The Extras - Restoring "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm"

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

Dave Strohmaier, Director of Film Restorations for Cinerama,  and his collaborator Tom March provide a detailed background on the epic restoration of the 1962 Cinerama classic.  And the Warner Archives’ George Feltenstein details the history behind the release and the two-disk special edition blu-ray filled with extras.We start with a review of how Dave’s interest in restoring the Cinerama films led to his first meetings with Warner Home Video, including George Feltenstein, to discuss “How the West Was Won.”  This film was found to be in relatively good shape leading to a fairly easy restoration.  The re-release of the restored film was hugely successful in both its Cinerama screenings in 2008 and in the Home Video editions.   However, previous reviews of “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” film assets stated that they were so badly damaged that it was basically an “un-restorable” film.  But advances in digital film restoration, combined with Dave’s work on the technically challenging WINDJAMMER restoration, gave him the confidence to explore the film once again.  Starting with meetings in 2018, Dave and George recount the milestones in the collaboration between Cinerama and Warner Bros.  And then Dave and Tom explain some of the specific restoration challenges they faced in their epic year-and-a-half spent on the project.To view exclusive images:  www.theextras.tv/podcastsTo Purchase on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/yc7vtvxaOtaku 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.tvThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify 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 we have three very special guests on the show to talk about the deluxe two-disc special edition release of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and the amazing restoration process that went into bringing this to Blu-ray. Most of you know George Feltenstein from the Warner Archive, and with him is Dave Strohmeyer, director of film restorations for Cinerama. Dave started his career with Warner Brothers and has worked with Disney and 20th Century Fox on many documentaries and television shows over the years. Partner in the restoration process is Tom March, who is now retired after a 30-year career as a television systems technologist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Dave and Tom, welcome to The Extras.

Thank you. George as well. Thank you, sir. It's great to be with everybody on this exciting occasion. Well, before we get into the wonderful world of the Brothers Grimm, Dave, I thought maybe you could take us back to a little bit how you started working with Cinerama and some of the earlier restoration projects you worked on. Well, it all started at a cocktail party, believe it or not. I can't remember the year now, 1990 something or other. And everybody was talking about the

latest IMAX movie. And I said, do you guys remember Cinerama? Because they were about my age and they should have. One guy said, yeah. And the other guy said, well, what's Cinerama? And all that stuff started. And I figured, you know, it's kind of getting lost in history here, you know. And that was a big deal all through the 50s and early 60s to get in the family station wagon and travel to St. Louis or wherever, some big city, and see a Cinerama extravaganza travel on usually. And so I decided, you know, I'm going to do a little research. And I found out this guy in Ohio named John Harvey was in the process of reviving Cinerama at a local small theater because he had the equipment and had a print of how the West was won and a couple other things. And so I went out there to shoot a little like half hour PBS special. And it ended up being a 93 minute documentary with everybody in the world cooperating

and, and, and Roger Mayer, your old boss, George, was involved. And everybody just pulled it together. And literally, the whole industry got behind it because they were all about my age. And they remembered Cineram. And yeah, that needs to be preserved, blah, blah, blah. So that's how I got into it. Kind of sacrificed my film editing career at the time periodically by going away for a couple of weeks or months to shoot interviews and stuff. And we shot interviews all over the world, actually. Wow.

It was a heck of an experience, believe me. I've never done a documentary before other than working for Disney and doing promotions and stuff. But, you know, we got into the Telluride Film Festival opening night of the Telluride Film Festival and their biggest auditorium. And at the end of the documentary, it burst into real Cinerama on three big screens that were set up by Boston Light and Sound. And that was, you know, one of those goosebump moments. Wow. Well, George, maybe you could talk a little bit about the history

of the partnership between Warner Brothers and Cinerama. Well, I think this really goes back to Dave just alluded to it. I can't exactly remember what the year was, but I think it had to be either like 99 or 2000, somewhere around there. When Dave, you came in to meet with Roger, who was my boss when I was working for Turner Entertainment Company, which was already owned by Warner Brothers by then. And Dave was wanting to have kind of the linchpins of especially how the West was won, but the two narrative MGM features and was also looking for support. And Roger, rest his soul, was just the greatest guy. And so amazingly,

he had the ability to make things happen and get things done and broker peaceful partnerships between everyone to get them to get cooperative. And I think, and Dave, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that eventually, because you were struggling as the film kept getting bigger and bigger, and Roger was able to bring TCM in on it and everybody contributed something. And I don't know if I believe you had other contributors, but it was really an amazing process because just walking from the outside in, it went from being something small to like the grandest dream.

And then I think when you finish the documentary, you'll know the chronology better than I, but it kind of happened at the same time that a new print of How the West Was Won was being struck for Paul Allen in the Seattle area. Have I got my chronology

kind of correct? Pretty much. The Paul Allen people contacted me like in 98, 99 because they were going to buy the theater and do it and they wanted to know if I would be their consultant as it were technical consultant. And I'm not super technically inclined, but I've run projectors all my life in high school and stuff. So I kind of was on the borderline, but they brought me up there. They saw some rough cuts of the documentary. And at that point,

they said, what's it going to take to restore all these movies? You know, because we want to show them up here in Seattle in real center. And I said, well, it's going to take to restore all these movies you know because we want to show them up here in seattle in real center ama and i said well it's just an expensive proposition and i did some research i found a film restored by the name of leon uh gosh what was his last name anyway he had restored or worked on star wars the first restoration of star wars and fantasia and so i thought you know you gotta drop some names so so I thought, you know, you got to drop some names. So Fantasia, Star Wars, you know, and that impressed the Paul Allen people. And then they decided to hire him. Somewhere along the line, somebody put the kibosh on it.

