Return of the Secaucus Seven
Lianna
Baby, It's You
The Brother from Another Planet
Matewan
Eight Men Out
City of Hope
Passion Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Lone Star
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados)
Limbo
Sunshine State
Casa de los Babys
Silver City
Honeydripper

THE RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN (1980)

Ross Lipman works on most of the independent and avant garde films preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and notes that many of the technical problems he wrestled with on The Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna (ambiguous aspect ratios, sync sound discrepancies, variations in grain) “are very much par for the course for a lot of independent movies. We can do a lot now to subtly improve films that were shot on 16 mm, as those two titles were, just by controlling the process every step of the way. For example, we can often achieve better blow ups than the filmmakers were able to get twenty or thirty years ago.”

As usual, an important stage of the restoration process was performing needed repairs on the original negatives, which while complete, were beginning to show signs of age. “There was extensive dirt and slight chemical spotting on the Secaucus Seven negative,” Lipman reports, “which had accelerated over the years. Scott Smerdon of Monaco Labs did extensive, very careful hand cleaning on that one, and along with Michael Hinton, step-printed around some dirt particles that could not be removed physically.”

Among the preservation problems endemic to older independent movies shot on 16mm, sync sound issues are especially common. “When they married the sound and picture and built up the sync rolls for Secaucus Seven,” Lipman reports, “a number of shots were about one frame off. In the older prints they basically determined an overall fudge factor, just to get it roughly into sync. But there were all sorts of internal variations that had to be adjusted.”

While the basic processes are fairly straightforward, the archivist’s mandate to present films “as they were” is not without its ambiguities. When several different versions of a film exist, each with some claim to being regarded as definitive, it is not always easy to chose between them—not, at least, without some input from the filmmakers.
“In comparing old prints of The Return of the Secaucus Seven to its original 16mm camera negative,” Lipman recalls, “ it became apparent that they had vertically panned the image when blowing up the nearly square 1.33:1 aspect ratio original to 1.85 widescreen. This suggested that the film was not originally intended for 1.85 viewing, despite having been commercially released that way. And in looking at the two versions, even apart from the cropping, the shot composition simply seemed stronger at 1.33. I contacted the original cinematographer, Austin DeBesche, who confirmed that Secaucus Seven was originally shot for 1:33 viewing.”

This framing choice grew out of Sayles’ modest expectations going into the production of Secaucus Seven. In the late 1970s there was no independent film scene as such, just a few small distributors who were beginning to consider art house bookings for a few films that had not been made in Europe. Sayles’ thinking was: “’This is gonna be a nice experience, I’m gonna learn a lot, maybe we’ll get it on PBS.’ So it was actually framed square, in television ratio.”

But when the film was completed and began to win acclaim at film festivals, a theatrical release began to seem a real possibility. “The standard theatrical exhibition format,” Lipman says, “then as now, is 1:85. So when blowing up Secaucus to 35mm, John did a careful job with the vertical pans, working scene-by-scene to give people more headroom. But the restoration is going out at 1:33, as the film was originally shot, and it will look better that way.”

“Of course”, Lipman adds, “there is no guarantee that when this version gets to theaters it will always be projected correctly. Unfortunately some theaters tend to project everything at 1:85, due to lack of the proper equipment or sometimes lack of training.”

An even more puzzling quandary arose when Lipman compared the content of the 35mm release version of Secaucus Seven with the original 16mm negative. “Not only was the composition different,” he says, “but the cuts were different. There were entire sequences missing from the 35mm version. Nothing major, just a minute here, two minutes there. The scene of Lacey on stage at the playhouse, and the basketball scene, were both trimmed significantly.”

When Libra signed on as the film’s distributor, Sayles recalls, “their advance to us was $15,000-$20,000 to blow it up from 16 to 35. When that opportunity arose I said, ‘Well, look, we ran out of time and money in post-production and there are still some things that that I want to trim. And since we’re going to have to do this process anyway…?’ And they said, ‘Only if you cut whole things out, whole shots. You can’t cut something in the middle of a sequence but you can cut the end off.’ Because you could take the whole thing out without remixing. So I trimmed a few shots, probably a minute and a quarter at the most, things I would have gotten rid of anyway if I’d had three more days in the editing room.”

At UCLA, Lipman made the decision to preserve both cuts of the film: “When John told us that the trimmed version was the one he preferred we made a complete 16mm interpositive, which we will keep for archival purposes. And then from that we made a new 35mm negative that conformed to the director’s cut.”

When the restoration screens in theaters, Sayles says, “it will be what people saw back when it first opened. For the DVD what I’d like to do is take a look at it, and probably do a couple other little things, just for rhythm. It may be just that my rhythm has increased, but there are places where I feel the point was made and then it goes on for another 12 seconds.”

ABOUT THE RESTORATIONS

In a major effort undertaken over the past two years by Anarchists’ Convention Inc, along with experts from the UCLA Film and Television Archive, four early films written and directed by the pioneering independent filmmaker John Sayles have been fully restored.

The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Lianna (1983), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), and Matewan (1987) will be re-released this year as a touring retrospective package presented by IFC Films, with a boxed-set DVD release to follow.

Over the past decade these landmarks of do-it-yourself American cinema had fallen out of distribution, had become hard to track down even as well-worn VHS cassettes. Now all three can be re-visited in their original theatrical formats, both by long-time fans who have been following Sayles career for almost twenty years, and by younger admirers of such recent award-winners like Passion Fish (1992), Lone Star (1996), and Limbo (1997).

Sayles has said that he plans to make some adjustments to both Secaucus Seven and Lianna for the DVD release, the kind of changes he has made occasionally in the past when supervising the transfer of his films to video. “One of the things I like to do is change things to make them better,” he says. “You can get often better color in video than you could [on the prints]. You can add little zooms, you can add re-positions that you might not have been able to do on the set. To me you should always use those tools if they’re available, to make it better.”

But the theatrical versions of these films are intended to be “archival,” and for these Sayles adopted a “no tweaks” policy: “What we’re going for is to get them back to what we had in hand. This one was shot in 16 and blown up, this one was actually shot on 35 by a great cinematographer, and this is pretty much what they looked like and this is pretty much what they sounded like. I told the people at UCLA, ‘Don’t try to make this better than it was.’”

In the real world, of course, a restoration project begins long before any technician lays hands on a piece of celluloid. As Sayles notes, “Untangling the rights [to these films] has been a huge, huge job. Sue Bodine, who’s our lawyer, has been going through this incredible maze of finding what happened to the companies which distributed the movies, which often no longer exist and who may have sold the rights piecemeal to foreign countries and cable operations, which themselves may no longer exist but may have been bought by another one. And then there’s just finding the elements, as they’re called. What exists? And the sound can be as much of a problem as the picture, as the sound elements disappear or deteriorate. Luckily we haven’t had to re-record anything, we found enough of what we got.”

Once the raw material was located and the rights secured, UCLA restoration specialist Ross Lipman supervised the clean-up work, working closely with Suzanne Ceresko, of Anarchists’ Convention, and Scott Smerdon, of Monaco Labs in San Francisco. “It was nice from our standpoint as archivists,” Lipman says, “that John’s take was, ‘Just present them as they were.’ Because that’s what we always want to do. Our first allegiance is to the work as it stands. We’re not in the business of doing new versions for commercial release.”