Film Restoration

When director Elia Kazan made America America in 1963, his most celebrated work was behind him. He never regained the audiences of his heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and his last few movies had all lost money.

In 1957, John Cassavetes corralled a few students from the acting workshop he started in New York City to make a film as an exercise. There was no script, no permits for locations, just a 16mm camera and an idea for a theme on which the actors were to improvise.

The instrumental strains of “Harbor Lights,” the popular song from 1937, sound over the opening prologue: “With their hates and desires men are changing the face of the earth – but they cannot change the sea. Men who live on the sea never change – for they live in a lonely world apart as they drift from one rusty tramp steamer to the next, forging the life-lines of Nations.

On October 21, 1916, the La Crosse Tribune carried a full-page advertisement for the next day’s release of Thomas Ince’s epic silent movie Civilization. Under a black and white picture of a listing ship going down in a storm as a lifeboat full of people foundered nearby, the breathless headline proclaimed: Thos.

In May 1923, Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount Pictures, sent director Cecil B. deMille a telegram: “You have lost your mind.

In her autobiography “On the Other Hand,” Fay Wray says when director Merian C. Cooper offered her the role of Ann Darrow in King Kong opposite “the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,” she thought her co-star would be Gary Cooper.

When Eddie Muller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, introduced a screening of The Breaking Point on TCM, he told the story of Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks on a fishing trip in 1939 when Hawks told Hemingway he could make a decent movie from his worst book. When Hemingway asked him which book that would be, Hawks answered, “That piece of junk, To Have and Have Not.

When director Otto Preminger bought the rights to make The Man with the Golden Arm, he knew he would have problems with the Production Code Administration: he knew they would refuse to grant him a Code seal to release the movie. The film dealt with drug abuse, a subject that was censored, along with miscegenation, prostitution, abortion, and words like “virgin” and “pregnant.

Federico Fellini is quoted as saying that “from a sentimental point of view” he was “most attached” to his film La Strada. He told writer Edward Murray in Ten Film Classics: A Re-Viewing: “I feel that it is my most representative film, the one that is the most autobiographical; for both personal and sentimental reasons because it is the film that I had the greatest trouble in realizing and that gave me the most difficulty when it came time to find a producer.

There is an apocryphal story about Ernest Hemingway telling Howard Hawks his opinion of Hollywood money. “Walk to the Nevada side of the California state line and have them throw the money to you.