Ten Questions with Grover Crisp

Vice President of Asset Management & Film Restoration for Sony Pictures Entertainment and a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Grover Crisp has served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Moving Image Archivists over the past five years and presented or coordinated technical symposia on film preservation and restoration at educational institutions and film conferences throughout Europe and the U.S. Some of Crisp's most recent and forthcoming restoration projects include Easy Rider, In Cold Blood, Five Easy Pieces, Funny Girl, Suddenly Last Summer, Oliver! and Shampoo.

DVDFILE: Having been in development for over three years, what was the initial impetus behind restoring Funny Girl - why this particular film, and why now?

Grover Crisp: The studio made a print for Barbra Streisand which, upon review, was discovered to have a few things wrong with it, including some sync issues in a number of places, bad duplicate negatives, lack of proper color and detail, etc. We decided to take a full and complete evaluation of the film and, among other things, found the original negative to be in very poor condition.

This is one of the key musicals in the Columbia library, one of only three films William Wyler directed for the company, the film that put Streisand on the map as a major screen star, so it was not difficult to find a reason to work on this particular film.

DF: What state were the surviving print elements in when you began the restoration. Was anything usable, and did you have to strike a new print or do any repair to the original negative?

GC: The original negative was not printable when we first inspected it. The negative, unfortunately, had been used to make a lot of prints at the time the film was released and was seriously damaged in the process. Several scenes had been replaced with poorly-made duplicate negatives, most of the splices were coming apart and the film was torn in a number of places. We were very fortunate to have a good set of YCM master positives from which to strike new duplicate replacement negatives for many of the damaged scenes. YCM masters from this period can be quite problematic, especially those made in London at the time, but this set proved really beneficial. All in all, we replaced about 20% of the negative.

DF: Technicolor is known as being a very problematic format to work with. What were some of the specific challenges involved in restoring and transferring a Technicolor film?

GC: We always thought, during the process of restoration, that if we could use the new dye-transfer process at Technicolor, it would give us the ultimate look we wanted. Traditional positive printing just was not allowing us to take full advantage of the color palate used in the film for the sets and incredible costumes. The reds needed to be rich and the blacks needed to be black, not "milky" black, and the first test we ran at Technicolor proved we might get what we wanted out of our Eastman color negative. The film was fully-restored at the point at which we started to used the Technicolor dye-transfer process, but certainly one of the biggest challenges was maintaining the color timing throughout, with some minor shifts that needed to be made from time to time. The overall consistency of the color saturation with the new dye transfer process is very good, however.

DF: Were there any particular issues with the color timing and overall stylistic choices made with the film, and how did ensure that you were remaining true to the original intent of the filmmakers with the restoration?

GC: We had several original dye transfer prints, since the film was released that way in 1968, however, as was usual, they each looked a little different from each other, and had their own set of problems. Consistency in the flesh tones was particularly difficult throughout the process. We wanted to be as faithful as possible to Wyler's final road show version of the film and, normally, we try to have the director or cinematographer involved with restoring a film when possible. In this case, we enlisted the aid of Robert Swink on a couple of occasions. He was the supervising editor on "Funny Girl" and, unfortunately, passed away just a couple of months before the re-release of the film.

DF: Many remasters these days seem to use extensive digital technology to aid in cleaning up and remastering a film. Did you work at all in the digital realm in restoring Funny Girl?

GC: Any film that gets transferred to video nowadays gets some bit of digital clean-up, including newly-released films, even if it is just some minor dirt removal, mainly because the quality bar is so high and visible with the advent of High Definition and the DVD consumer format. Since we had good secondary materials to work with for the picture, we did not need to recreate any images digitally, unlike, say, "Easy Rider" or "Lost Horizon", two films with digitally recreated negatives used to replace lost or damaged frames, almost a quarter of the film in Easy Rider's case. The only extensive use of digital for "Funny Girl" was for the soundtrack, using Sonic Solutions to reduce hiss and distortion, remove pops, crackles and other anomalies.