Chances are that no film has been seen by more people than The Wizard of Oz. Victor Fleming's 1939 classic has made an indelible imprint on American pop culture, giving us durable metaphors ("the yellow brick road") and memorable lines ("You're not in Kansas anymore").
It's safe to assume that most moviegoers have experienced The Wizard of Oz through the narrow perspective of a television screen. An ambitious restoration project by Warner Bros. has returned the film to its original splendor, with the possible addition of a special effects dance sequence involving the Scarecrow. (At press time, that decision had yet to be made.)
Pacific Title/Mirage was selected by Warner Bros. to restore the black-and-white segments of The Wizard of Oz, plus the additional Scarecrow sequence, which was filmed in Technicolor. Given the possible inclusion of the extra sequence, Pacific Title/Mirage was responsible for scanning some 44,500 frames (of the approximately 85,000 in the original 101-minute movie) for image processing, and then recording them back onto film.
That figure surprises those who only remember the black-and-white footage from the scene in which Dorothy opens the door of her Auntie Em's house to discover that a tornado has transported her to a Technicolor universe. Phil Feiner, president of the optical division of Pacific Title/Mirage, reminds us that the first two reels of Oz, as well as the last, are black-and-white.
Dye fading is not inherent to the Technicolor three-strip process. The images themselves were recorded simultaneously onto three strips of a special black-and-white film custom-made by Kodak: one strip was sensitized to record the density of cyan colors, another was sensitized to yellow and a third to magenta. A patented imbibition process was used to transfer the image information onto release prints for theaters. The vivid colors came from dyes added during this process.
Feiner notes that the original Technicolor imagery can be re-created by making separate passes with each of three strips directly onto an answer print. That's presuming that the original black-and-white separations have not been scratched or damaged in other ways, and that the base on which it is coated has not shrunk. (Cinetech handled this portion of the restoration project.)
The original black-and-white negative photographed by Hal Rosson was lost in a 1970s fire at The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The only remaining copies were protection fine-grain intermediates made by MGM Labs in 1960. In 1984, a copy was struck from one of those intermediates. However, in 1960, the fine-grain film stocks and the techniques employed for making optical and contact copies were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are today. "We now use wet-gate technology to protect the film when it is contact-printed or duplicated with an optical printer," Feiner explains. "That eliminates the major source of cell abrasions and emulsion digs, which can occur during the duping or printing process. I would guess that the original negative was probably used to make more than 10 and perhaps as many as 200 release prints. The result was that there were scratches, embedded dirt and other anomalies copied onto the fine-grain master in 1960."
The restoration team at Pacific Title/Mirage tackled the task of restoring Oz with missionary zeal, which Feiner attributes to the company's deep roots in the industry. Pacific Title was founded in Los Angeles in 1919, the very same year that the ASC came into being. Feiner joined the company in 1977 as an optical camera operator on the night shift. "We're proud of our history," Feiner says, "which includes a large amount of the optical restoration work on the Star Wars trilogy. I believe we bring a unique film aesthetic to the use of digital tools for restoration."
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