Very interesting find. I find it to be quite inferior to the final script. Too many unimportant characters, too quickly paced, clunky exposition.
Interesting they reused that beginning for the sequel in any case.
Here’s a photo of my project timeline showing the edits necessary to get the Italian 35 to sync with the laserdisc which also included replacing the computer screens and reordering the middle section and shortening the SEN/Children scene.
Having seen pretty much every version of THX-1138 pre-special edition, there are 2 versions of this film plus one obscure edited-for-TV Italian cut.
Version 1 is the original theatrical 1971 release. The sources known to contain this cut are the Italian 35mm print, the faded scope 16mm print and (mostly) the Italian TV version.
Version 2 is Lucas’ first director’s cut which apparently was done after the success of Star Wars and is the cut seen on every home video version. This is also the version the Special Edition version is based on.
The differences between the two are very minor. The biggest difference is that the scenes in the middle part of the film are rearranged differently. There is also a scene between SEN and a couple of boys before his arrest that is longer in the 1971 version.
@SpacedRanger: Not to float my own boat or anything but my English Grindhouse version has looked at what’s missing in this print and is replaced with laserdisc footage*. This replaced footage is easy to spot because of the differences in color and resolution.
The 35mm ‘jumps’ in that cabinet shot because there is a tape splice (if you look at the pictures you posted, you can see it). This Italian print has quite a few instances where 1-2 frames are missing and not at the beginning or end of a reel as you might expect. Of course, even at the end of reels, there are sizable chunks missing. The biggest section missing is in between reels 1 and 2 at around the 20 minute mark where there are men mall-walking through a corridor and then there’s a shot of a (possible?) hologram staring out of a window with the sign ‘Unassigned Space #3’. After that, the whole shot of a man looking at numbers on a wall is missing and the following shot of the guard malfunctioning is missing footage.
Another unfortunate victim is around the 58:53 minute mark where THX and the hologram are in the fetus room. the opening shot of the room is missing about 9 seconds.
Yet another chuck is around the part when SEN is talking to the children. “Combined economics was a bottle about this big” and then everything after that is missing for about 16 seconds so that includes the children going “Woooow”, security camera footage, a shot of a control panel and the beginning of the shot of the woman saying “Officer 1088 proceed with recovery…”
@Poita: Two questions. 1: did you get my PM? 2: What additional information about the print would be useful for you?
*Just a warning that I may have missed a splice here or there so it’s not perfect.
I found an article that goes into detail about Super35:
“Next, you can’t make the image too dark when you’re doing your answer-print timing. It’s better to be a little light at that point. Then, when you’re doing your formatting to anamorphic at the IN stage, you’ve got a nice fat IP to work from.”
According to Carpenter, Titanic’s IP, like that of True Lies, was made at CFI on Kodak’s 5244 intermediate stock, utilizing a wetgate direct-contact printer at full aperture, running at 180 feet per minute. A precision ground-glass was used to focus the image through the liquid, while fine-grade filters made overall color compensations. The 2.35:1 anamorphic squeeze was not made at this point, as the IP would also be used to make prints in other aspect ratios.
Source: http://www.theasc.com/magazine/dec97/titanic/pgs35/pg1.htm
I don’t know when the whole OCN->IP->IN thing started but I would guess shortly during or after the silent era. At the beginning, all prints were made from the negative but I’m sure they’d had to have learned their lesson after a couple of years…
I would say that the difference between SW/Godfather and their sequels is the fact that these films’ popularity exploded. They probably didn’t think they would be the massive hits they were and didn’t think to take extra precautions to create enough back ups.
They had learned their lesson by the time Empire and Godfather 2 came out.
I too am curious about the workflow of Super35 (and techniscope for that matter). I have no personal experience with either format. Nowadays, it’s easy: everything is scanned.
The original OT was worn out for a very simple reason: it was a widely popular film.
Eventually, after you make a large number of release prints, your internegatives and interpositives are going to wear out so you need to go back to the original negative to strike some more. Add to the fact that they may have used the OCN for the IB matrixes or perhaps to make a 70mm blowup interpositive, you’re creating a lot of damage. Then you have to remember that the film was shot on fading 70s filmstock and the effects shots were composited on notoriously unstable film in order to save time… All of these are a recipe for a very worn out negative.
There are lots of stories of popular film negatives being worn down: The Godfather is another example. During the latest restoration, the restorers found massive sprocket damage and one shot of the Don laying on a bed breathing was so worn out, they had to go back to the dailies and find an unused section of that shot and line up his movement perfectly.
^^ well said Poita.
Adjusted for inflation, $125 in 1968 would equal to $855 today. Not a bad weekly salary for an assistant.
The $2,500 director’s fee on THX is about $17,000 today. Not terrible money but I’m not sure how much they’re paid today.
BTW, here are screenshots of the Intermission title cards. They appear between the scenes where THX is being taunted by the guards in the white ‘jail’ and the one of him being ‘tortured’ with invisible forces while two off-screen voices talk about… something.
