"When The Godfather Part II came out in 1974, the original film was revived as well, as it was all through the 1980s. The prints were worn out, so Paramount churned out new ones—and they churned them straight off the negative. Film is delicate, and the printmaking machinery can be harsh, with its sprockets, rough-edged reels, and (back then) less-than-sanitary conditions. With each churning, the negative became more and more damaged—dirtier, scratched, and torn. (These days, prints are usually made from a duplicate negative derived from a master print, called an "inter-positive.")"
"Over the years, the Godfather negative was also shuttled to several different film labs, some of which were careless beyond belief. Whole sections of the film were ripped apart and crudely spliced back together with Mylar tape. "
"In 2006, Paramount bought Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios. Coppola called Spielberg, an old friend, and asked whether he could use his influence to rescue The Godfather. Spielberg lobbied the higher-ups, who agreed to finance a restoration. Robert Harris—who has conducted some of the most meticulous restorations of the past couple decades (Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Rear Window, and My Fair Lady, among others)—got involved in discussions that September. He and a large team began work in November. It took them a year and a half to finish. First, they repaired the original negative to the point where it could be put through a digital scanner without breaking. Then the machine digitally scanned the negative at a "4K" sampling rate—that is, at a rate of 4,096 pixels per line, much more than even a high-def image. The significance of this is that 4K scanning (which is still rarely employed in restoration work, in part because it's so expensive) is a high enough sampling rate to capture everything that's on a frame of 35 mm film. In other words, Harris and his team started with a digital replica of the film—not some compressed approximation, as is the case with most digital transfers. They then set about restoring the image to what it looked like more than 30 years ago. Frame by frame, they erased every scratch, speck, pop, and bit of dust. Often, the damage was beyond fixing, so they had to search for other film elements—dupes, IPs, prints, whatever—to find an image in good enough condition to work with. Then they had to do the color correction. This was a harder job than usual. The colors on the negative hadn't faded much, but in this case, that wasn't the issue. The colors on the negative bore little resemblance to those on the theatrical print. Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, had manipulated the colors in the film lab, aiming for a lush effect—a "brassy yellow," as he called it—reminiscent of old photographs. Willis created this effect through photochemical "color timing." Harris and his team had to replicate digitally what he had done."
"Luckily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a print of The Godfather that was in perfect condition. (This was the approved master print that Technicolor stored with the academy when the film was complete. It had never been shown in a theater.) So, when Harris & Co. did the digital color correction, they could use this print as a reference. They also worked side by side with Allen Daviau, a brilliant cinematographer who, in turn, consulted by phone with Willis himself. (Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock's Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars—the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film—so that he could match the shade of green exactly.)"
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