Bottum line, running rep stuff you take your chances with the kind of print your going to get.
 

If your print is coming from a local or private film exchange, get to know the people there so you can personally ask for them to select the best print available.

Unfortunately, once a movie has been released for home video, new 35mm prints are rarely struck. There have been fortunate exceptions (the recent retrospectives from Columbia and Warner Bros.), and individual re-releases of restorations of pictures like "Vertigo", "Rear Window", "Apocalypse Now Redux", etc.

I recall that "Young Frankenstein" had a recent printing for a limited re-release, so there are some good prints in circulation.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
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"Stop Making Sense" 1984; but the print was newer because it had a Dolby digital track added. Good shape, except for the usual dirt and splices at the reel heads and tails.

You have to take what ever prints are still left.
 

This isn't the first time this site has been told a certain print exists, only to find out the only print has disappeared.

As for MOTHRA, this was another weird situation. If I understood correctly, the negative of the American version had been edited. Then, someone decided to put the original parts back in, but there was no available soundtrack, so, at various points in the film, the sound just disappeared! So, no sound for 3-5 minutes at a time.

Now, with MOTHRA, you can get away with this...the audience just made up its own dialog, or just started to sing the MOTHRA song as sung by the two little girls. It was fun, anyway.

It's too bad that so many titles are just not available in good prints.

With older prints, it seems to be just the "luck of the draw".

Mark Lensenmayer

 

Anyway, the Babe print had a few reels that were just loaded with scratches near every tail and had a darkening layer of dust on about a few hundered feet of one reel. On top of that, there were at least six mid-reel splices from the previous theater that broke on the first run (Blame me for trusting all of our projectionists to know a good splice from a bad one) The film also managed had a tendency to stick as it fed through the platter brain, and I was preventing at least five wraps! Since we only ran it for 2 shows, I didn't bother calling for a different print, but I did pay extra attention to Fly Away Home when it came in (built it myself, watched it with crossed fingers) . The only problems with it were more countless scratches and a pretty scratched optical soundtrack.
Neither of the prints seemed to have been taken care of in storage and I can only wonder what the theaters that had these as first screeners did to them (and for how long?)
 

With Babe, whoever built it (one of the five other guys in our booth) didn't inspect any of it, and therefore missed the six or seven mid-reel splices that would later snap during the show. The film stock had been resting for so long (probably in storage) that it had a tendency to stick and nearly cause a full brain wrap (on about five occasions). But the real nightmare of it was that the print looked AWFUL. The end of each reel was covered in scratches, and had a base coat of dust that dimmed the light considerably. Fly Away Home was better. No lab or other mid-reel splices, but the scratches were still rampant, and the optical soundtrack was scratchy (I suppose this was from wear since I threaded the machine normally, and this sound system usually doesn't have this badly sounding SR processing).

I take pride in using film cleaners and taking whatever steps necesary to extend the life of a print, and these two examples of neglect just bother the hell out of me!
 

Just got done with a [second midnight] screening of 'Heavy Metal' using a very good condition original 1981 collectors' print (which has FAR better picture and sound quality than lab-mint prints of that hideous 1996 'reissue' did). It was pretty dirty however. After two passes thru Film-Guard, the print now looks even better!

 

1. Seeing that the print, although it has fantastic color and picture quality, is beginning to get curly and warpy (NO smell however), and from the results of the tests Brad has done, I figured that a good FilmGuard treatment can't hurt anything... it isnt as if I am FG-ing an original nitrate IB GWTW...

2. The print owner gave his OK to apply the [FilmGuard laden] cleaner. He also uses FG in the theatre he co-owns.

Brad: Perhaps you might want to remind us all of the tests you have performed and their results?

Aaron

 

For prints that cannot be stored in film storage vaults and are stored in film depots or in collector's homes, the tests show nothing to lose and everything to gain.
 

For instance, if you get Casablanca from Turner, it will be a recent print. Additionally, replacement reels for new prints of rep titles are often struck.

And since the runs are small, they don't like platters.

http://www.geocities.com/rotoflex/misc/nplatt.htm

I do agree that you have to be a lot more careful with original (or as near to original as are extant) elements than with release prints. However, even originals are treated with some chemicals: for example, archives ultrasonically clean, rewash and polish camera negatives before copying, a process which involves 1,1,1,trichloroethane and acetone (and probably several other chemicals that I'm not remembering). Other chemical treatments are used to reduce scratching if an archive feels that the risk of doing this is outweighed by the chance of a better picture from contact printing than could be obtained by wet gate.

However, all of these chemicals were systematically tested by archives and university research labs before they were used for this purpose, with the results suggesting that the benefits outweighed the risks. So I wouldn't be against the use of FG on archival masters in principle, but I would want the endorsement of a major player in the field (e.g. the International Federation of Film Archives, or AMIA) before I did so myself.

I have recently bought some FG from Jack Roe and used it on release prints in our collection (which are mainly used by researchers working on Steenbecks), with very good results. IMHO, it's almost as good as ultrasonic cleaning, rewashing and polishing by a lab (as good, as far as I can see, for filling in scratches but not quite for lifting off dirt), but at about 2-3% of the cost. That can't be bad, especially for small archives such as mine which has a very limited budget even for making preservation dupe negs, let alone release prints.