The 16 might be more fitting and it could work. You make the 35 the reference track and you cut up the 16 mm accordingly.
In my own humble opinion, the sound on this film is really incredible - probably the greatest thing about it - and should be heard in the best possible quality.
What resolution, filesize would people want a grindhouse to be, and would you prefer the intermission cards left in or removed? Colour aligned or not? (It won’t realign perfectly unfortunately, but can be improved a lot), missing frames left as is?
Cast your votes here.
I feel like full 1080p would be beneficial (I’ll only be viewing on 720p or 768p, but thinking of others 😄). For the intermissions, I personally wouldn’t like it, but if others want them I don’t care. Colour allignment yes! As much as can be done, that is.
EDIT: Would the grindhouse include English audio? Since it’s the same as the US cut apparently, would it be easy to sync?
Well the highest quality English audio is the laserdisc and this is edited to the 1st director’s cut. It’d be easy to re-edit to the theatrical cut since it’s simply just a couple of scenes re arranged. The only tricky spot would be the extended scene with the children and SEN towards the end, but the 16mm sound would suffice.
It does! Quite funny actually. It’s just two title cards, one says “fine di 1 partia” or something like that and the second one says beginning of 2nd part.
is grindhouse version of italian cut possible at some point?
As thxita said, the Italian cut is the same as the US theatrical (I know, I watched them side by side). Now what exactly do you want? Just a raw scan of the Italian version with Italian voices and titles and computer screens? Poita has already released this.
Something in English? I have done a version where I synced an English track to the raw scan and replaced the titles. That’s in the link above.
THAT’S WHERE I’M PREPARING TO MEET KALI, MOLA RAM.
Fascinating stuff, thanks a lot.
So now a quick summary, if I understood it all correctly. Let’s do it on an example, e.g. Star Wars.It has scenes of 3 types :
I) scenes consisting only of live action shots
II) scenes containing some simple visual effects like fade-ins, fade-outs, dissolves etc.
III) scenes containing composite shots created using live action shots and visual effects
Yes.
If I was the Star Wars editor, I would do …
I) these scenes would be done by cutting and joining the original camera negative
II) these scenes would be created using negative A and B rolls
III) these scenes would be a combination of edited negatives and various optical elements joined together using an optical printer
If you were a Star Wars editor you would not be touching the original negative. Only the negative cutter and the lab will ever touch it. The editors on Star Wars were editing on B/W answer prints.
Understand that an editor at the time did not deliver a finished film print. They edited the movie with a bunch of tape, black leader and grease pens to mark dissolves, cross dissolves (they would draw a large X along the frames that would be part of the dissolve). This was then carried over to the lab who would do the dirty work of piecing together the negative.
The A/B rolls contain the original camera negatives and the negatives of the completed effects shots. (In the case of Star Wars, I think the wipes were done separately as effects shots due to their complexity.)
So we would have properly edited scenes of 3 types, and they would still be negatives - correct? Then we would join these scenes together, and interpositives would be made? Then from these interpositives new internegatives would be printed, and these IN would be the source for theatrical prints?
Correct or complete bull…?
That’s pretty much it.
Here’s an excellent video on the history of matte photography.
Mavimao said:
Who is he even looking at??
Haha! I meant the shot of him in the factory…
Now back to my first post: big studios aren’t dumb and make sure they have backups. They will make different interpositives, a couple for safe keeping, a couple for international releases (so these will have no alien subtitles or blank titles for instance) and a couple for national releases. Then those internegatives that are OKed for distribution will have several internegatives made (so as to not wear it out)
And now let’s go even more complicated - what about shots which include optical effects and/or composites? Since this is a Star Wars site, let’s say a Star Wars example - the shot where our heroes look through the window on the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon and see the flying fighter and the Death Star. I remember that this specific scene was explained in some of the documentaries, not sure which one, but from what I remember they combined them using the optical printer, in other words magic. But what did go inside the optical printer? The original negative? The internegative? The interpositive? The “answer positive”? In other words - how many generations away from the negative can we get in such a complex shot as the one I mentioned from Star Wars 77?
And another question 😃 From what I though, original negatives are the film reels which came out of the camera equipment, correct? But many people all over the internet (I think even here on ot.com) use the term to describe a finished shot with integrated optical effects, or is it just me?
For this particular question, it’s a bit more complicated, but let’s use your example. This shot is made up of different shots or “elements” as it’s called in SFX parlance. We have the:
For shots 1, 2 and 3 you would have had to have made a traveling matte for each of them so that’s an additional 3 elements added. Traveling mattes are basically very high contrast copies of the original blue screen shots and help keep the elements separate from each other on the final assembled shot and not exposed on top of each other.
An optical printer is a simple machine. In essence, it’s just a projector shining into a camera. You load the elements into the projector, you load unexposed negative into the camera and away you go. Once you’re done, you process the negative that was in the camera and, voila! You have people in a space ship, looking out of a window. Take that to the filmmakers and the negative cutter will splice that footage in accordingly.
Of course, it’s much more difficult than that, but that’s the gist.
