Questions about the WB film 'The Searchers' and VistaVision & Perspecta Sound*

I saw this film on AMC the other night, and was quite impressed (first time I'd ever seen it believe it or not). I noticed it was shot in VistaVision, but was a Warner Brothers release. I had always thought that process was exclusive to Paramount though. Did Warners have to pay a royalty to Paramount to use the process or was it free to all studios?

Also, and this question might sound silly, but did the Searchers (the band from Liverpool) name the group after this movie? I think everyone knows the story of how Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison came up with the song title 'That'll Be The Day' from the line that John Wayne uses in the film several times.

 

From VistaVision's 1954 promotional booklet:

Q: Is VistaVision exclusive with Paramount or is it available to all?

A: Paramount has made VistaVision available to all producers and to all theatres without compensation, an in order to encourage the wider use of VistaVision for the advancement of motion pictures generally, has provided fully detailed data and specifications to all interested camera and equipment manufacturers. Paramount will not accept any royalties, payments or profits of any kind as a result of VistaVision. This policy-- in keeping with Paramount's policy of many years standing-- has been officially enunciated by the top executives of the company and is made clearly and unequivocally, with no reservations of any kind. Anyone in the world who wishes to obtain VistaVision cameras or VistaVision equipment is completely free to do so without restrictions of any kind, stated or implied. It is expected that all other processes will adopt the VistaVision large negative principle to improve their presentations.

Interestingly enough, I think THE SEARCHERS is the only VistaVision title NOT to have a Perspecta Stereo encoded soundtrack.

 

Perspecta Stereo is such a crock. It's just panned mono -- cleverly panned mono, but not true directional stereo.

My old pal Rich Chace actually built a Perspecta decoder in the 1980s so that they could determine how certain 1950s filmed were presented. This helped Chace create better 5.1 surround remixes for VistaVision films his company did for Paramount, MGM, and other studios. Done right, and when good source elements survived, they could do amazingly good-sounding remixes.

While I think Perspecta was dodgy, I gotta say, I did like the old VistaVision logo: "Motion Picture High Fidelity." Very cool.

 

I wonder why they made that decision? I guess there's not really anything in the movie that needs panning really, it sounded good in mono.

 

Wow. Thanks for those bits of info, guys.


As something of a Ford biographer, I'm surprised I've not seen anything concerning the actual way Perspecta sounded. What a trip! I have the limited cd that was put out by Brigham Young University of the soundtrack; it's mono and I never questioned it being mono. I wasn't aware that it is the only Vistavision film that's not in stereo.

I gotta say Vistavision is my favorite wide-screen process. Vertigo is mind-boggling. And Ford's Monument Valley was absolutely made for it, or vice versa.

 

Do you know why, Steve? Just didn't like stuff not coming from the center?

 

Really interesting stuff, Steve. I didn't know about the tones. Was "Fantasia" encoded with these 8K tones? I seem to remember a late 70's revival showing in which I heard tones before each big surround moment. Never figured out what they were.

 

Well, that solves a mystery I've been pondering for thirty years. One of those strange things I've always wondered about but never tried to track down. Amazing what one learns on this forum! Thanks a bunch, Steve.

 

me too! I love this forum and I have personally learned quite a bit from it in both film and music history. I do have another question about the film (bear with me folks! lol) I know now it is considered a classic-was it well-received at the time of its release also?

 

Vidiot, No offense to Mr. Chace, but I've heard examples as played through his decoder card and they sound like crap, because he forgot to add the gain control that was half of the system-- oops! He shouldn't feel too bad, though... there are a number of cards made over the years, and every single one of them sounds awful, because the engineers making them don't understand how the system works.

Perspecta isn't waving the signal back and forth between three speakers. It's gain control PLUS simultaneous speaker control. Played back through a real Fairchild or Altec integrator, the better examples are extremely good alternatives to discrete stereo. And I emphasize GOOD examples because there was some very uninspired mixing, particularly with Paramount's VistaVision titles (other than WHITE CHRISTMAS), which have maybe one or two effects in the whole films. MGM and Universal had much better mixers for Perspecta.

