NEVERENDING STORIES FOR THE FILM ARCHIVISTS AT UCLA, EACH RESTORATION IS AN ADVENTURE IN ITSELF.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

When Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio were preparing their Howard Hughes biopic ``The Aviator,'' they screened a beautifully restored print of the millionaire moviemaker's 1930 air war classic ``Hell's Angels.'' This clearly inspired what many consider the best part of Scorsese's Oscar-nominated movie.

And it's a sterling example of how the restoration and preservation work at UCLA's Film and Television Archive saves our visual past for increasingly worthwhile modern applications.

Established in 1977 to provide 35mm prints for the university's fabled School of Theater, Film and Television, the archive houses more than 230,000 film and television titles. It's the largest collection at any university in the world and the country's second biggest, after the Library of Congress copyright depository.

As with many films that the archive has painstakingly restored, the process of putting the Hughes picture back together was a combination of luck, detective work and technical artistry.

``John Wayne's son, the late Michael Wayne, gave us a call back in the '80s and said that a friend of his had found a partial nitrate print of 'Hell's Angels' in an old movie house in downtown Los Angeles,'' explains Robert Gitt, the archive's preservation officer. ``It was about two-thirds of it in an original 1930 print. The night sequences with the dirigible were tinted blue, and some of the daytime scenes were tinted lavender and so on. Most exciting of all, it had a reel of two-color Technicolor with Jean Harlow in a ballroom scene.''

For film researchers, this was a mother lode. Like many early films, the original negative of ``Hell's Angels'' had long ago disappeared, and all that existed of the partially colored production were black-and-white projection prints that Hughes had made in the 1950s.

But to create a new pristine print, Gitt had to find as much of the footage that wasn't on the discovered reels as possible. As often happens, the studio that now owns the rights to Hughes' films, Universal, happily supplied all the material they had. A couple more crucial minutes were found on a 1936 projection print stored at another archive, George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.

This kind of hunting and gathering, once the exclusive preserve of operations like UCLA, has gained new urgency over the last quarter century. ``The archive was created at a time before there were videocassettes, so that the doctoral students in the program could do close analysis of movies,'' notes Robert Rosen, dean of the UCLA film school and one of the archive's founders. ``A number of things have changed dramatically over the course of that time. The copyright proprietors, the studios and producers, realized that these old movies and what they had in the vaults were not dead storage but corporate assets. Once there were ancillary markets in videocassette, then DVD and cable and what have you, that was a dramatic change in the attitude of the industry toward what we were up to.

``The other change is public consciousness. When we first started with the notion of doing restoration on a film, the best possible original copy was of interest to a small group of film buffs. Now, it's very clear that it's value-added for a vast number of people who go out and look for movies. They want to know about the quality of the image and the completeness of the movie.''

All of the major studios now have vast, in-house operations that collaborate with various Hollywood labs and digital companies on DVD releases of vintage material. But they often come to the UCLA archive for the results of work they just don't do.

``We may hunt all over the world for bits and pieces that may be at sister archives in order to reconstruct the work,'' says Rosen. ``The financial motivation of the studio for a film may be very limited to carry out an activity like that. But our motivation, because of its cultural importance, is great.''

Finding as many of the best materials as possible - which may be at the Cinematheque Francaise, a former Soviet archive in Moscow, in the personal collections of old (or even dead) actors, filmmakers and studio bosses, or any of 100 other places - is just the start of the restoration process.

At a newly acquired facility in Hollywood, the archive performs meticulous physical repair, image cleansing, color restoration and printing work with a variety of photochemical processing machines, massive contact printers and an antique-looking but highly versatile optical printer.

``Most of the time we work from prints, either decomposed nitrate or decomposed safety film,'' explains Richard Smith, manager of the archive film lab and technical services (UCLA also works with private labs throughout Southern California). ``Sometimes the negs are available, and the portions that we can use from negatives, which give us the highest quality, are always what you want to use first.''

A lot of preservation work is less about searching and splicing than just transferring films from two unstable media: the flammable nitrate film that UCLA keeps at a special facility in Hollywood, and the acetate safety film that replaced it around 1950, which is stored in climate-controlled vaults on campus. The archive's television programs are transferred from obsolete formats such as kinescopes to contemporary video storage systems.

``The acetate film literally starts to smell like salad dressing; it's what we call vinegar syndrome,'' preservation officer Gitt says. ``The film begins to warp and curl and become limp and moist. Eventually, you can't project it and can't print it. It crystalizes and gets chalky white powder all over it and you have to throw it away. In its way, it's just as bad, in terms of deterioration, as the old nitrate film used to be, which would turn syrupy and gooey and then powdery.

``Part of the goal is to make a new print or prints and send them around to show people at museums and film festivals and so on. But the main thing is to make a new preprint element - a master positive copy or a dupe negative copy - on modern polyester film that's supposed to last for hundreds of years, and place it in our cold storage vault.''

One of these elements goes into the archive's collection whether it was made in conjunction with a studio - which usually foots most or all of the costs - or off individuals' donations and grants from organizations as varied as the Scorsese-backed Film Foundation, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Packard Humanities Institute and the Playboy Foundation, among many others. Limited federal and no state funds go to the archive's preservation activities, though its work is screened regularly at the Westwood campus' Melnitz Hall and is available for research purposes at the school's main Powell Library.

``That's so a student, faculty, industry professional, academic or writer can come to that research and study center and access anything in this collection for free on tape,'' notes archive director Tim Kittleson.