And they just wanted to do How the West Was Won. What's it going to take to do How the West Was Won? And that's when we found out that the negative was in pristine condition. And so Crest Labs made the new print. It was a reasonably easy job to do from that standpoint, because you had the best set of photographers in the world. It was like you almost didn't have to do any color timing. It was that good.

Yeah. And and so therefore, the new print was made. I looked at it. Roger came over. I think you came over. I was in the Crest at it. Roger came over. I think you came over. I was in the crest wall board, uh, they had in some, uh, warehouse space or some kind of empty space created a makeshift,

uh, center on the screening room. That was, you know, it kind of felt like it was put together with toothpicks and scotch tape. Yeah, right. It just lessened the wow factor. And it was so exciting to see it like that. And then probably six months to a year later, there was this incredible night. I will never forget the image of Dave in the booth working with all the cat,

all the projectors and the, the audio. Uh, I think they looked like flatbeds or maybe it was just a one reel. It's probably just reel of audio. Yeah. Giant reel. It was like a wagon wheel on a Western. And the audience was went out of their minds because, you know, I missed Cinerama. It was before my time for my ability to go see it. So I never dreamed I could see it. And the dream was becoming a reality because for me, I got my first movie history book for Christmas when I was five years old. It was called the Pictorial History of the Talkies by Daniel Blum. And it had a full page on this is Cinerama. And it was really just a picture book. And I always was curious since I was a little kid, what was Cinerama, you know, and it was happening, uh, or it just happened when I got the book and then flash forward 20 some odd years

later. And, uh, I'm, I'm in a theater and seeing it and hearing it, which got that seven channel sound. So it was a really wonderful, wonderful experience. And then several years later, we got to, at Warner Home Video, release it on Blu-ray with Dave's documentary and in the smile box format that Dave invented, as well as the traditional letterbox. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit because there's a lot more Dave can tell you that happened in the middle. 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. Well, I lived in Seattle during that time, and it was a lot of excitement when Paul Allen bought the Cinerama and restored it.

I remember, I'm not sure if I'm correct, but one of the, if not the first film that they played there was the first Lord of the Rings movie. And I stood in a very long line to watch the movie there. And I mean, it was a big deal. It was a lot of fun. And I've been a fan ever since then, of course. And then I was here in LA when How the West Was Won came out and it played at the Cinerama Dome here in Hollywood. So that viewing in the Hollywood Cinerama Dome was packed. Do you recall any of the specifics of that, either of you guys? I can tell you that we rehearsed it the day before and everything went wrong. And which also happened every time we did it for TCM, something would go wrong. And, and, but interesting thing about Cinerama, it wants to promote itself.

So the day of the show, everything goes perfect. Wow. Cinerama, it wants to promote itself. So the day of the show, everything goes perfect. Wow. I just recall, I recall it was packed in there and everybody was cheering. And I mean, it was, it was fantastic. Everybody loved it. And they wouldn't mind if it broke down. In fact, we ran Brothers Graham, a very vintage print at the 60th anniversary of Cinerama. And the print was just, you know, we were holding our fingers on the film as it went into the projector and we had ushers up there just helping, you know, everybody was, and then the film finally broke and Russ Tamblyn was there and he got up and did like a 30 minute

comedy routine about film breaking and stuff like that, you know, and to entertain the whole audience. Then we finally got back online and everybody cheered and everything. It's, it's very audience participatory, not only, you know, where you're watching all this big images around you and the sound and everything. It's a kind of a participatory thing because you're always talking to your friend. Oh, look at that. You know, you're doing that kind of stuff. That's why the Cinerama travelogues themselves are a little bit on the boring side, unless you can sit up real close to the screen. And unless you can get that audience participation where you're seeing something that you can't see ever again, because it's lost in history. I mean, the scenery. So it becomes a whole different

theatrical experience in a way. Yeah. George, how did the home entertainment release of How the West Was Won, how was that accepted by the fans? It was, I would say, pretty huge. Because it was that golden moment when it was before the economy collapsed,

it was before Tower Video and Virgin Video and Camelot and Suncoast, all the specialty stores went out of business. And there was still a robust retail environment for classic films. And we had a deluxe book package and it was a two-disc set. And we had a good marketing budget and it became an event. It got press all over the world, actually, because it started here, but it was released all over the world. And it was beyond anyone's dreams. And it was beyond anyone's dreams.

And the best part about it is, is that Dave's documentary accompanied the feature. And I believe the documentary had already been in festivals. And I don't know if it had been shown on TCM already or not. I think we had just been festivals almost around the world. I mean, we were in Italy and all these opening night at Telluride, as I said, and New York and MoMA and all kinds of stuff. It was surprising to us to get to travel that much. So I had this little thing I was going to make a bumper sticker that said, join Cinerama and see the world. Well, that's a quick question I want to ask you. Was Cinerama worldwide then? then was that were there theaters worldwide yeah there was theaters in downtown

tehran in iran in iran there was uh nothing in moscow they invented their own system there was philippines it was almost every major capital city had a cinerama theater and in some cases too germany alone had 22 center of theaters. So the interest was worldwide then when they released came out. Yeah, it was a major, it was not a, people like to call it a craze or a, where do they go? Not a, what is it? A fad. Yeah. People like to go, it was a fad. It lasted five minutes and it went away. It was like 3d in the early fift 50s. You know, it lasted a year or two and went away. Well, it wasn't.

It lasted about 14, 15 years. And then in its 70 millimeter form, it lasted another five or six years. So that's like bell bottoms were a fad. You know, Cinerama was a phenomenon. Right. It was almost, you know, if you think of this as Cinerama opening in 1952, This is Cinerama opening in 1952. And I think the last film that was a 70 millimeter projected onto a Cinerama screen, I think was like the last Valley, if I'm right. Or one of those in that early 70s era.

