A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (50 page)

I sat there for a couple of minutes, completely depleted and dejected.
It was so close. I went back through everything once again. No mistake,
it was cut. I tried to take some comfort in the fact that here was a pristine
original Technicolor dye-transfer print; but the disappointment was so
strong that it was almost physical; I felt as if someone had hit me in the
stomach. After that, I had to admit that the missing sequences were
irretrievably lost.

Still, the search had unearthed a great deal of material. Out of the
missing half-hour, approximately twenty minutes of usable footage had
been found. There were the complete 181-minute monaural soundtrack;
154 minutes of stereo soundtrack on the studio print; and the mint-condition Technicolor short version. So, even though everyone involved felt the
disappointment of not finding all the material, there was still the possibility
of putting much of the picture back together. I wanted to take the bits and
pieces of film that had been found in the stock footage vaults and, using
the soundtrack and the editor's script as a guide, put the shots back where
they belonged. The sections without the necessary visuals could be filled
in using stills of the missing scenes. These had all been shot on the set
simultaneously with the principal photography, and the still photographer
generally matched the angles and the action of the CinemaScope camera.
Panning, zooming, and otherwise moving across these photos in a variation
of TV news technique, would, I felt, give a fluidity and a sense of drama
to these otherwise static shots. It seemed feasible, at least in theory.

But before proposing this, I wanted to get some idea of what was
involved technically and financially, so I called Robert Swarthe, special
effects genius and animator par excellence. Bob, busy with Francis Cop pola's The Outsiders, listened to my idea and nodded yes, it could be done,
but it would be expensive. When I asked him how expensive,'he explained
that it would depend on how many camera moves we made over the stills
and how elaborate these moves would be. Obviously, we would need someone experienced in working with an animation camera and in laying out
camera moves. Bob wanted to take on the project, but because of his work
on The Outsiders he reluctantly had to give up on the idea. He recommended several people who he thought could do what was needed.

The first one I called was Lize Bechtold, mainly because I knew she was
a prize-winning animator, a filmmaker of sensitivity and imagination; it
turned out that she was also a young woman of energetic charm and humor.
When I spoke to her, she was flabbergasted. A Star Is Born was one of her
favorite films, but she had no idea that large sections of it were missing.
She agreed at once to take on the project if we could get approval and
money, and she immediately worked out a budget based on her examination
of the stills and hearing tape recordings of the missing scenes. She estimated that her work alone might cost upwards of ten thousand dollars.
Then, the costs of printing up the negative material in the Warners vaults
had to be figured in; raw stock and printing of approximately six thousand
feet of color film would add another seven or eight thousand dollars, not
to mention the cost of rerecording the stereo track (replacing missing
frames, repairing tears and splices, and generally bringing it up to presentday standards)-all of which added up to an approximate total of $25,000.

But at least the project seemed feasible, so Doug Edwards and I presented the idea to Fay. She was a bit uncertain about the concept and the
costs and decided to get Gene Allen's opinion. Gene had a long-standing
close relationship with George Cukor, and if Gene didn't like the idea, then
we wouldn't go any further with it. After listening to what we wanted to
do and how we proposed to do it, he was all for it and, even more encouraging, offered to work with us in the still photography to make certain that
the tints and colors we used were coordinated with the existing color and
design scheme of the film. Fay and Gene now felt that George should know
what was going on. He might be very opposed to the idea-it was, after
all, yet another compromise on a film that had already been compromised
enough. So Gene explained what was happening and asked George what
he thought of the whole idea. "Very intriguing, by all means-go ahead
with it" was the reply.

Having worked out a budget and received the approval of George and Gene, Fay now felt prepared to go to Robert Daly of Warners and ask for
the company's financial support not only in restoring the film but also in
setting up a series of fund-raising screenings in selected cities across the
country. At a meeting in his office, Daly was interested but cautious. He
thought the project worthwhile but did not want to commit the company
to it until everyone was certain that the concept would really work. He
proposed that we do a test reel and asked how much we'd need. I did some
quick calculations and pulled a figure of $5,000 out of my hat. "You've got
it," he said. "How long do you think it will take?" One or two months, I
told him, and he said to let him know when we were ready and he'd look
at what we'd done and give us an answer. It was a quick, productive
meeting.