Steve, the Perspecta tones on an optical track are 30, 35 and 40 hz (left, center and right, respectively). On four-track mag prints, the surround tone is 12 hz. You can hear it if it's not filtered out, and it's REALLY irritating if it isn't.

I'm surprised that Warner disliked Stereo sound, since he was essentially the one who introduced it to the general public (HOUSE OF WAX, which was post-Cinerama, but Cinerama was still only playing big-city engagements). He was always fairly supportive of the technology Warner Bros. was using.

By the way, most recording sessions for movies going back to the late '30s were usually two or three tracks, usually with strings on one and brass, reeds and pipes on the other. When mag fullcoat was introduced in the early '50s, this simplified the process and many sessions were recorded stereophonically, even if it was going to be mixed down to mono, anyway.

Warner stopped using their WarnerColor moniker around 1954, but as I recall was still doing their own processing. The prints of THE SEARCHERS by Technicolor do indeed hold up-- Technicolor was almost a necessity to the VistaVision process in order to reduce the 8-perforation negative down to 4-perforation 35mm prints using their dye-transfer process, which was inherently an optical one.

Unfortunately, Warner's labs (or whoever he used) DID process the negatives on THE SEARCHERS, and the neg was totally baked when WB did this restoration, which has compromised some of the detail in both the shadows and highlights.

 

I've always heard this too.

It was similar to Star Trek: The Motion Picture filming all it's VFX opticals in 65mm - to reduce the effect of grain build-up on successive layers of optical printing in the final composite. Star Wars at times just had a lot more layers in each composite because of the relative high number of elements on screen at once.

 

Steve, do you know when Dave stopped engineering film music for Warners?

 

Tell me about it! I've spent the better part of this week going through a backlog of DVD's, and among them is Howards Hawks' 1955 sword'n'sandals stinker LAND OF THE PHAROAHS, a guilty pleasure of mine since I first saw a bad pan'n'scan TV print back in the '70s. Worth seeing only for the seas of extras and Joan Collins playing her first(AFAIK)certified scheming beetch... She was young back then, lacked the authority she would later display with such acting matters, but for its miscasting and predictable score, worth seeing every so often.

But Warnercolor! Yech. IIRC, EAST OF EDEN was also Warnercolor; both films, even 'restored,' look strange(as my wife pointed out about PHARAOHS this evening--obviously NOT Technicolor!).

As for THE SEARCHERS, love it, and the DVD editions are vivid enough. But since VistaVision can be shown in several aspect ratios, not sure we're seeing it at its best. I believe they matted this one for 1.85:1, even though one *could*argue for the taller 1.66:1. But a great western regardless of aspect ratio.

 

You might be right, Steve, but I always remembered 12 hz. In any case, it's a fairly high tone. Generally, though, the oxide doesn't wear out that fast that it would effect the tone (50 years later, yes, but we're talking about prints here that were only supposed to last a year, if that...)

And that being said, some older prints that do have the high end starting to go have less excruciating tones than others. I sat through a print of THE ADVENTURERS barely hearing it, but when it came to running a print of BEN HUR with the surrounds, it was so excruciating after the first five minutes that I HAD to turn it off.

I'm told by professional folk who were looking for this stuff back in the '50s that WarnerColor was pretty livery, but held timing pretty well. The problem (which you can see even today on some prints) is that it had GOLF BALL sized grain-- really jarring compared to the finer grained b/w stocks around that time. Fading wise, WC was never as bad as Deluxe, and I've seen some vintage prints that held up all right, but it still ain't Technicolor.

 

So in other words, movies that used Perspecta Stereo were widely panned?

Seriously, us there a good online resource for learning about the different sound systems that have been used throughout movie history, such as Perspecta Stereo? The Criterion DVD of Hidden Fortress has a 3.0 soundtrack in Perspecta-Sound. Is that the same thing?

 

Thanks Steve. So Dolph was doing stuff for Warners through the '60's? When the SINATRA IN HOLLYWOOD box set was being put together, they found some of the multitracks for the ROBIN AND THE 7 HOODS music, the film versions. STYLE and some chatter/rehearsal on DON'T BE A DO-BADDER. I wonder if he was the engineer?