So we're talking almost 20 years of content being run in those theaters. But from a historical point of view, for these two narrative features, it began with a partnership between MGM and Cinerama that was, I think, signed at the end of 1959. Because I was looking at the contract the other day. And they planned to do four productions. They would be narrative films using the technology. And after Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won were put into production kind of simultaneously. And they were released.

Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm opened in the United States and Canada. And How the West Was Won opened internationally. And they flipped them, you know, because there weren't enough theaters and screens. It was a very efficient, clever way of doing it. And I always thought it was kind of interesting that they would choose to take the most, one of the most important pieces of Americana cinema. You know, How the West is Won is so rousingly patriotic and so wonderful in that regard. But it opened in Europe first, and the European-themed

Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm opened here. But those two films were incredibly expensive, and then they created reduction prints to be shown in regular movie neighborhood theaters at regular prices. And at that time, they figured, I guess at Cinerama, that it was more economically viable to do a 70 millimeter print and project it on that wonderful screen and it would be far less expensive and lead to more profitability and flexibility also in terms of filmmaking. So there was from It's a Madman, Madman World on, you'd see films that would say Cinerama, but they weren't the three panel Cinerama. So I always found that as a very curious child. I didn't quite understand what was going on there because there's too little to know.

But I found out eventually. Tom, I think I recall in the documentary, you mentioned that as a young person, you actually did go to the Cinerama and see one of these movies. Yes. Thanks for having me here. I was in Toronto at the time, went to the Eglinton Theater and they ran Brothers Grimm. I remember looking around, seeing the light coming from all directions and sound coming from all directions. It was just mind-boggling. And when I left walking out of the theater, I was thinking, now what are they going to do?

It's all been done. I'm going to do another movie. Then I looked for Cinerama again and again. Oh, I did see How the West Was Won. That topped Brothers Grimm. It just seemed like they did it again. And then it vanished for 50 years. I was always looking, where did it go? Found on the internet eventually that Dave's Cinerama Adventure was appearing. So I drove one weekend to Portland. San Pedro. San Pedro. It was down in California. Further than that, yeah.

And I was working at the time, so I had to get back to Canada. That's when we met up and talked. And I was so interested in what happened to the Cinerama. I found Dave doing restorations and slowly helped him. Maybe an editor, too. I was on a completely different platform than him. I was on a different, completely different platform than him. I was on a PC and it was difficult to connect up, but it was better that way because I had completely different software, different ways of fixing problems than him. So we doubled our capabilities capabilities. And that's how we worked on all the travelogues. Eventually, Grimm came along. And that movie, that first movie I saw in the Eglinton Theater, now I'm restoring it with him.

Amazing. Yeah, that's quite a circle back to you're interested in as a young person. So before we get into the kind of the nitty gritty or the nuts and bolts of the restoration, George or Dave, maybe one of you can tell us a little bit about the history of the actual film itself, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. What is the movie about

and the director, George Powell? Well, I'm not an expert on George Powell. You might be more than me, George. I can speak a little Well, I'm not an expert on George Powell. You might be more than me, George. I can speak a little bit. I'm certainly not a George Powell expert, but I know enough of the raw details. You know, this film really had two directors. George Powell did the fantasy sequences and Henry Levin directed the non-fantasy sequences, the book sequences, if you will. When you're doing a musical,

you have like the book scenes and the musical scenes. Well, the Cinerama scenes are bookended by the dramatic fictionalized story of the brothers and that was directed by Henry Levin. And it was a combination of location shooting overseas and also shooting on the MGM lot. And of course, in locations all through the country. So it was a lot of ambitious activity following on the heels of the company just having spent a huge amount of money making Ben-Hur.

And all of this was to get people out of their comfortable living rooms, watching their little TVs, and experience something you couldn't possibly experience at home with massive screens and wide vistas that wouldn't be possible when the biggest television was 27 inches. So there was a lot of investment made. Also, the difference, How the West Was Won has an insane cast of big stars. And that helped a lot in terms of making it a blockbuster and a really good film.

Some of it directed by John Ford and two other directors with him. It was a blockbuster at the box office. Grimm didn't have as much star power, but it had Cinerama and it also had something, I think it would probably be more enjoyable for a nine or 10 year old child than How the West Was Won would be, you know? So they were making a family film and then also a more adult film. But, you know, when it was re-released, it was rated G. And How the West Was Won was very successful for the partnership. I've never seen any of the financials, but I think Brothers Grimm was a little bit more of a struggle, but it was not

I think it was the 13th biggest grossing film of its year. So it was not, I think it was the 13th biggest grossing film of its year. So it was not by any means a failure. It just cost a lot. So gross based on the cost, it may have taken a while for it to be in profit, but it eventually was. profit, but it eventually was. And I think the thing that's interesting about where we are now is that this is a film that I was under the impression it would be impossible for us to release it properly in Cinerama because portions of the original negative were water damaged in the tunnels underneath the MGM lot. And as Dave explained to me later, when we actually brought in all the film

and had it scanned, and it's in the wonderful documentary piece that's on the disc that Harrison Engle made called Rescuing a Fantasy Classic. He did a great job documenting Tom and Dave's work in how they meticulously and painstakingly restored the film. And it's revealed in that documentary, just the water damage really wasn't quite as bad as had been believed. But the truth of it was that had it not been for digital technology and the scanners we have now, which can deal with warpage and all sorts of other problems that made it possible to do this. Whereas we did, How the West was Won was done at Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging from start to finish. And that was using photochemical, you know, making film elements and scanning them through. We didn't, I don't believe, because we weren't doing it at that time, we didn't scan the original negative. I think we

scanned interpositives or whatever. It came out great, but, you know, I'm thinking now, oh, you know, maybe we should be looking at that again because technology has grown so far. But right now we want to keep the focus on what's in front of us. And we have a very wonderful high definition master of how the West was one that is properly modernized without join lines. And we've, you know, 7,000 movies to take care of. We have to make our priorities. Well, why don't we get into, you know, the actual restoration? Because that's the meat and potatoes of the talk today.