Several weeks earlier, I had been talking about all this with a young editor
named Craig Holt. He thought it "sounded like fun" and volunteered his
services if we ever got to the point where we needed them. Now he, Lize,
Gene, Doug, and I met in the Academy's editing room to figure out the
best place to start. We decided to begin right at the beginning, with
Esther's farewell to the band, and proceed through the scenes of Norman
being driven off to location, Esther waiting for his call, and all of the other
missing bits, right up to Esther doing the voice-over for the commercial.
Evelyn Lane pulled the negative segments we needed, which caused me
some worry, because there recently had been questions in some quarters
about the supposed instability of Eastmancolor negative. It looked fine
when I was winding through it, but the material was thirty years old.
However, all my doubts proved relatively unfounded. When the material
came back from the laboratory, aside from a slight yellow tint to some
scenes, it was visually superb.

Craig and I then began the arduous task of looking at these various takes
and trying to match them up with what was happening on the soundtrack.
It was very much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. We put in blank
film where we had no picture, then Lize and I sat down and timed this
blank footage and worked out the camera moves across the stills, again as
dictated by what was happening on the soundtrack. It was a matter of
painstaking trial and error. We could not really be certain of how the
original shots had been put together: there were so many takes and angles
to choose from, and nobody at the studio or at USC, where the early
Warners files were deposited, had been able to turn up Folmar Blangsted's
cutting script. (Unfortunately, Blangsted had died several months before the project got under way.) So Craig was working in the dark, and it's a
testament to his instincts that when Evelyn Lane finally did find the cutting
script, Craig's choices were almost all identical to the original edit.

One of our biggest headaches was the proper photography of the stills.
A Star Is Born was the third film in Hollywood to go into production in
CinemaScope, and that was the proportion we wanted to use for the stills.
To make certain that the photographic quality matched that of the original,
the Warners camera department located the anamorphic attachment with
which the picture had originally been photographed. But it turned out that
when Lize went to her cameraman to start photography, she found it
impossible to get the kind of moves we wanted with this lens, as it was not
possible to follow focus; after every movement the cameraman would have
to refocus, a time-consuming and expensive process. None of the other
computerized camera stands were set up for CinemaScope photography,
and we were stumped. To our rescue came Bob Swarthe. He suggested
copying the stills themselves through the CinemaScope attachment, which
would give us a "squeezed" image which we could then photograph on the
animation stand with a standard lens. When the film was projected through
a normal CinemaScope lens, we should get a wide, full-screen picture.

After this had been tested and had proved effective, our major problem
was in gathering the necessary stills to flesh out the sequences. Previously,
there had been some discussion about this: Why go to all the trouble of
manufacturing footage for these sequences-why not just restore the musical numbers that had been found and leave out the sections that would
need stills? But my intent all along had been to find and restore the missing
dramatic sections. Their deletion had caused Cukor the most pain and had
fragmented the early part of the story to such an extent that a clear
understanding of the characters of Norman and Esther was impossible. I
didn't really care about the missing musical numbers that much, though
it was wonderful that they had been found, and they were, of course, the
most interesting aspect of the picture to Garland fans. But for myself and
for George, and for all the people who loved A Star Is Born as more than
a Garland vehicle, the real joy in reassembling the film would be the
inclusion of all this early expository material. As our project got under way,
I pointed out that it would be impossible to say that we had reconstructed
the film without doing something about this deleted footage. If we put back
just the songs, it would still leave gaping holes in the beginning. Audiences
would feel cheated-and George still would not sit through the film.