Well in all actuality… It depends. But here’s what it basically boils to:
Before digital, you’d shoot your film and your negative would be sent to a lab and this lab would develop it and also make an answer print straight from the negative. They would send both back to you and you would view the answer print to see how your film turned out. With this answer print, you then cut up all the shots and sync up your sound on separate mag tape and then edit on a Moviola or a Steenbeck or whatever. This is usually done with just simple splicing tape and a guillotine splicer.
Once everything is assembled the way you want, you send your negative and your edited answer print to a negative cutter. This person will cut and cement splice the actual camera negative to conform it to your edited print. This is usually done in two rolls named A and B so every even numbered shot is on roll A and every odd numbered shot is on roll B and black leader is in between. It looks like this:
Why do it like this? It helps hide splices between each cut and it helps make higher quality dissolves.
Now that you have your A/B rolls, you send this off to a lab to get an interpositive made. It’s a high quality positive print with all the dissolves and any possible color correction done so this is it or die. If you were a poor student filmmaker, you’d stop here and show your IP at your local film festival and then be forgotten.
Now if you’re a big studio distributing all over the world, you make a negative from the interpositive and this internegative (IN) will be the negative that release prints are made from.
Screenshots (Top to bottom, 35 - BD - LD):
Notice how on the Bluray, the background has been digitally “enhanced”? Who is he even looking at??
As you may know, thxita, a member on the board, recently obtained a 35mm IB print of THX 1138. This print is from Italy so all the titles, and computer screens are translated into Italian and the sound contains the Italian dub. The print has been scanned and is currently being cleaned up by Poita and Harmy has expressed interest in creating a ‘despecialized’ version.
While their efforts will help create the best version of this film whose original version has little chance of seeing the light of day, I thought it would be nice to take what we have so far and whip up a quick and dirty English version for people to enjoy now. Poita recently released a file containing the whole scan as-is, and I took this and made an English version.
I used the laserdisc as a point of reference for this sync because it’s the only official release of the original version of the film. In a sense, I felt this to be the closest thing to a ‘GOUT’ that THX has. This is the 1st director’s cut of the film that was released after the success of Star Wars; the 35mm print, however, is the 1971 theatrical cut. The only changes between the two are re-arranged scenes in the middle and a shortened scene towards the end between SEN and a couple of young children (and by short, it’s only about 5 seconds shorter). I decided to maintain the edit of the laserdisc version because it was easier to simply edit the footage to the laserdisc than trying to edit both the 35 and the laserdisc and moving both around. I’ve viewed both versions of the film and to be honest, it doesn’t change much. The scenes in question are independent of each other and don’t enhance or take away from the overall narrative. At worst, these edits change our views about how quickly this futuristic society expedites criminals or tortures them prior to trial depending on which version you watch. I just say: meh.
Here are some additional notes:
The first 3 minutes of the film were taken from the bluray version. This includes Buck Rodgers, the Warner Bros logo, the Zeotrope logo, the intro titles and a close up of a clock. At first, I was going to just leave the laserdisc footage, but Buck Rodgers looks particularly bad on the LD and three minutes is a long time to look at badly upscaled LD captures.
Any additional missing footage though is filled in with the laserdisc. This is much easier to do since the laserdisc footage was already laying under the 35 footage in my timeline and any gaps in the 35 timeline is replaced by the laserdisc footage. These last from a mere few frames to a few seconds at a reel change. I really didn’t feel like pulling out my hair to splice in frames from other sources and I prefer this to black frames. Plus, this helps show the difference between this and the LD and what footage is missing from the print and what any future restorer will need from alternate sources. I also might have missed a few frame splices here and there and the sync may slightly go out here and there.
I replaced all of the Italian info screens with the laserdisc. The Bluray uses new computer screens so that was worthless anyway. A future restoration might be able to use the 16mm print that Poita scanned.
I own a really old Macbook so this was done on iMovie 10. I wanted to work on this in Resolve, but my computer couldn’t handle it. Please don’t expect anything fancy from this release. It’s really just a quick job in case anyone was dying to see it (crickets).
If anyone would like it, you need to go over to a certain human anatomy website…
Just took a quick glance and this looks really great! Congrats!
There was in interview with Matt Wood who said that all of the mixes were captured and archived.
QUOTE:
Q: Was there any thought given to archiving previous tracks like the 6-track master from the 70mm prints or the 78 mono remix? Any thought given to putting them on the Blu-ray?
A: Yes, we have those and they’ve all been digitized. I don’t know if they considered putting those on the Blu-ray. That might be more of a question for Marketing, it may be an issue of space. It’s funny because I play those other audio tracks, like the scene when R2 and C3PO have been left on Tatooine and they walk through the canyon. I just love that on the current mix, you can actually hear the quiet, when R2 is lonely, going through the canyon. I played the original mix and it’s FULL of hiss and totally brittle, so it’s fun now to hear it like George wanted it to really be, what was intended.
This is really cool! I’ve been dying to see a copy of the open matte version just to see all the filming equipment you weren’t supposed to see.