But I just wanted to set the background, you know, for the fans of just kind of Cinerama and some of the previous projects. But Dave, when did you kind of start focusing your attention on the actual restoration or looking at the assets? And I know you go into this in detail on the documentary that's part of the Blu-ray release. And for the fans, you're going to want to watch that in full detail. But let's get a taste and tell a little bit to the fans of this restoration, when it started, and then we'll dive into it a little bit deeper.

Jim Vanderveer, who is one of the head lawyers at Arclight Cinemas, or Decurion, who owned the center ammo process, eventually they inherited it, asked me one day, what would it take to do Grimm? Because he saw the sales of how the West was won, and every time it ran at the Dome, it was doing well on all this. And that, that 50th anniversary or 60th anniversary of center. And the thing we did at the center,

I'm a dome with John sitting, uh, was blowing everybody away. How can you make that much money on these films? Yeah. So he sent a letter to, I believe it was Steve Anastasi and maybe you, George,

I'm not sure. I told him who to go to. And so he wrote a letter and then they exchanged. And then finally, one day when it didn't seem like anything was happening, I just said, let's all get together for lunch. What year was that? I think 2018. 18 or 19, something like that. I can't remember. It was in November, I remember. Yeah, it was. It was before COVID. So we all had a lunch over there and I said, I think you guys need to do some tests on this and something of that. And then I told them what we had done for Windjammer. We had just finished Windjammer, which was a, I wasn't even sure we were going to be able to finish it, but we'd finished it like a year earlier. And I had this little documentary on how that one was done. And I gave a copy to everybody. That one was done.

And I gave a copy to everybody. And then I think a couple of months went by and then they did a test on a reel that I requested because I had a copy of the damage report from 1995. I believe it was Dick Mays report from photo camp. And it's like 150 pages long. Every reel broken down with, you know, there's a spot here, water damage there, unrestorable, blah, blah, blah, all these notes, which were, I'm looking at this, scaring the crap out of me as I'm reading. And I figured, you know, if I was able to get through Windjammer, I can get through this somehow. You know, it just won't be, I can't tell you when it'd be done. So anyway, that's where it started. Warner Brothers did some tests, and the tests came out very good.

They invited me over to one of the screening rooms and showed me the test. And afterwards, they said, what do you think? And I said, well, I think you guys have got it. Good luck. No, no, no, wait. Don't come back, Dave. It was that kind of a scene, you know. Right.

It was really remarkable because what was going on at that time and is still going on at this moment is we have a massive initiative to try and scan as much film as possible, as well as protect videotape material and everything in the library and get it onto servers at USC and multiple servers because, you know, digital storage, something could die, you know. So this has been going on, I'd say aggressively as we shifted from working photochemically and making, you know, let's say film elements on 10 or 20 movies a year to working on, I would say probably two or 300 movies a year. And so when I talked to Steven Anastasi, who retired at the end of 2020, because he's an excellent golfer, and I know nothing about golf, And I know he is. Everybody who's played with him says it's impossible to beat him. But I've known and worked with Stephen since my days at MGM and his days at Turner. And we've been very friendly and very committed to seeing that everything gets protected.

And we looked at the Brothers Grimm situation and we said, well, if the camera negative has so much water damage, let's bring in the positive separations. Let's bring in the 65 millimeter interpositive. Let's bring in everything we have. millimeter interpositive. Let's bring in everything we have. And that's really the way to approach these projects is to bring in every stitch of film and every piece of audio you have, unless it's obvious from paper inventories or computerized inventories that there are some things you don't need to bring in. I don't think we need to bring in the 20 minute, eight millimeter super condensation, you know, but we did look at everything. And as Dave mentioned before,

we found that the supposed unusable water damage to the negative wasn't as severe. And whereas in a photochemical situation in a laboratory, there would have been problems that I don't even want to think about. But with the scanners we have now, the film actually never touches the sprocket. The sprocket balls actually never get touched by a gear like it used to be in traditional telecine. So it's so gentle to the film. And we have a 10K director scan. We actually have two of them now. So each of the original negative panels were scanned. We also, for protection, panels were scanned. We also, for protection, scanned all of the positive separations. So that's the A, the B, and the C panels, and then the three RGB separations. So that's basically the equivalent of nine movies as a backup to the negative, which is three strips of film. And it's a long film. It's 140 minutes when you add up all the exit music and intermission and

so forth and so on. So this is a massive expense, but a necessary one, because now Because now the film can be shown all over the world on television, on people's big 16 by 9 monitors, or they can, if they want to, watch it on their phone or their iPod or their iPad or whatever. I mean, it's amazing what technology will bring. I'm not a fan of watching things on small screens. I love big screens. You know, if I'm watching an art gang short, it's fine to watch it on my phone on the airplane. But if I'm going to watch a movie, I want to see it on a nice big monitor or in a big theater. And we now have, because of this process, with all the negative scan and all the material scan, don't have to be film educated to understand clearly what they're going through in trying to align this because you're dealing with optics and you're dealing with keeping everything even and dealing with a little bit of fade here. And I don't want to jump ahead of myself,

but I think the documentary is essential viewing. And I always tell people, before you watch the movie, watch the documentary so you can see what went into what you're about to see. And I think in retrospect, it might have been a cool idea to make the very first thing you see or give the audience the option. The very first thing you see would be the restoration documentary. But the way we have the disc programmed, it's the disc is actually two discs. We have the first disc in traditional letterbox and the second disc in smilebox.

And the documentary is on disc two. And the reason we spread the extra features out is to have the highest possible bit rate, which is something I'm kind of obsessed about. So we could have the best possible quality and no one let us down. It is just amazing what these gentlemen have done is worthy of an Academy Award. And I'm not the first person to say that. Frankly, I find it incredible. And quantum leaps, I would say, over even what was achieved with How the West Was Won, which was 14 years ago.

