Theory on the 1997 "restoration". — Page 2

By JOE MORGENSTERN

Back on the big screen after 20 years, "Star Wars" has regained its grandeur; that far-away galaxy was never meant to be squeezed into videocassettes. George Lucas's special rejiggered edition will be a revelation for kids who've never seen this seminal space opera in a theater, and a delicious treat for longtime "Star Wars" lovers, of which I'm one.

It's great to rediscover sly Obi-Wan Kenobi at the height of his powers, and spunky Luke in the fullness of his shallowness; to rejoin that most charming of gay couples, R2-D2 and C-3PO; to revisit that "wretched hive of scum and villainy," the space port Mos Eisley, now a much busier hive thanks to the wizardly interweaving of new footage. But at a recent screening I, like Obi-Wan, felt a disturbance in the Force. If my unease was less than his, I started feeling it earlier in the picture, about the time Luke first appears on the sands of his home planet, Tatooine. The colors, once so radiant, seemed subtly wrong. The print looked faded here, muddy there, occasionally beset by fluctuating reds, sometimes far too blue.

Wrong compared to what, though? To the objective rightness of some perfectly preserved master? Or to my subjective, unreliable memories that may have grown in radiance as the movie grew in reputation? I sought answers and found them, thanks to the help and candor of three topnotch obsessives who had supervised this restoration: Tom Christopher from Lucasfilm, Ted Gagliano from 20th Century Fox and the veteran film consultant Leon Briggs. I learned that the film medium itself is more unreliable, more shockingly fragile, than I'd ever guessed--not just notorious old nitrate stock, but the stuff being used today. Many of our most cherished modern movies, features from the 1970s and even the 1980s that form the canon of contemporary cinema, are already in deep decay, and could be lost to theatrical audiences forever.

First a sense of how close to the grave the big-screen version of "Star Wars" actually came. (While quite good versions are widely available on laserdisk, the disks can never be blown up into theatrical prints because they don't provide anywhere near enough resolution.)

The movie was shot, in 1976, on four different varieties of Eastmancolor stock, all of them bad--i.e. subject to rapid fading and color shifts--in different ways. Shortly after production, the finished negative was supposedly preserved on a pair of YCM protective masters; the term refers to a three-strip process in which a record of each basic color component--yellow, cyan and magenta--is deposited separately in stable silver, rather than unstable dye, on black-and-white film stock that may last for more than a century (or may not; like every other archival medium, including optical disks, the YCM process has its quirks and instabilities).

But the preservation effort was botched, mostly by a failure to clean the negative before copying it, and the studio never bothered to inspect the final results. Far from constituting a single studio's sin, such neglect of corporate assets was endemic to Hollywood at the time, and remains widespread today.

As a consequence, the restoration team was forced to struggle with a negative that was not only dirty but badly worn, from making thousands of prints, and was seriously faded, even though it had been stored at prescribed temperatures and humidity in a vault 650 feet down in a salt mine near Wichita, Kan. Blue skies and rich blacks had lost their luster. Silver had almost vanished from the emulsion in certain scenes, like the prelude to Kenobi's duel to the death with Darth Vader. Flesh tones had turned pallid. Strobing effects and those red fluctuations had mysteriously appeared. Some parts, such as the Tatooine desert sequences shot in Tunisia, had never had much luster to begin with. ("Star Wars," it's useful to recall, was first considered the slapdash work of a brash young upstart.) Other pieces weren't even original negative, but intentionally degraded duplicates that Mr. Lucas had stuck in to avoid emphasizing the quality of adjacent optical effects, some of which were so crude as to be almost unacceptable.

Tom Christopher, the Lucasfilm editor in charge of restoring the "Star Wars" trilogy, describes the team's three-year travail as deconstruction; another term might be Herculean, as in those nasty stables. Each optical effect had to be taken apart, layer by layer, link by link. Gaps and defects were replaced by original trims and outtakes, which Mr. Lucas had kept in his own vaults. Precious pieces of negative were washed, rewashed, matted, filtered ("We were handling the Holy Grail!" Mr. Christopher says), chemically or optically manipulated when possible, replaced with other original or duplicate material when necessary. Eventually 748 of the 2,228 shots in the movie were redone in the course of creating a new negative, from which some 2,000 new prints have been struck for the current national release. (Similar though less extensive work has been done for the two sequels, "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi.")

When I met Messrs. Christopher, Gagliano and Briggs in a projection room on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles earlier this week, they ran a demonstration reel of their work. Side-by-side, before-and-after comparisons of a dozen or so shots convinced me that they'd done wonders, albeit incomplete ones. "It can't be a perfect restoration," Mr. Christopher acknowledged, "because you can't go back 20 years. But this film has a heart, which is what we hope audiences will respond to again. This is a film that lots of people remember in the same way they remember key moments of their lives; they talk about the day they first saw 'Star Wars.'"

The demonstration also convinced me that the current or imminent decay of relatively recent films represents a cultural emergency. What films? A list might start with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The Conformist," "Shampoo," "The Conversation," "The Godfather," "Taxi Driver," "Apocalypse Now" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." They may be safe for a while on video and laserdisk, but not in the only format that can do them full justice. I'll write again soon about what is being done and what ought to be done to keep our movie heritage on the big screen.