Danny Burk wrote:HerrSchreck wrote:I suspected as much, since Universal doesn't even touch their own PHANTOM or HUNCHBACK which they coulda made at least a few extra mil for over the past decade... and financed a small ongoing silents operation that could've earned them some props in the academic community.
U only has material on very few of their silents (having trashed them all in the late 40s)...MAN WHO LAUGHS comes to mind, and they only have the same chopped up silent version of the '29 PHANTOM rerelease that's been floating around for years (35mm). They have nothing on HUNCHBACK or LAST WARNING unless it's a 16mm "Show at Home" print, which is where all extant copies of both titles come from. The original 1925 PHANTOM only survives in Show at Home prints too.
BTW, the new HUNCHBACK is from 16mm (Show at Home), not 35mm as some sources indicated. Jack Theakston confirmed it on another forum. Other than a few fragments, the film doesn't exist in 35mm. If it weren't for the 16mm Show at Home prints (struck directly from camera negs from mid-20s to mid-30s), there would be far less of U's silent output surviving than we even have now. The old Show at Home catalogues teasingly list THE CHINESE PARROT as being available...either no prints survived (or were sold?), or one could possibly still be lurking in an attic somewhere. (Hopefully not in Tacoma with FOUR DEVILS...)
This still doesn't excuse the neglect of present and near-present management regimes within the studio at least making some effort to those silent/early sound titles which have extant materials. Kino and Shepard seem to be the only guys doing anything with what's left laying around.
We've all heard how one of the post-silent era regimes at Universal pulped their own silent library to extract the precious metals in the nitrate.. or something to that effect. But elements still do exist in their library. After developing their relationship w Universal, and getting out THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, the Wyler silents/early sound feautures & doc (originally slated for BEN HUR I seem to remember), plus the early Paramount Mamoulians APPLAUSE & LOVE ME, Bret Wood had this to say about the potential future about their relationship w Universal viz mining silents from their lib:
Q: Any more Conrad Veidt films coming from Kino?
A: If The Man Who Laughs does really well, we might release The Last Performance and The Last Warning [directed by Paul Leni], so you get a little bit more Veidt and a little bit more Leni. But because those films are so little known, we thought it would be stronger to come out with The Man Who Laughs, which is better known, in hopes that it does well and that it would encourage us to release more suspense-oriented Universal silents.
on the subject of working w Uni, and their treatment of their silents, he admitted:
A: Yes, it's my understanding that they didn't maintain their films very well at all, and a lot of key Universal films survived in the format of Show-at-Home prints, which were 16mm prints marketed to collectors and hobbyists. The 35mm elements are long gone for films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Von Stroheim's The Merry-Go-Round.
I've had a look at a print (I actually have a badly degenrated ntsc tape of it) of WARNING and it looks positively sublime. My suspicion was this was one those few silents film that managed to escape the recycling glut at that juncture when the pulping occured. This doesn't mean that exhibitions of clean show at homes of this film don't regularly make the rounds (from Eastman House, for ex.)
I have no doubt there are more buried treasure in their vaults that we don't know about-- in addition to WARNING-- because U simply doesn't give a drop of a shit.
Q: Why hasn't The Man Who Laughs been released on video before?
A: It's a long story, mainly having to do with the difficulty of an independent video distributor getting access to studio films. A studio like Universal doesn't see a lot of value in releasing older films like The Man Who Laughs, because in their dollars and cents viewpoint, it's small potatoes. But for a small company like Kino, it's a great release. It's something that we have been wanting to do for a long time. This is how it happened. A long time ago we picked up a documentary about William Wyler called Directed by William Wyler, and we didn't have anything to release it with; it's hard to release a one-hour documentary on a filmmaker by itself. As a favor, Catherine Wyler, William Wyler's daughter, asked Universal to give us two or three films to release with the documentary. That's how we got Counsellor-at-Law, The Good Fairy, and The Love Trap [all directed by Wyler and released on DVD by Kino]. Suddenly we had a relationship with Universal, which was a godsend. We asked them if they'd be interested in continuing the relationship, and they said yes, and The Man Who Laughs was the film film on our list. The next movies on our list are Applause and Love Me Tonight [available November 25]. We're finishing up the DVDs of those two right now. We hope to delve very deeply into Universal's vaults and release a lot of other films like this that have never been out on home video before.
[...]
Q: This sounds like a wonderful new relationship, because up to now Universal has been slow in releasing their old films, especially silents, on DVD. Not counting their classic monster movies, of course.
SO as I said-- there's more in there. There's definitely more in there besides the sound PHANTOM reissue, MAN WHO LAUGHS and a few odds & ends. I don't buy that it's an empty library in a million years. So let's hope that somehow, somewhere, somebody gets to get into that library and find out the full scope of what fucking Universal is sitting on.
666 furluciferssakes.