Cheat with How the West Was Won, which was 14 years ago. So technology has improved so much since then that this is doubly remarkable. And it changed, for me, it changed the film from being a good piece of entertainment, but nothing earth-shaking, to actually, you can't take your eyes off the screen because there is wonderment to behold in front of you at all times. Even if the dialogue isn't particularly exciting, there's something going on because of Cinerama and because of what Dave and Tom have done. I can't underscore enough how impressive it is and how grateful all true film fans will be to what they've achieved here. It's really fantastic. Dave, maybe you can pick up that story of once you got the assets from Warner Brothers, what was it that you and Tom, what was the task that was before you? And take us through some of that.

As far as the damage is concerned, I would, you know, in loose terms, I would say it's about 38% was damaged in some way, shape, or form. And then there were other whole reels, like the reel next to the other reel that was in pristine condition, except for dust and things like that, you know, and then aligning them up and stuff. The worst problem for me anyway, was flesh tones between the three panels. And I finally said this to myself, I slapped myself. I said, wait a minute. Well, everybody's got a different skin color. Why do they have to be equal?

And I thought it was fading at first, but then I realized, you know, the sun was shining through that window. That's why he's brighter and blah, blah, blah. Although in some of those cases, the person was so much brighter because of fading of negative or something. I was able to highlight his figure and lower his screen temperature. So it wouldn't distract on one side of the screen. We did some of those throughout the film to even it out, which you couldn't have done in Cinerama because it was just all photographed. What was it that you did in terms of the nuts and bolts of the rest of the restoration? The first thing we had to do was do a process called barrel warping, which straightens out a lot of lens problems in the original Cinerama format

when you don't have a curved screen. It helps straighten a lot of that out. And then some scenes you couldn't do. For example, the puppatoon scenes were shot with a different lens. And so that, even though we had it barrel warped, we had to redo it as non-barrel warped. And there was, I think, one other scene, I can't remember that we did the same way some of the dragon stuff was shot in Cinerama and some of the animation wasn't but it was shot with a actually one of the old windjammer cameras

the single camera and as they photographed each frame you know stop motion they had it in three different positions they do the animation for that then click over, do another one and then click over and do another one. So all of that ended up being a duplicate negative of some sort because it was all in one camera. So subsequent, what do they call it in animation where you do the YCM? Successor exposure. That's it. Yeah. I never say that 10 times real fast. I never tried. It was a process like that.

So one of our jobs to do was to try to even out the different grain structures throughout the whole film. So it all looked like it was one grain structure. And what was inspiring to me was Peter Jackson's film. They shall not grow old, although I think they went overboard on a bunch of stuff. But we didn't want to go that far. But that gave me the inspiration. I like let's make it all look even. And that's that's what we ended up doing.

But it was a year and a half. I think, Tom, it was a year and a half. The actual crux of it. And the rest of the time I spent on helping Harrison and getting involved with the extras, which we kind of surprised George because he didn't know he was going to get all these extras. And on all the travelogues that I'd done with Flickr Alley, they didn't know they were getting extras. We were just doing them somewhat simultaneously to the actual restoration because we knew it was groundbreaking stuff and people should know about this. Or at least film restorers might want to take a cue from people that aren't professionally film restorers, which I guess I am now, but I never really was. I was the stupid guy that was going

to deal with all this crazy stuff. Right. So anyway, it was one of those things where it took about a year and a half to do the, the main crux of brothers grim. Then you have to let it sit on the shelf for a month or two. And then you go back and look at it again because they're, you know, the first time it looks great. And then you go back and look at it a couple of days later, like color grading and what the heck was I thinking? So it has to gestate a little bit.

Right. So how did you guys divvy up the work? Tom, you said you're on the, you know, a different platform, different software. So did you guys do different elements of the restoration? Yeah, well, Dave was the organizer. He made sure that everything was there. The scans were great. When Dave put all the panels together and stitched them, then I could do something at my end. He would send them on the internet and a shot at a time and I'd work on it. His organizing helped because I didn't have to worry about if there was sound in sync. That was all taken care of. I did all the water damage cleanup. And that took forever, it seems. He gave me the worst problems first. I'm not stupid. That was discouraging because I saw the worst damage coming in first.

That was by design. I worked like 16 hours a day for weeks at a time just cleaning up water damage. And I also did, my specialty would have been join line matching. And that wasn't just brightness or color or getting them, if there was any parallax error that had to be taken out or suddenly your eye would be drawn to the join line. If there was any jitter in the picture, the different panels move at different directions at different times. That draws your attention to the join line. Everything had to be removed before the effect worked. And we would address each problem separately. So we'd come back to the same shot again and again and again, cleaning up different things each time.

Big job. It was boggling what we had tackled. I think it was the biggest restoration ever because of the damage. I think it was the biggest restoration ever because of the damage, mold, water, warpage. Dave kept it organized. And like I said, if the scans weren't so well done, that would have doubled the amount of headaches that we encountered. Yeah, we had whole areas where I replaced ceilings. The ceilings were in shadow. And as film fades over the years, the shadows become like fluorescent blue in a way, you know. And so I would have to take a freeze frame of the ceiling. Once we studied the images,

take a freeze frame of the ceiling, draw a mat around it, make a freeze frame, add a little bit of grain movement to it. And so that these blue worms wouldn't be crawling over each other on the top of the frame, causing your eye to go up. And instead of that, they had a lot of ceilings or corners of sets where that was happening, where the shadows were just calling attention to themselves by movement. And you can almost see the grain walking over each other and stuff like that. So there was tons of that. Every shot in the restoration is considered a composite in visual effects terms. That means that, you know, of a traditional movie where you get a matte shot, they paint the matte and then they have the foreground, they shoot the

foreground and they maybe have some blue screen behind that. And then you have to composite it together. In that sense, you're compositing the three panels of Cinerama and in several shots, mostly interiors, you're also compositing parts of the set. Yeah. The documentary goes into great detail about how you did it and gives it a nice kind of linear flow of what you guys did. How long did the actual kind of picture restoration take before you kind of took it to the sound element, which we'll get to in just a second? It was pretty much done at that point, except for final QC, when it went to sound. Right. Except for the final QC, you know, some more specs that we found and we're still finding them today.

