The Extras - Ivanhoe and the Wonders of Technicolor

Episode Date: December 25, 2021

Warner Bros executive George Feltenstein reviews the last Warner Archive release of 2021, the 1952 historical epic “Ivanhoe.”  Starring Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, and George Sanders, this beloved romantic saga has been restored to all of its original technicolor glory.In addition, George describes the technicolor process and the work that the Warner Archive has been doing to preserve and restore these stunning visual classics.   The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. Today, George Feltenstein joins the show to talk about the last Warner Archive release of 2021,

the film Ivanhoe, and to also provide more background on the Technicolor process that has been integral to so many Warner Archive releases in 2021. So George, there are only two Warner Archive releases in December of 2021, but they are both highly anticipated. We did a podcast on Angels with Dirty Faces with author Alan K. Rohde, but we didn't have a chance to discuss the other release, the 1952 historical epic, Ivanhoe. What can you tell us about this film and why you wanted to get it released before a piece of literature that most kids have to read in I think either junior high school or high school. So there's always this built-in audience and it's more exciting for people to,

instead of having to read the book, let's see the movie. You know, this film was a hit when it came out. It was very profitable when it came out. And what was interesting about it is that MGM didn't film it on their back lot. their back lot. They filmed it in London and MGM had their own British studios in England in a place called Bormwood. I believe the studio is still intact today, although MGM had to sell it in the early 70s when they were selling everything. But there was also a tax benefit during that time where a large amount of MGM contract players went to the UK to make films for MGM.

I assume this wasn't just an MGM thing. It was probably for the whole industry, but I only know of this as it concerns MGM. And there was some huge tax savings by people going over there and making films. So Clark Gable, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Taylor, Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, they all made films at MGM British, as the studio was called, during that period of time. So you had the producer, Andrew S. Berman, who first had his claim to fame with the Fred and Ginger movies as head of production at RKO in the 30s.

And then he moved to MGM. And the director was Richard Thorpe. Thorpe. And Richard Thorpe is not renowned as one of the great film directors or revolutionary film directors of all time. He was a journeyman film director. He was under contract to MGM. And he was under contract to them, I think, from as late as the 1960s. And I think he started in either the 20s, certainly the 30s. And he looks about 20 years older than he actually was. He was a heavy smoker. And he passed away in, I think, 1967 or 68 at a relatively young age, but he looked much older than he was. And when he started at MGM, he was playing opposite Greta Garbo and Camille, and he was known for his stunning good looks.

And those stunning good looks didn't last very long because, you know, spent a lot of time outdoors in the sun. And, uh, he was very much, uh, you know, a guy's guy and was, uh, you know, there he's not, didn't have a reputation of being, uh, you know, getting in trouble because of drinking like Errol Flynn. It wasn't anything like that. But he still had a big screen presence and popularity. And he was one of the very longest duration contract players at MGM. So he was selected to play Ivanhoe. And the rest of the cast is like a who's who of great actors and actresses.

Elizabeth Taylor, no relation to Robert Taylor, of course, and Joan Fontaine, who is the sister in real life of Olivia de Havilland. And there you had a famous feud. of Olivia de Havilland, and there you had a famous feud. And many great British actors who were London bound, and they all came together for this adaptation of a very famous novel. And it was originally going to be made at RKO in the 40s. And then RKO realized they couldn't afford to do it the way it needed to be done. And they sold the rights to the story to MGM and MGM put the picture into production and decided to really go for it, not shoot it on the back lot. And it has a whole different characteristic because it was shot in England and you're not looking at recreations of, you know, these amazing structures. You're looking at the real thing. The great screenplay, the beauty of the production, the cinematography by Freddie Young, who's

one of the great cinematographers in England of all time. I believe he shot Lawrence of Arabia. He's a legend. So you had all of these parts, all of these ingredients, it was like a surefire hit. And it was beloved by critics and audiences. And of course, one of the key factors in why the film was so popular was something I would consider a cast member, and that is color by Technicolor. Right.

And when a film was shot in Technicolor, it was an event because the Technicolor process that was used and first perfected in the early thirties and used in feature films starting in 1935, it used three strips of film in the camera. And as a result, it resulted in the cost of every movie being three times the amount of film stock. Right. So an investment in a Technicolor film was a big investment. And the beauty of the Technicolor process is that it was based on dye transfer, basically one layer over another layer over another.

