is responsible for part of it but it could not possibly explain all of it, there is simply no way you could get colours that deep and that vivid while also having the most natural skintones (and other colours) that I've ever seen in a Star Wars film. It also varies from shot to shot, even though the camera settings were the same, so its the print that has the tinting in the first place, even if the camera nudged the colours a bit. So like 90% of those colours you are seeing are authentic, and they match other sources too. Even your test pic there looks undersaturated compared to the I.B. print, so the subtle green shift would be almost as noticeable as the photo if it were at comparable levels of intensity; you would also see there is still some pink in the image, which means it needs to be counter-shifted further. I don't think its possible to correct the GOUT to same colour levels because of the fading and the transfer, so you can only get a rough approximation. So anyway, while the screening photos may not be 100% exact, they are the closest to the original colouring that anyone has ever seen, and certainly can be used as a reference of about 90% accuracy IMO, at least in most shots.

Well, what you are asking for is basically what was screened here, so...

It is very interesting that the Death Star actually did have blue walls, unlike pretty much every home release before the SE.  I always hated the blueness of the 2004 dvd, but it looks like I have to clarify that dislike into the particular shade in which it was rendered, not the presence of the colour itself.  They definitely overdid it to the extreme for dvd, though, evidenced by Vader's armour frequently appearing blue-cast as well, and of course the crushed blacks and pink saber and laser blasts certainly don't help.

It's strange how even within the print the colour varies as much as it does.  Some shots are nearly grey while others are very blue indeed.  Regardless, I can't help but marvel at the lovely contrast and detail; I've never seen it look that good anywhere.  Even though the GOUT colour can't be made to look like that, it would be cool if someone were to take a shot at getting it to a closer resemblance.

Fang Zei said:

Y'know, 2012 would make more sense as a release date for the bd at this point. Indy was rumored to be hitting the format this year and .... still no announcement. A lot of big catalog titles are hitting this year, but not all of them (for example, still no word on Lawrence of Arabia). 2011 is Raiders' 30th and '12 is Star Wars 35th. If they actually end up remastering the OOT, we'd get it just in time for the mayan apocalypse.

 Indy isn't supposed to be coming until Nov/Dec and the rest of the year DEFINITELY hasn't been announced yet.  I'd expect an announcement in the next 2 months for them.

I'm expecting the annoucements at Celebration V. Normally I would say Comic-con, but they are saving the big guns for their own show, that's why there was no real Lucasfilm presence there.

Ah, good point digitalfreak. We're only up to October in terms of announced blu-ray releases. Announcing the Indy bd's at c5 is totally within the realm of possibility. These lucasfilm titles never hit a new format on a significant anniversary anyway. It really does seem like every last catalog title is hitting blu-ray this year, LFL probably feels the pressure.

I just caught American Graffiti on one of the local tv stations and couldn't help but wonder when Universal will put that on the docket for blu-ray. THX is due next month from WB and the absence of the original version kinda feels like a nail in the coffin, though it doesn't have the cultural significance of Graffiti and Star Wars so that's at least understandable.

Something I randomly noticed after the end credits of Graffiti was a quick flash of the title shot, only it was letterboxed unlike how the movie had been presented. I think it was the revised version, don't know what it was randomly doing at the end of the broadcast transfer though. The title shot back at the beginning was - I think - the old version (hard to tell from the cropped-for-tv framing, but I don't remember clouds). Found a nice comparison right here actually.

I wouldn't be surprised if they held off on indy this year.   Blu-ray is pretty overrun with high profile boxed set releases for the end of this year.  There's only so much money to go around for some people.

We're already looking at (rumored or announced): The Alien Quadrilogy, Lethal Weapon Quad, Jurassic Park trilogy, Back To the Future trilogy, Robocop Trilogy.

And that's just off the top of my head...

I could see them pushing Indy to 2011 and Star Wars to 2012 but who the hell knows.

I dunno, DVD from 2001 to 2004 was twice as crowded as that, and SW and Indy both managed to do okay.