That took what, a year? I'd say a year and a half. And then we were basically done with the actual damage. And then at that point we did the sound and then we were basically done with the actual damage and then at that point we did the sound and then we came back and then we sent it over to uh the warner brothers qc people and they would make clear notes there was i don't know maybe two pages of there's a dirt speck over here there's something on the dragon's tongue there's whatever and then stuff that we were seeing every day but because we saw it every day our eyes tricked us into that it was okay so you need another you need another another

pair of eyes to pick out stuff that you didn't think was there and then oh my god there it is how come we don't see that we tom and i kept saying i didn't see that before how did that happen well it's always been there but we just didn't see it well i How did that happen? Well, it's always been there, but we just didn't see it. Well, I did want to talk a little bit about the seven channel sound restoration that you guys did. I know when I watched the movie, the new Blu-ray George, which is amazing. You you're visually, as you mentioned, George, you're visually drawn in by these images, obviously, and the widescreen and the pristine colors now and everything. But there are huge chunks where there's no dialogue. You know, the stagecoach is just going through the forest and the sound becomes hugely important to hear all of that. Talk a little bit about the restoration and how long that took.

The sound was five and a half days of work. The sound was five and a half days of work. They had the audio mechanics, John Pulido, had all the tracks and everything ahead of time for them to look at it and determine if they wanted to do the job or not. And they're one of the premium restoration places in town. They did My Fair Lady. They did a bunch of the movies that came out on home video by cleaning up the tracks and stuff. The tracks weren't terrible, but there was warpage. There was where you have a violin playing a straight tune.

It would go like that. They've got electronics that can clean that stuff up. So five days of work and lots of coffee and donuts. We lived in that edit bay for that long a time. And it became a challenge for the whole thing was a challenge for everybody. And once you get people, as they used to say in the movie business pregnant with a project, then they want to finish it and they want to make it as best as they possibly could. And that's, we had the guys at the sound that found things that I never heard before and they would play them for me and they'd say, here's the fix.

Do you like this or do you like that? And I'm just, I'm sitting there blown away. Like if people are blown away with the restoration, I'm blown away with The Sound guys and some of the stuff they were able to accomplish. Yeah. I mean, the combination obviously is terrific. It's an amazing, amazing restoration. Maybe, you know, what was kind of the most challenging element of that restoration process? Was there anything specific? Besides everything?

I can't really put my finger on it. Okay. finger on it okay what gave me the confidence to tackle something like this was was getting windjammer done which was the same kind of impossible thing you know missing this and something that and and then trying to get the color even across the panels all that stuff you know added up but i figured after windjammer as i told george and steven i said you know after windjammer i don't think anything's going to ever scare me again. You know, and I'm 70, I'm going on 73 years old. So I've been through the mill on a lot of post-production things and stuff like that.

And I'm just amazed at some of the software that you can get now to fix some of these things. And some of it is not that expensive. I think one of the main things we used was neat video, right, Tom? I mean, besides a couple of things that you found on the internet, and you can download these things for 250 bucks. Thinking of software, I remember having so many problems with the join lines on Windjammer. with the join lines on Windjammer. New software came along after Windjammer that made Brothers Grimm so much easier to address, deal with. And this was all happening during the pandemic, which, you know, we're all shut down.

So the ability for each of you to work independently out of your homes and everything was pretty fantastic. Couldn't have done it without the internet. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And I live in Eagle, Idaho. When I left my wife and I retired from the movie business, we moved to Eagle, Idaho and we didn't have that much COVID problems here. We're going out to eat and movies and you know, what's everybody. And then I go to LA to visit and it's like all shut down.

I'm saying I'm going to be arrested any minute. So and Tom is in Canada, which was also what I call COVID paranoid. And he had to, like, stay in his house and him and his cat, you know, survived through that whole thing. So. But with the Internet, we could be anywhere in the world. Yeah, true. Yeah. As long as FedEx can get it there we used FedEx a little

bit and the internet a whole lot yeah I was always worried that you know because I don't know that much about the internet and how it works and I was always are we losing any quality by going to the cloud and back down or are we missing some pixels or something or, you know, whatever. And, uh, and so I would do these incredible tests where I would blow everything up 400% of what I said to Tom and what I got back a certain part of the scene or somebody's face or nose or whatever. And I would literally get my magnifying glass and count the pixels to make sure nothing was missing.

Wow. Well, the other question I had that I want to ask is you, you really have two films. I mean, you have two discs, George, you mentioned because the second disc has the smile box version when you did the restoration. I mean, is there anything different for the smile box or is that just taking the main film and then you just put it, explain that a little bit for us. It's a slightly different version in the sense that the Letterboxd version is literally everything that we had to deal with. And every shot that had to be aligned, there was alignment changes on every shot because the camera was out of alignment that day. Or the other thing that drove Tom and I crazy was the pulling focus thing that happened in Grimm that didn't happen in West.

It was a different camera crew. And there's a guy named Pete Gibbons who wrote the manual on how to use the center of the camera. If he had been in Europe, he would have said, no, stop, don't do it that way. Because every time an actor moved closer, they were racking focus like Hollywood would normally do in a regular film.