It built color using the three primary colors. And the release prints made by Technicolor, if you found a release print now of Ivanhoe from 1952 it would have all its color if you found a release print of a film made in 1980 it would probably be purple and the reason for that is that

the Technicolor process that was so cumbersome in filming and then printing the dye transfer prints was superseded in 1953. Kodak was able to push what they called Eastman Color, which was basically the same cost to the studios as a black and white film. You didn't need a camera that was incredibly heavy and hard to be mobile with. You could use any camera. to be mobile with. You could use any camera. And it ended up being that this was coinciding with the evolution of CinemaScope and widescreen anamorphic photography. And there was never a dye transfer Technicolor film made in CinemaScope. The process with the lenses, it just didn't work. So you had this whole push for stereophonic sound, wide screens, and Eastman Color was cheaper. And initially, everybody was doing cartwheels.

Oh my gosh, we can make more of our films in color. We can save a lot of money. And what they didn't realize was that the color just wasn't as good. And it depended on the lab who was doing the processing. Technicolor still made prints for decades afterwards that would not fade. But films shot with their three-strip process, and that was basically three strips of black and white film,

each of which was affected by a different prism that built the primary colors of yellow, cyan, and magenta. And layered on top of each other, the process was perfected. It started out in 1932 as something exclusive to Walt Disney for animated cartoons. And by 1934, it started to be used in short subjects and eventually in feature films in 1935. And so by the time you get to a period like Ivanhoe in 1952, Technicolor had been perfected to the nth degree. Right. And Ivanhoe is a swashbuckler. It's an adventure film.

It's a romance. It's got something for everyone. And it was so popular that the following year, MGM made another film with Robert Taylor called Nights of the Roundtable. And that was MGM's first film in CinemaScope. And, of course, did not use Technicolor. And then there was one other afterward, not as successful, The Adventures of Quentin Durwood, also known as Quentin Durwood, just without The Adventures of. You know, Robert Taylor was great in film noir like Rogue Cop.

He could do westerns. He could be in a gangster film like Johnny Eager. He was extraordinarily versatile in the kind of films that he could play in. He didn't make too many comedies. I can only think of maybe a handful where they tried to put him in a comic role. That wasn't his thing, but he was definitely super popular and beloved by audiences for decades. decades. So when he did pass away, he eventually went to television in the 1960s, as other aging actors were known to do. And when he did pass away, it was really kind of coinciding with the knowledge within the United States and the world that smoking causes cancer. Of course, he died of lung cancer at a very young age, relatively young age. I don't think he was even 60.

And it was kind of in a way that like Rock Hudson's death, I've never heard anybody make this parallel. Maybe I'm off base saying this, but Rock Hudson's death made AIDS more recognizable to the public. Robert Taylor's death from cancer, from lung cancer, it had a chilling effect on Americans and people in general about smoking. And this is when the American Cancer Society was really playing up the fact that cigarettes were lethal. And it was only two or three years later that cigarette commercials were banned from television and so forth and so on. And it took big tobacco many decades to get their air handed to them. And it's still going on. There's still a lot of people who smoke. Thankfully, I don't know anybody who does,

but I know people who did. And, you know, this was definitely a celebrity death that created mourning throughout the film community and among all the film fans because he was so popular. But when we decided to redo Ivanhoe for Blu-ray and the Technicolor restorations, we've been doing in quite frequent number of late. I would say there were maybe 15 or 20 of them in the last year and a half or two. We've been able to make these films look the way they looked when they first premiered. And it's thrilling to be able to bring that to Blu-ray.

I recall watching, you know, this movie for the first time when I was young on television, which was probably not a very great way to see it in all its glory. But that that was where it was available for me. And even then, you know, you're not going to get the colors and you're just not going to get anything of the detail that this Blu-ray brings to life. When did the DVD come out? And then how long did it take then to get this process of the preservation of this for Blu-ray? The DVD came out pretty early in the era of DVDs. I can't give you the exact date off the top of my head, but I'm saying it was probably sometime

in the early part of the aughts, probably 2001, 2002. It was a perennial bestseller on VHS. So way before the Warner Archive, it came out through the normal catalog DVD. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the

Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. Right. It was a regular normal catalog release. And how things worked at the time were that the Technicolor negatives, because there are three there is the yellow the cyan the magenta so each reel has three negatives that have to be reassembled and in the lab when they were making the prints even even back, you know, when the process first happened,

to align those three negatives to a state of perfection, you couldn't do in the laboratory the way we can now for video. We're able to match to the pixel. And it was about 20 years ago at this time that we developed a process at Warner Brothers that there were these two sisters who were, I believe, maybe they were physics experts or scientists or whatever. It was during the period of time that AOL owned Time Warner and they helped develop this technology that broke the image into 16 pieces and could align the colors within those 16 pieces. And we needed a name for the process, and I came up with the name, which was Ultra Resolution.

