A makeover for MARILYN

In restoration studios across the country,Hollywood classics are getting a new life

In restoration studios across the country,Hollywood classics are getting a new life
Chandrasekar likes to think that he has contributed to the films of Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. In a way he has,and that has meant quite a lot to these movies,apart from earning him a special place among friends. After all,not many get to work with the masters every day.

Crouched in front of big monitors,he and his team members scan images,one frame at a time. There,a flicker of Monroe in the 1954 classic River of No Return,the image dulled by dust and scratches. But at this restoration department of Pixion studios in Nandambakkam,Chennai,experts are at hand for the anti-ageing treatment.
I tell them to be extra careful while working on my girl, says K Chandrasekar,a 30-year-old movie buff and restoration artist. Chandrasekar owns a collection of 2,500 films,both Indian and world cinema,and tells us that he is usually found in theatres if not on his seat.

Timeless they might be,but movies from the past are more in danger than pelicans in the oil-spilled Gulf of Mexico. The nitrate films are notoriously high-maintenance,and are unlikely to survive beyond a certain period even with all the precautions.
Hence,world over,film-makers are packing off their movie collections to restoration studios to be converted into digital formats,and a substantial part of the traffic is heading to India where those like Chandrasekar are working on the frames making them as good as new.

I myself am a fan of commercial films Tamil and Hindi but when I was working on some parts of the first version of King Kong,the one made in 1933,I was curious to watch the whole film. After two years of restoration work,I have started looking at movies from a different perspective altogether, says Thasleema Fathima,a 22-year-old restoration artist.
In this studio,we have restored 65 international titles and 12 Indian ones,the oldest being King Kong 1933, says S Thirugnanam,operations manager at the digital restoration facility of Pixion in Chennai.

Pixion is not alone. For instance,when the restored version of the Oscar-winning 1948 Hollywood musical-drama The Red Shoes was screened at the classics section of the Cannes Film festival last year,the role a handful of technicians from Prasad EFX studios in Saligramam,Chennai,had played in its second life remained unknown. In early 2008,Prasad EFX began digitally scanning 5.79 lakh individual frames of the movie,re-registering the colours,removing visible specks and scratches,and finally recording all 134 minutes back to 35mm Eastman colour negative.

We had been commissioned by Martin Scorseses Film Foundation for this project, said a spokesperson from Prasad EFX. Over the last two years,the studio has successfully restored and digitised 12 Academy Award winners,seven Golden Globe Award winners,including works like Young and Innocent 1937,Fistful of Dollars 1964,The Harder They Come 1972 and Thats the Way of the World 1975.
Thats quite a change from the 90s,when it took American film restorer David Shephards enthusiasm to get the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to restore Satyajit Rays The Apu Trilogy.

The price point is what makes Hollywood production houses turn to studios in India. On an average,restoring a film here costs between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 50 lakh. Converting it to a Blu-Ray format costs an additional Rs 5-6 lakh. It is 50 per cent cheaper for them to get their films restored by us, says P Caeser,chief operating officer of Filmlab,which operates its digital restoration facility in Goregaon East,Mumbai. Thirty per cent of the work Filmlab gets are international projects.

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It costs between 100,000 and 120,000 to restore and digitise a film and format into Blu-Ray in the US. It can be done within half that amount or lesser here because the labour costs are much lower, says Rohan Desai,head of restoration at Prime Focus,Mumbai.

In 2007,Prime Focus started with the complete restoration and Blu-Ray DVD conversion of a Jet Li film Twin Warriors 1993 and has so far restored 20 Hollywood films. The list includes Rumble in the Bronx 1995,Evita 1996,King Lear 1971,Dances with the Dragon 1991,The Legend 1985,The Burbs 1989 and A Place in the Sun 1951. Prime Focus also operates drop-off-point facilities in Los Angeles,London,New York and Canada,where clients can bring film negatives and get them scanned to a digital format.

The studios in India also have an edge in terms of the know-how. The Pixion studios in Chennai,with over 200 technicians,can restore films up to 6k resolution images up to six times clearer than the original. The Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging studios in Los Angeles mostly handles 4k resolutions. The Prime Focus facility in Goa has over 70 restoration machines and employs over 200 people. The Warner studios have 10 machines,not enough to handle the large volume of work.

We get the movies on hard disks and tapes,which are first scanned. Then a software does the initial cleaning,removing the dust and other particles from the frame. Though this is automatic,we have to do a manual check frame by frame to ensure that nothing from the original is lost in this process. Restoration is a process that is completely faithful to the original, says Thirugnanam.
Back at the studio,Chandrasekar shares his memories of working on the Hollywood classic On the Waterfront. There is a special feeling,an elation of having worked on a masterpiece,helped it live longer, he says.