The "Coppola Restoration" Letters: Postscript

Making his bones in this town while you were banging cheer­lead­ers. If, in fact, you were banging cheer­lead­ers. We kind of doubt it, actually. 

“The Coppola Restoration” of the three Godfather films is a major salvo in a battle that won’t be settled any time soon. The battle over how clas­sic cinema should look on high-definition video. And this has an impact even on those who don’t have a Blu-ray play­er and don’t intend to get a Blu-ray play­er, because pretty much all mas­ter­ing of film to oth­er media is being done in high-def and then down-converted to stand­ard def NTSC for “reg­u­lar” DVDs. It’s a high-def digit­al world and the tools avail­able to both movie­makers shoot­ing in video and tech­ni­cians put­ting older films into home enter­tain­ment formats are almost magic­al. Potentially dangerous.

Gordon Willis, Allan Daviau, and Robert A. Harris drew a line in the sand with their res­tor­a­tions of the first two Godfather films. They used the digit­al tools to present the films as they were shot and prin­ted. No mess­ing with the grain of the film stock (or “grain-rape,” as Jeffrey Wells rather, um, infe­li­cit­ously puts it). Maintaing the four-points-yellow-one-point-red above-normal pro­cessing. Keeping those blacks—actually unex­posed parts of the negative!—black. Keeping the nearly blown-out whites of the wed­ding sequence blar­ing. And so on. A bold state­ment. I agree with it. (And, more import­antly, I enjoy the res­ult.) Others don’t. Some are kinda confused.

More state­ments are com­ing. Disney’s first Blu-ray of a clas­sic anim­a­tion title, Sleeping Beauty, comes out in October. It was done at Lowry Digital, with a pro­cess I’ll detail in a forth­com­ing Popular Mechanics fea­ture on High-Def. (Which I’ll alert you to and link to when the time comes.) A very dis­cern­ing fel­low crit­ic who saw a Disney-sponsored pre­view demo of selec­ted scenes (as I did) used the same word Kay used to describe her mar­riage to Michael in siz­ing up the res­ults of the res­tor­a­tion. I’m reserving judg­ment until I see it in a theat­er, and after that on a prop­erly cal­ib­rated home dis­play. (At demos they tend to pump up the bright­ness on the dis­plays to pretty much uncon­scion­able levels.) In November come Criterion’s first Blu-rays. The range of the first eight titles shows they’re eager to strut their stuff in a lot of modes, from the lus­trous black-and-white of The Third Man to the rav­ish­ing col­or of The Last Emperor to the alto­geth­er more funky and impres­sion­ist­ic styl­ings of Chungking Express.

Should be a very inter­est­ing Fall.