The History of 3-D with the 3-D Film Archive

Adam invites two of the world's most renowned experts on 3-D to co-host and discuss the history of 3-D. Bob Furmanek and Jack Theakston, collectively known as the 3-D Film Archive, have worked on almost every major 3-D release of the last decade. They divulge working on the oldest known 3-D short, and the lost film it may have been a part of. They reflect on how one of the most expensive 3-D films of all time, Money From Home, has a personal effect on Bob's life and his working relationship with Jerry Lewis. They chart the fall of the golden age of 3-D, but not it's death, as it is adopted by the independent world of pornography and martial arts films in the late 60s and 70s. They even tackle 3-D's glorious resurgence in the 80s.

Bob and Jack bring special treats, like a sneak peek at one of the docs on the Money From Home disc and clips from their upcoming 3-D Rarites Volume 3. They also make an exciting announcement about a future release.

Kickstarter Links:

3-D Rarities Vol. 3: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1912346019/3-d-rarities-volume-iii?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=3-d%20rarities&total_hits=1

The Great Golden Age of 3-D Comics: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1912346019/the-great-golden-age-of-3-d-comics?ref=discover_saved_projects&category_id=252

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome back to GeekamokTief. This is the show where we talk about big topics. Like this week's subject is 3D, one of my favorite things. And so who do I bring in? I'm going to bring in the two biggest experts on 3D that I know the 3D Film Archive, Bob Fermanek and Jack Fiekston.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

How are you doing, Adam?

SPEAKER_04 0:19

It's great to be with you today. Thanks for having us. Um, I'm really excited about this conversation.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Yeah, I can't wait to talk about 3D with you guys. So if you guys are interested in 3D, stay tuned. Bob Bermanek and Jack Thiekston. Let's talk 3D. So I hear you guys are working on some very old 3D, stuff from like the 20s and 30s right now.

SPEAKER_04 0:50

Oh, we've got a bunch of really cool stuff coming up, stuff that nobody's ever seen before, and that's gonna be on uh Rarities Volume 3, which we actually have just finished our Kickstarter campaign for. That's gonna have a bunch of cool stuff on it. Views of Yosemite Valley, which was a short that was shot in uh 1922, and it is, as far as we know, the oldest purpose-shot 3D film in existence.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Wow, that's a big find. And Yosemite at that time is fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 1:22

Oh, yeah. This is uh, and this is really choice footage of it, and it's also photographed specifically with the idea of showing off a 3D process. So there's a lot of great layering and interesting effects that uh happen in the film. It's only one reel. It was actually shot as a prologue to the very first feature that was ever shot in 3D, which was a film called The Power of Love. Only played publicly at one venue and then was consequently retitled and released only flat. I believe the retitle was Forbidden Lovers, and it didn't make much of a splash as a 2D film because the feature is lost. But I found this reel actually through a film collector who had posted that he had gotten it among a whole stash of uh nature films, all nitrate 35 millimeter nature films, and this just happened.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

And by nature films, you mean actual nature, not like nature films in the 50s, right? No, no, not those kind of nature films.

SPEAKER_04 2:26

We'll get to those later, but no, no, no, real nature documentaries, and it was at the tail end of a reel that was starting to go decomp. So we caught it really at the 11th hour. We've done stuff from the 20s in the past. We restored a film that I turned up at Library of Congress called Kelly's Plasticon Pictures, that's from 1922, 23. We also uh worked with George Eastman Museum on a role of sort of demos that a guy by the name of William Crespinel put together. And a lot of those are shots from all these various pathway anaglyph one-reelers that they distributed throughout the 20s. So we have some experience with older footage than uh the sound era.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

And if I could add one of the things that's really cool about the Yosemite film restoration, it only survives flat. And for the very, very first time, we're dipping our toes into the serial conversion pool. The conversions have been around for quite a long time and they've gotten incredibly good. When we did some of the tests on Yosemite, I was blown away how good it looked. It looked like natural 3D photography. We're doing that as a conversion. We've got a couple of other lost 3D films that we're converting for uh Rarities Volume 3, including a fabulous short called Bandit Island with Lon Cheney, where they're uh filming around Los Angeles. And and for Lon Cheney fans, I mean, this is he's quite outstanding in this. Uh no dialogue, all action. It's great that now, due to the advances in 3D conversion techniques, we're able to bring these lost 3D films back to life. So that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_04 4:06

And we wouldn't do it unless we thought that the quality was to our standard. If you have faith in our standards from our previous natural 3D releases, I think you will be pleasantly surprised with these conversions.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Yeah, and you're only doing it for things that where the other element doesn't exist anymore. Like you wouldn't do this for anything other than that, right? Oh no, no.