Fay, in her best logical manner, argued forcefully and persuasively that
we could make a virtue out of necessity by using this section to demonstrate in a very dramatic fashion just what film preservation was all about.
I must say that if it weren't for Fay Kanin, A Star Is Born would never
have been restored. Everyone who loves the movie-and loves movies-is
in her debt.

Now that everyone agreed on the approach, and with the support of the
entire Academy, we set about trying to solve our difficulty about the stills
themselves. Warners had been run very economically by Jack Warner. The
still photographer assigned to the film, Pat Clark, had been under strict
orders not to overshoot, which meant that he shot only one still of each
camera setup. (As I mentioned earlier, these stills would be used for publicity purposes.) Normally, this would probably be sufficient, as most directors
break these scenes up into a multitude of shots. Cukor, however, liked long
takes and would stage his action to move in and around this single take.
So the still photographer would do one or two shots of an entire three-tofour-minute take, usually at the beginning of the scene or at a crucial
dramatic moment. But after going through my own stills from the film and
the files at Warner Bros., USC, the Academy, and the Museum of Modern
Art and ransacking all the stills stores in the New York and Los Angeles
areas, we had almost enough photos to do the job.

Our first section of photographs and live-action footage set to the soundtrack was the sequence of Esther saying goodbye to the band. We had a
number of stills that could be used for this sequence: stills of the bus, shots
of Noonan and Garland in the scene, and production shots showing the
scene being photographed. The scene continued after the bus pulled away
with Esther going back into her room to wait for Norman's call; she decides
to wash her hair and then lies by the pool drying her hair and waiting for
the call that never comes, while across the city, a hung-over Norman is
being poured into his car and driven off to a seaside location. This was a
long sequence, and half of it was nothing but music as Esther waits and
waits: almost three and a half minutes, all scored to a lush rendition of "The
Man That Got Away." We tried everything we could think of to make
those stills interesting for three and a half minutes, but we just didn't have
enough variety. Finally, in desperation, we decided to trim the track,
eliminating two minutes of music. Ironically, this was done by Elsa
Blangsted, the widow of the original editor on the film and a superb music
editor. Her cut was barely discernible on the track, and now we were finally able to assemble the sequence, using our combination of stills and live
action to make clear to the audience what was happening.

Unfortunately, there were some scenes for which evidently no stills had
ever been shot. One of these was a transitional scene that showed Esther
having a long-distance conversation with Danny McGuire in a phone
booth. He has stayed in touch with her after she has left the band, and he
calls to tell her that Glenn Williams is willing to take her back. She refuses,
saying that while Maine may have been insincere in his job offer, he
convinced her that she could do it and she's going to stick to that. It's an
important scene because it sets up Esther's belief in herself, her determination. It also has a kicker at the end-for, according to the script, it isn't
until the very end of the sequence that the audience discovers that she is
a waitress, something she vowed earlier that she'd never do again. We had
the sequence of Garland as a carhop, inadvertently left in the stock footage of the drive-in; the soundtrack we had didn't quite synchronize with
this alternate take, but it was close enough, and Garland's reading of the
final line-"Everything in the place, all burgered!"-matched the picture
perfectly.

The problem was what to do about the sections showing Danny
McGuire placing the call from the lobby of his hotel. There were no stills
of this. There were, however, stills of the set of the hotel lobby, seven
publicity shots of actor Tom Noonan seated on a divan with different
expressions on his face, a still of the drive-in, and one of Garland in a phone
booth in her carhop uniform. So we took the photos of Noonan (which were
two-by-three images on a proof sheet), cut his figure out, took the phonebooth shot of Garland, cut her out of the booth, put Noonan's figure in
the booth, and placed this mock-up against the still of the hotel lobby.
Then Lize did a quick series of dissolves, showing Noonan's change of
expression as he hears Esther explain that she's decided to stay in Hollywood. On the cut to Esther on the soundtrack, we opened on a close-up
of her face talking, and as Lize slowly pulled the camera back, we revealed
to the audience that Esther is a carhop. Then we cut to the live action of
her waiting on customers.