But what that causes is the panels to move on the two sides. It's called focus breathing. We call it breathing. The lens on the Cinerama cameras have a lot of focus breathing. So if they rack the focus to track the actors moving back and forth. The pictures of each panel zoom a little bit. And once you've set the join line positions and then they move the focus, everything goes off. There was no real fix for that. We just have to say it's there. It's due to the the pulling of focus for

it with the assistant cameraman and uh and on west they had pete gibbons there that made sure they didn't do that because in cinerama it's such a wide angle lens the depth of focus covers a lot of a lot of that problem and you don't have to rack that much they should have let the actors walk into focus and walk out of focus. Yeah. There's no real focus in a center camera. And believe me, I've operated it. So I can speak for personal experience that it's just the three little lenses move. And that's mostly for alignment, not for focus because of the depth of field is going to cover your basis there. Yeah. And they just didn't get that. So in Grimm, there is a lot of that. I'm sure somebody will recognize that and make a comment on home theater

forum or something, but I've got answers for everything. Right. Right. So back to the smile box, was that something you did after the letterbox? Yes. We wanted to pattern the smile box after what they did with how the West was one, give or take a pixel or two. Tom went and took the How the West Was Won smile box and the letterbox and then took our letterbox and matched it up to the How the West Was Won letterbox and figured out geometrically what the difference was between the two.

Because when the Cinerama played in Cinerama theaters, it was not as wide as what you're going to see in the Letterboxd version. That's right out to the purse. And Cinerama theaters, when they did the two dramatic films, they replaced a lot of projectors. And inside the projector is a special kind of aperture plate that helps you with the join lines called gigolos. And they're on the outside edges. There's two in each projector. So the outside edges are getting a little bit of cropping. So we wanted to match what they did with how the West was one, which

did compensate for that. And so we did the same thing. So some people that see the smile box, if they're starting to count pixels, they're going to see a little bit of cropping on those two edges in smile box, which is exactly what was done on How the West is One. So we wanted to keep the Warner Brothers Cinerama releases consistent with each other. And Tom would do the smile box based on our past smile boxes or based on the How the West is One. smile boxes based on the How the West Was Won. Tom, I

noticed in the documentary that you have this home theater and it looks like it's a curved Cinerama

screen. It was based on the crest screen. I brought in a load of drywall and a

stack of two-by-fs and built a wall curved. And the drywall was flexible drywall so I could curve it and then discovered that it doesn't work. You have to have louvers to prevent the cross illumination. So we put louvers on it. And Dave was up here with Harrison Engel to do the documentary and to check how Grimm looked on a curve for a couple of days near the end of lockdown. And we checked everything and it all looked good. And I've checked the Blu-ray on that curve as well.

Very nice. It fits. Is that where you tested the smile box then on your screen there? Yes, the smile box. Actually, I used the smile box and modified it because the curve distorts the image a little bit. It was built to Cinerama screen standards. You know, it's a 1952 technology. I think there might be something better today.

Well, George, I can only think of, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's only been one other two- two disc special edition Blu-ray from the Warner archive. And that was last year for Curse of Frankenstein. Is that right? Blu-ray, yes. Until this release of the Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, obviously you needed the two discs that you could have,

the bit rate that you wanted for the two versions of the film. But tell us a little bit about the release itself, some of the extras and your excitement for the two versions of the film. But tell us a little bit about the release itself, some of the extras and your excitement for the release. Well, it's so beautiful in the packaging. There's a really lovely booklet inside that is mostly a reproduction of the original partial reproduction of the original souvenir program that people could buy in the theater when they went to see the movie in a roadshow engagement. And we've never had anything like that before. And even the original artwork, Dave's wife made it so much more colorful than it originally was. And we ended

up using that as the cover. We're always very picky about what we put out and we want it to be perfect. And this is beyond perfect. It's beyond wildest dreams. And I do want to call out, because it's something Tom mentioned earlier, we have, and I say this a lot, but it's very, very true. At Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging, we have really talented artists that do the scanning. That in itself is an art form just like being a colorist. And these gentlemen really understand film in a way that a lot of people don't. And our scans are particularly on the mark and we are able to achieve so much clarity and uniformity because of their eagle eyes. And I just want to give a shout out to those guys. And they're in the documentary, very briefly, but incredibly talented people. Everybody who worked on this did so with a great sense of passion.

Cinerama seems to breed passion in those who participate in it. It really is, it's something special, and it brings out a love of film within those who touch it. Oh, one other thing I can mention is that, as you may have alluded to earlier, we started with 6K because we were going to go down a bunch of generations and so ended up with 4K. But the 4K, we create a special DCP that's corrected for Keystone and all that other stuff that can be played at the dome on the full big screen, as well as at the Bradford Cinema, where they have a Cinerama set

up. So you can see Brothers Grimm essentially in, I guess you could call it digital Cinerama, but all three panels stay completely in focus across the curved screen. So it's, and essentially it's an improvement on the original Cinerama process, as much as we'd like to hear the projectors clacking away and the film going through, which you can't do anymore photochemically with these films. But this is certainly it's literally an improvement. Debbie Reynolds' son, Todd, came to see How the Westeros Won on almost every screening we had. And he said, when we ran the digital version of How the Westeros Won on the Cinerama Golem screen, he says, I've never seen this movie look so good. And that was the Warner Brothers restoration.

They did everything on that. And I said, well, did you get the Cinerama feel during the moving shots? He said, yeah. I mean, was it better than the original Cinerama? I said, it should be the same. But you do get the Cinerama effect in a Cinerama theater with our 4K DCP version. It's ironic that you talk about Todd Fisher because I just spoke with him last night after not talking to him. We've been friends for years, obviously. He's very close to his mom.

