Laurel and Hardy Preservation | Interview with Scott MacQueen

I'm Scott MacQueen. I'm the Head of Preservation for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and I've been spearheading the Laurel and Hardy preservation campaign that we've been running the last few years. [MacQueen] Laurel and Hardy is perhaps, for my money, the greatest American comedy team of all time in motion pictures. Their films have been seen and loved for 90 years at this point. And they've not survived in terribly fine condition. The Laurel and Hardy films were so popular worldwide, that the original negatives were over printed tremendously... a half-century ago and more, to where they wore out in many cases. Many don't even survive, and the copies that we are left with are many generations down in pictorial quality, and have a lot of printed-in damage, and wear and losses. So our objective is to go back and find the highest existing generation in the world, on each title and try to reconstitute the best possible, most authentic, most good looking and sounding version that can be had in the 21st century. [MacQueen] Next up, and having many of the same losses of damage is, Perfect Day. The 1929 short which is typical of Laurel and Hardy, a simple premise. The family is going to go on a picnic. And for 18 minutes, everything that can happen to prevent the car leaving the curb in front of the house happens. We only had one of two reels of camera negatives surviving into the 21st century. That was reel one. And when it was looked at about 10 years ago, it was decomposing. And the initial two minutes of it had to be cut off and thrown away, because they'd completely rotted. We then made a fine grain of the remainder of the reel. That's what I have here in this red can. This fine grain is a master positive from which we can make a duplicate negative. This is how the camera negative, the surviving roll, has survived for Perfect Day. It's got losses. Now in that early talkie period, not everybody got the memo. In fact, the memo may not have been written. What was the size and shape of your movie screen? In the silent days, it was a roughly four by three, one point three-three units wide, as it was one unit high (1.33:1). The problem is when sound came in, you had competing sound systems. The one that succeeded first was Warner Brothers sound on disc, the Vitaphone, and that had that one 1.33 silent image interlocked with phonograph records. But the competing system was created by Western Electric, and it was an optical sound tracking system. Where the sound was printed, on the film, alongside the picture. Which meant now, that the far edge of the film over here, had to accommodate the soundtrack. What was the cameraman doing? He was still composing in many cases for the optical center of the silent frame? When they thought about it, they would sometimes redesign the artwork, and move that over this way, so the optical center would still leave the titles centered, and they'd extend the artwork. But they would be inconsistent. Sometimes one cameraman would shoot it and leave that correct. Other times, they would cheat it over. The result being that the soundtrack copies, the Movietone, Western Electric prints frequently had huge picture losses on the left-hand side of frame, to where characters could disappear. And in Perfect Day, in the opening sequence, Edgar Kennedy, the uncle, is sitting on the couch. And then the surviving copies that we have of the opening minute, he's invisible. You can see his leg in the cast, he's got gout on the couch, and every now and then he bends into frame, he crosses the line and comes in. But by and large he's missing. And because that section is what's decomposed out of the camera negative, we can never get that back short of something special turning up. Because we don't have that day and date work print for reel one. But nor do we have reel two of the camera negative. That didn't survive the 21st century. What we have for that is what is labeled here by the Roach Studio, the "cutting pic pos." That is the work print, the picture work print. This is the highest generation thing in the world on reel two of Perfect Day. And so this is what reel two will come back from. The difficulty is that the work print, being an editorial copy was subject to changes at all times. And what we see in these work prints, despite the fact that they are first generation, they can be dirty, they can have editorial marks, and you can even see places where, during a take, they may have decided to cut after about 10 seconds, and maybe when he stands watching the assembly, he goes, "No-no! Put back the scene where Ollie does the gesture. I like that!" And so they would return the rest of the take, having lost frames where they had cut it out of the dailies. But being Roach, and being on a budget, they didn't bother to print it. They would just slug two or three frames of black in to cover that to maintain sync. So now, what do you do about that? The surviving alternate materials tend to date from the late 1940s, from the post-World War II period. They're often fourth and fifth generation. Made from those composite Western Electric sound elements, that have lost left edge of frame. So they're three to four generations down in quality, and they're missing the whole left edge. The only way you can come back from those is digitally. So I'm very hopeful that Perfect Day also, will look like it has not looked since 1929, in its generational quality. And the sound as well, coming off the original Vitaphone disks. And it even has a wonderful little throwaway piece of profanity that uncle Edgar Kennedy tosses off when he's inconvenienced getting out of the car at one point. That has turned up in other editions, and people just quite don't hear it. We did find evidence in some of the postwar film elements where they made a splice there. Somebody did notice it, and did try to remove a little bit of the colorful language that Mr. Kennedy used. But rest assured when we get done with it, you will hear it clear as a bell.