Robert Harris with his FotoKem.
When classic films are in dire need of restoration, Hollywood studios generally turn to Robert A. Harris.
Known for the dedication of presenting films the way they should be seen, Harris received praise for resurrecting David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1989. Later on, Harris went on to restore Spartacus, My Fair Lady, Vertigo, and Rear Window.
In many cases, the films Harris restores unleashes a treasure trove of material that were once considered lost. Lawrence and Spartacus got several minutes of footage reinstated after their premieres at the best of the studios.
And now, in 2013, Harris is working his magic on another legendary film, Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
Kramer, known for his serious social commentaries, went “a little less serious” and tackled the subject of American greed in a slapstick comedy. Perhaps the greatest achievement this film is best known for is that it features roughly half of the most successful comedians of the time and put them together in a three-and-a-half-hour search for missing loot. One advertisement proclaimed that practically anyone who was ever funny is in it.
However, for the past 50 years, most people watched Mad World in a version that was roughly 45 minutes shorter than the one that initially premiered in 1963. In 1990, 20 minutes were found, but that didn’t seem like enough. Now, Harris, in conjunction with the Criterion Collection, has assembled a version running 197 minutes, the closest to the way the film was first released.
This project has been the dream of several members at the Home Theater Forum, of which Harris is a member. They too, appreciate this film so profusely that when news of this restoration finally came to be, the crowd went wild with satisfaction.
How did the process go along? T.R. Wilkinson, an advanced member of the Home Theater Forum, had a lot to say.
The release is a dream project of Criterion but any chance of fully restoring it proved to be strenuous. “All of the 70mm material has turned to magenta at this point and a good deal of it had already decomposed and warped past usability several years ago,” Wilkinson said. What remains is the resolution and the magnetic 6 track audio.”
The color was missing but fortunately, the crew had the original laserdisc version as a resource to bring color back to the frames.
“The secret is in technology developed to convert films to 3D,” said Wilkinson. The computer program takes dozens of points across the identical frame in both versions, and then warps them together into perfect alignment.”
All but three minutes were found in this reconstruction, but this is the closest we will ever see of the uncut version, and it fulfilled the dreams of all involved to release a Blu-Ray that gave the film a second life. The Criterion release will be released on January 2014.