But I was telling him about some of the things that we've been doing and mentioned that, you know, we were doing Brothers Grimm. And he was talking again about how the West was won. Talking again about how the West was won. And he's a remarkable guy because he's a very talented film person in his own right. He set up all the film sequences. His mother had a museum in Las Vegas for a very brief period of time. She had bought a hotel. Vegas for a very brief period of time. She had bought a hotel and he put together all these film clip sequences around the costumes and props that Debbie had collected that she showed in her

hotel. And Todd cut all the sequences and he's just so talented and such a warm, down-to-earth, unspoiled guy. After everything he's been through, he's just an amazing individual. But he has told me several times that one of the great thrills for him, he obviously loved his mother very much, but when she was very much still alive and after the How the West Was Won screenings, he was just over the moon because he had seen it as a little boy. He was five, six years old. And now as an adult, he was really able to appreciate how exciting Cinerama was. It is, you know, it's a wonderful

infection to be infected with is the Cinerama. That makes me ask the question that probably other people are interested in is, is there a possibility of a screening in the Cinerama domes in the future? I would think so. We were hoping it would be ready for the TCM Festival this year because I thought we should do a big premiere of Brothers Grimm and bring Russ and whoever's alive in there to be a part of it and everything with Klieg lights out front and all that stuff. Then they informed me that it wasn't going to be open. I'm not sure when it's going to be open. I'm kind of counting on the fall because that's the 70th anniversary of the

center of the process. And they might want to open up the dome with a big something or other and show all the films or something. So the personnel has changed so much at the Decurion company, but I have a bunch of allies there that are going to help pursue this. So I'm hoping we can do it in the fall and show it up really big. I think it's worth mentioning that even the films that weren't shot with three cameras, when they're shown at the Dome, the ones that did say Cinerama, but films like Grand Prix and even 2001 A Space Odyssey. I think there was a screening of 2001 A Space Odyssey about 10 ago, and a nice 70 millimeter print. But I think the tickets went on sale at midnight and it was sold out within five minutes or 10 minutes. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

And it would only be more so now, you know, because as we're facing changes in technology, As we're facing changes in technology, some of those changes in technology have made this possible, that this can be, as you guys have said, it is actually in many ways superior than projected photochemical original Cinerama, because the things you couldn't improve upon at the time now can be perfected. So there is that part of it, which is wonderful. But as I see in certain younger generations, a disinterest in quality and they'll just, you know, watch things on their phone and this and that. There are also people who are learned and excited and want to delve into the history of this, just like I did when I was a kid. And I'm hoping that people will get infected by the bug and want to learn more about this. And frankly, and other other widescreen processes that are all part of our cinematic heritage that only can breed good things and inspire new filmmakers. And I think this is all part of a chain. And history is a great teacher

and we're so fortunate because none of the, really I have to say there would be no revival of Cinerama to the extent that there has been if it wasn't for Dave and working alongside Tom, these two gentlemen have created miraculous things that I know a lot of people are terribly grateful for all their work. And certainly I'm

ahead of the line because I had the fortune to meet Dave early on. We owe them a great debt of thanks for the talent of what they do. Just you can't even in words or in a documentary when you're actually sitting there and they're having to confront all these unusual technical problems and overcoming them. And then the result, as you said, Tim, the sound and the picture is so amazing. This is an extraordinary thing to celebrate and what these men have done. I only wish I knew Oscar better because I'd tell him, you know, give these guys. But I've never met the guy. So I met him once. I met Oscar once. Kevin Brown, who invited me to his induction and Patrick and, uh, a bunch of Kevin's friends. So I got, I got to hold it afterwards. Oh, that's wonderful. Well, the show is called The Extras and Dave, we've talked about it, the documentary that is on the release. It's 40 minutes. Tell us just a brief background on that documentary

and why every fan needs to see that documentary. Well, compared to what we had to accomplish, it's somewhat simplistic, which is by design. So people wouldn't, their eyes won't glaze over and stuff because there's probably behind every sample we showed in that documentary, there's probably 150 that we didn't show or that we couldn't show or explain ourselves how it worked. But it started with the first meeting where I said to everyone, if we do this project, I want a documentary to be done about this. Because I had done that on all the Flickr Alley things. I did a little 15-minute demo and I talked and explained what

we did and everything. But this was going to be different to a certain extent. So I wanted to do it. So a friend of mine for years, Harrison Engel, who also did the documentary on Obsessed with Vertigo with Robert Harris and James Katz doing the restoration as well as the history of the film and everything. I said, Harrison, how about doing a documentary on while we're doing this? And he said, Oh, really, really? What do you think? And I said, well, I think Warner Brothers will go along with it, but let's make it anyway. And so that's what we ended up doing. Most of it was done after the fact, because as we're restoring, I'm saving little bits and Tom is saving little bits so we can use it before and after and stuff like that. So that was part of it. So I wrote a basic outline

and then gave it to Harrison and then we, and then he would start shooting interviews and stuff like that. So that was part of it. So I wrote a basic outline and then gave it to Harrison and then we, and then he would start shooting interviews and stuff. And my interview was the hardest thing I've ever done because I'm better spontaneous like this. But if I have to do something that's rehearsed, I literally, my wife was holding up cue cards so I can stay on track. I used to be a DJ, so I'm not nervous, you know, but it was just one of those things where, oh, I better get this right. So there was a little bit of pressure. So the cue cards came in handy, even though I flubbed a lot of them and it looked like I was reading. It's a terrific explanation of the work that you guys put into it with the visuals.

And Dave, you've been kind enough to let me have a few of those visuals that I'm going to put on the website and, uh, and we'll have those available so that people can see a few examples of, um, shots from the documentary. Well, George, Tom, and Dave, it's been a real pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you for taking the time today to, uh, to give the fans insight into this highly anticipated release. Thank you. Thanks. For those of you interested in learning more about this episode and all of our other episodes,

please check out our website at www.theextras.tv. And as I mentioned, we'll have some images there that you can look at from the documentary. And if you're on social media, you can follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheExtrasTV or Instagram at TheExtras.TV. That's the best way to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images and behind the scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. And if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify,

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