And it cost us about a million dollars per picture to do this work. Wow. And the first film we did, if my memory serves me correctly, it was either Singing in the Rain or The Adventures of Robin Hood, one or the other. They were like the first two.

Right. And when we would do an ultra resolution title, it was a big deal and a huge expense. We eventually used the process for Gone with the Wind and for Meet Me in St. Louis. And it was so expensive that we couldn't use it for many Technicolor films. And that led to using second generation elements that weren't always so good. And what has happened in recent years because of the way technology has improved, we now can recombine the negatives matching to the pixel and it it's no longer a seven figure proposition.

It's much more affordable, although it is expensive. Right. And it is part of also the overall corporate initiative right now to, we call it preservation on steroids. It's very, very important that we get these films looking right and put them on Blu-ray and in some case, put them on 4K. And all of these begin with a 4K scan of each of the Technicolor records or negatives, as we call them, recombining them. And it's the talented staff at Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging that have the ability to do such a fine job of this. There's one major studio that was known for Technicolor. I won't mention any names, but after they had preserved their nitrate Technicolor negatives,

preserved, they thought, to a very unstable stock that was called CRI, color reversal internegative. It saved you a step. You could make a color reversal internegative from these negatives and make prints from the CRI. So the process normally would be you take the camera negative you make an interpositive from the interpositive you make an inter negative and you make your prints off the inter negative the CRI skipped a step and it was much cheaper and the quality sometimes could be good. Most of the time it was really awful. Had a lot of color breathing. And MGM made CRIs of everything

and then shipped off their nitrate negatives to George Eastman House for safekeeping. This other studio made CRIs of all of their Technicolor films and tossed their nitrate negatives into, I've heard, the Santa Monica Bay. The original negatives of this studio's Technicolor output, which is very significant, does not survive. So they don't have anything to go back to. Now, we as owners of the MGM library up through 1986, we have to deal with the fact that we had CRIs made in the 70s. And it was in the 1980s that we were trying to get good prints made out of them. And we wanted to go back to the camera negative and make new interpositives.

And in 1978, there was a tragic fire at George Eastman House where we had sent all the nitrate material for safekeeping and over 200 feature films, as well as all the cartoons burned in a very tragic fire. So some of the MGM films were intact and some of them were partially burned and some of them were completely destroyed. For example, Singing in the Rain's negative, only one reel survives. Now, since a protection was made on everything before it was shipped, Singing in the Rain has been able to look really wonderful,

but you're a generation away. Thankfully, Gone with the Wind did not burn. The Wizard of Oz color sequences did not burn. The black and white portions did. But the fact that we have these camera negatives now is what has enabled us. And when they don't exist in their entirety, we do use the preservation materials that were made as backups. And so sometimes you'll see a film, for example, we recently released in the good old summertime and part of that burnt up in the fire.

So it's a combination of the two, but it's done so well. You really have difficulty telling what came from where. There are other films where the last two reels of An American in Paris, the ballet, the most important part of the movie, that burnt in the fire. It's heartbreaking. But thankfully, we've been able to do really, really good work in being able to use digital technology to bring all this together at a really reasonable price. So that has escalated our going back and doing them with 4K scans for preservation and creating new masters that we can release on Blu-ray.

So that's why there's been an abundance of Technicolor and people aren't out of focus anymore. Well, they look pristine and beautiful. Can the fans expect more in 2022? Absolutely. We have several on the docket. Several are in the works as we speak. I can't wait to see them. Thanks, George, for running through the history of Technicolor and taking us through the release

of Ivanhoe. I think that gives us a good background for that release. And it's a film really for all ages. And if you're at the age where you have to read the book in school, you get the benefit of, you know, buying the Blu-ray and not having to read the book. But just don't tell your teacher. For sure. Thanks again to Warner Brothers executive George Feltenstein for coming on the show to discuss Ivanhoe, the last Warner Archive release of 2021. the last Warner Archive release of 2021. If you haven't had a chance to listen to the podcast of the other December film release,

the 1938 classic Angels with Dirty Faces, be sure and catch George's entertaining discussion with author and Michael Curtiz expert, Alan K. Rohde in episode 28. For those of you interested in learning more about some of the releases discussed in the show today, there will be detailed information on the website at www.theextras.tv, as well as a listing of all of George's episodes.

Also, follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheExtrasTV or Instagram at TheExtras.tv to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images and behind-the-scenes information about the episodes and for exclusive images and behind the scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. And if you are enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider that will ensure you don't miss any of your favorite guests. Until next time, you've been listening to The Extras with Tim Millard. Stay slightly obsessed. The Extras is a production of Otaku Media,

producers of podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connects creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals at www.otakumedia.tv or look for the link in the show notes.