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

Yes, those were done by Dolph Thomas. 1963 is the year the music for the roadshow pictures was recorded not only on mag 3 track film but on 1/2" 4 track magnetic tape using an Ampex. The MY FAIR LADY stuff was all done on that as well. By the way, in my short time at Warners (1991) doing soundtrack restoration I found all the MY FAIR LADY sessions piled in a heap in the corner of a music storage vault. They used a bunch of those when making the special Laser Disk version and then I am sure they dumped them in the trash..

By the way, George R. Groves was the original head of the Warner Bros. sound department starting in 1925. He won his first Oscar as part of the Warner Bros. sound department team under Nathan Levinson in 1942. He retired in 1972.

 

Condition? I've written about this before. I had to use a full oxygen mask when working on this stuff. NEVER store mag in metal cans! Almost had a nervous breakdown doing these and that is no exaggeration. I did it on weekends and nights and had to stop; the smell and the feeling of claustrophobia were too much for me. Ever tried to do an edit wearing a mask and headphones? Geez, like being under the ocean and trying to concentrate.

I did (in this way) GIANT, SAYONARA, SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS, THE SEARCHERS, THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, RIO BRAVO, AUNTIE MAME, THE NUN'S STORY, THE MUSIC MAN, GYPSY and a few others that I can't remember plus a bunch of WB Merrie Melodies and Loony Tunes scores by Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn like "The High And The Flighty".

When I was done with all of the soundtracks I removed the metal and put them all in proper cardboard boxes and labeled each tape of each movie correctly including all of the take numbers. About 2 years later a buddy of mine in Palmdale in his screening room had a reel of some WB film score and with shock I recognized my writing on it. I asked him where the hell he got the reel. He said someone found it dumpster diving in Burbank. In other words, they threw out all the original "music storage" material. I guess they felt that the DAT's I made took up less room...

A shame.

 

No, sorry. I never worry about acetates. They are usually lo-fi, worn out and just a pale representation of the actual music cues committed to 35mm or tape. Guess I'm spoiled.

 

Yes.

 

My Buddy,

Sorry, this stuff is for archive purposes only. Almost every movie in the word has a score recorded with hours of interesting cues, alternate versions and other goodies. Most of it never gets released. That's just the way it is..

 

Well, good luck! Anything to do with THE SEARCHERS is mired in a legal quagmire of Biblical proportions.

 

Hi Steve,

Yeah, I was there, mainly early in the AM and after 4 pm although I spent loads of time in the middle of the day as well. I loved walking around the lot, the New York street, the Western street, the "King's Row"/"Music Man" street. It was (is) a neat place. Did you ever eat in the commissary ? Rubbing elbows with big celebs eating meatloaf is always fun. I was back on the lot in 1996 during the day because I was dating the head of production at Warner Bros. Records and we'd spend every lunch hanging around the back lot holding hands.

Ever watch ER? It kills me that the hospital street is just the main drag of WB. If the camera panned about 20 feet to the right from the "entrance" to the ER you would be right at the commissary ! Makes me chuckle, especially when they put all that fake snow everywhere. The on-camera buildings are so obviously painted that WB red/brown of all the sound stages. It's like so, uh, Hollywood to do that.. Like out of the movie The Stunt Man or something.. Love it!

 

Yeah, "vinegar syndrome"; really bad news and I must have spent weeks, months in that smell. Dreadful; my hair smelled, my clothes, urggh. Awful. The mask didn't keep out the stench. Really, the money was good but I couldn't do it anymore; I was really starting to become vinegar myself. Had to give it up! No one else wanted to work with the stuff. They dumped the entire vault soon after.

 

When Jeff Joseph of SabuCat and I did some soundtrack restoration on AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS at Todd-AO in 1990 (the VICTOR YOUNG score), the fullcoat stuff stored in metal cans had already turned. The stuff they carelessly stored in cardboard cartons on spools from the same era (1956) was fine including (thank God) the actual six channel Todd-AO/Westrex alignment tones from 1955 created by Fred Hynes who invented the six-track system. We would have been dead meat without it. By the way, this is when Jeff and I discovered the original BLADE RUNNER interpositive that caused such a stir a few years later. We sent it over to Mike Arrick at Warner Bros. and the rest is history..

Over at Turner (where we found some 80 DAYS mag left over from the United Artists days) all the fullcoat mag film scores from the 1950s were going. BEN HUR, etc. A shame. We told them over there to take the stuff out of the metal cans and give it some air but they didn't listen....

Such is life. Even if I get just a whiff of that smell when I'm in a vault now my stomach turns. Just a bad smell that reminds me of some bad times and decomposing classic film scores from the 1950's and 60's...

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=3447

 

A technical nit: While The Searchers was most definitely shot in VistaVision, it was not, however, shot in "true IB Technicolor". While some of the early VistaVision cameras were converted three strip Technicolor cameras and looked a lot like them, no VistaVision camera ever used a three strip color process. Color Vistavision movies were using a variation of Eastman color just like Warnercolor films. "Warnercolor" was essentially the same as all of the other Eastman single strip processes of the time with the addition of horrible in-house lab work with terrible dupe stock for any opticals. Shooting "The Searchers" in VistaVision resulted in them using Technicolor for their lab work and bypassing the inept Warner in-house processing which certainly was to its benefit. Technicolor IB prints were created, but this was from separation masters derived from the original single-strip VistaVision negative.

In any case, the point about the film benefitting from being in "Technicolor" rather than "Warnercolor" is a valid one, but it was shot on a single strip negative, not 3-strip like the classic Technicolor process of the preceding years.

Regards,

 

On a separate note, while VistaVision was mostly used by Paramount, "The Searchers" is a rare case where a Hollywood studio other than Paramount used the process without any Paramount connection (Universal's "Away All Boats" was another). Also, I believe it was the only Warner Bros. film to be shot in the process. MGM would later make "High Society" and "North by Northwest" using the process, but these were using on-loan Paramount talent Bing Crosby and Alfred Hitchcock respectively, which reportedly influenced the choice. The music for "High Society" was recorded anticipating a multitrack magnetic stereo release, the plans for which went out the window when the Vistavision decision came down. This did ultimately allow them to make probably the nicest sounding 5.1 remix for any VistaVision film released on home video to date, though, with its only serious competition being "The Ten Commandments".

Regards,