Which begs the question, why isn't the whole thing being transferred to some eternal digital format? Easy answer: It's too expensive. More practical answer: What eternal digital format?

``We really hold back on the technology,'' Kittleson explains, ``because VHS is not an archival format, DVD is not an archival format. When was the last time you saw a floppy or laserdisc player? I think, going two decades forward, that that's going to have to happen. But we'll never throw away the 35 (mm).''

For what can be accessed on the Web now, go to www.cinema.ucla.edu. Meanwhile, the long, involved work of restoring and preserving old films continues.

``Sometimes, you can do something in just four or five weeks, sometimes it takes six months to a year,'' Gitt says of the time it takes to restore a feature film. ``It depends. Usually, you can do everything in a couple of months. But there are difficult ones, obviously.''

One of the most difficult was Rouben Mamoulian's 1935 ``Becky Sharp,'' the first feature shot in the rich, three-strip Technicolor process. That was a three-year process of discovering one reel with all three strips intact, tracking down parts of one-color negatives and two-color positives in various parts of the country, then making everything match up for a new print.

``We were embarrassed that it had taken us three years,'' Gitt explains. ``When we somewhat sheepishly told a reporter at a press conference how long it had taken, Mamoulian, who was there, said 'Yes! These dedicated young artists devoted three years to this, and I'm so proud of the hard work they've done!' See, he knew how to turn it around and put a positive spin on it.''

It is also moments like that, of course, that archivists live for.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

How they decide what to save

With more than 230,000 films and television titles in its collection, the UCLA Film and Television Archive - with a total staff of 63 - can't possibly restore every film that could use the loving care.

So how do they decide which movies to bring back to their original release glory?

``The single most important criterion in selecting what to preserve is humility,'' School of Theater, Film and Television dean Robert Rosen says. ``That is, tastes change. Those grade-B movies that were stories of urban paranoia and violence that might have been viewed as not terribly important became discovered as film noir in the '60s. A movie that may have very limited interest for students of cinema might, say, as a cultural document about America's attitude toward ethnic minorities or women, be a veritable treasure trove.''

Archive preservation officer Robert Gitt adds that the restoration schedule is also loosely tied to the archive's biannual Festival of Preservation, in which the preceding two years' work is, hopefully, represented by a balanced sampling.

``We try to preserve many different kinds of old films,'' Gitt says. ``We believe that the classics should be preserved, certainly, but we are also very interested in early silent films, early newsreels, shorts. I try to select a good cross-section of our collection here at UCLA. We check with other archives around the world to see if we have things that are unique. In some cases, we have literally the only copy of an early film that exists. Those then go on a list, and we try to raise money to preserve them.''

Taste - and the UCLA group surely has collectively high standards - takes a backseat to preservational practicality.

``What you worry about is, is it the last surviving copy - and what shape is it in?'' Rosen explains. ``Then you take the issue of historic importance into account. Because, the chances are, if you foreground your own notion of historic importance, you might be wrong.''

Sometimes, a good preservation may not even be the best version of a film available. Take the case of ``The Big Sleep.'' Shot near the end of World War II, the beloved second teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was only shown to troops overseas before being recalled by Warner Bros. (the studio had a war movie starring Bacall that they preferred to get into the domestic marketplace before hostilities ended).

In the interim, some of the most memorable scenes of Raymond Chandler's famously convoluted, super-sexy murder mystery were added to ``The Big Sleep.'' Still, UCLA thought it worthwhile to reconstruct the poorer original version.

``It wasn't released to the general public until two years after it was made, and during that time they took 18 minutes out and put 16 minutes of newly shot footage in,'' Gitt explains. ``Of course, it does make the movie more entertaining, because it's got a lot of good dialogue between Bogart and Bacall. But the earlier version is interesting to see, because it does make the plot a little more comprehensible.''

``You try, as much as possible, not to second-guess the uses that film could be put to,'' Rosen concludes. ``You try to cast the net broadly.''

- B.S.

Timeless titles

Some highlights from the many titles that have been restored and/or preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive:

The Wizard of Oz (1925)

Cleopatra (DeMille, 1934)

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

The Naked Kiss (Sam Fuller, 1964)

Return of the Secaucus Seven (John Sayles, 1980)

Recently completed projects:

Tillie's Punctured Romance (early Chaplin appearance, 1914)

The Scarlet Letter (1926 and 1934)

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd (both Eli Kazan, 1950s)

Paths of Glory (Kubrick, 1957)

Current film projects:

The Adventures of Tarzan (1921)

Macbeth (Orson Welles, 1948 and 1950; same film, two completely different voice tracks)

Kenneth Anger shorts

From TV:

The George Burns Show (June 7, 1960)

Let's Make a Deal (pilot, 1963)

Beatles press conference, Los Angeles (1966)

CAPTION(S):

drawing, 3 photos, 2 boxes

Drawing:

(1 -- cover -- color) Screen gems

UCLA film archive gives the classics new life

Jon Gerung/Staff Artist

Photo:

(1) UCLA Film and Television Archive collection services assistant Joey Guercio looks over shelves of materials in the archives.

(2) - Richard Smith,

UCLA archive film lab and technical services

(3) - Tim Kittleson,

UCLA archive director

David Sprague/Staff Photographer

Box:

(1) How they decide what to save (see text)

(2) Timeless titles (see text)