SPEAKER_04 4:26

This is completely just to restore the stereo integrity of the original that you're never gonna see it in 3D, otherwise. As far as we know, the elements are gone.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

So you're talking about your upcoming new release, which is 3D Rarities Volume 3. Is that Kickstarter still open? Can people still get in on that?

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yes, we enabled late pledges on this for the first time on this Kickstarter campaign. So anybody that's interested in still pre-ordering Rarities 3, you can go to the Kickstarter campaign and and pledge for it. It's not going to be released until next spring, so it's gonna be live for pre-orders for some time yet.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Right. We'll put the link in both the show notes at the bottom, and I'll put up a link underneath you right now.

SPEAKER_04 5:08

Now, the other centerpiece of Rarities 3 is something that we're very excited for. You'll have an exclusive now to see some of the first footage that we've discovered of this. About uh three years ago, we were approached by a lady in Philadelphia who said, I have all of my father's old home movies, and they're in 3D. I found out about you folks. Uh, could you come and take a look at this? And Bob and I kind of knew immediately what that meant. The red flags were there. It was uh, you know, 16 millimeter footage, 3D. We knew instantly that it was probably shot with one of these things. This is a uh Bolex, a 16 millimeter film camera, standard uh 16 millimeter Bolex, spring-loaded wind up. Uh, but what's unique about this, as you'll see, is I have the stereo attachment connected to the front of this particular camera.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

Oh, that's so cool. So this was something you would buy aftermarket and attach to your Bolex?

SPEAKER_04 6:13

Yeah, it was an add-on that Bolex made themselves, and they produced the spec for it pretty early on, actually, in the uh in the 3D game. But it does essentially is it takes your four by three 16 millimeter frame and splits it down the middle and makes two, we'd call them door frame aspect ratio left and right images that you then with a similar attachment to the camera, you would put on your projector and project through Polaroid filters onto a silver screen. And you could show full color stereo home movies that you shot yourself. But the thing was we never really found many of these films out in the wild. So when we got this email, we were very excited about it. We were expecting the standard size of rolling one of those cameras was 100 feet, so about three minutes worth of footage, and most people maybe shot like 400 feet of film and put it onto one reel and called it a day, and that was your home movies, right? Right. We arrived in Philadelphia, spoke with this lady a little bit more. Her father was a doctor by the name of Philip Strax. And Dr. Strax was famous for pioneering mammography, he saved many lives. Dr. Strax was also an amateur shutterbug. And in about 1953, 1954, he bought one of these Volex stereo units. He had already been shooting stereo still photos, and I think once he found out that the 3D was available, he had to have it. We uh finally got to see what this film was, and uh no, it was not 400 feet of film, it was about 48 fully edited documentaries that he had shot and added narration to and music tracks to. It was all around the world with Dr. Philip Strex. He was also a bit of a Carlos Clarence Williams type doctor, where he was also a poet, too. He wrote all these little limericks about his trip. The music will stop, it'll drop out, and then you'll get this nice little funny uh haiku or limerick or something that he's written for the moment. And then you'll go back to the music. And it's they're really well photographed, they're all in codachrome. It spans about, I would say, eight to ten years worth of time. Uh, we had over 24 hours worth of footage to play with.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

Wow, that was a massive cash then, huh?

SPEAKER_04 8:41

Uh it was unbelievable. Uh, our jaws dropped. Bob and I both turned to each other. I think the first one, Bob, we ran was what, the one where he's in Japan. We're talking like late 50s Japan here, right after the war, rebuilding, so all this new construction, uh, amazing footage. He had access to communist countries because of his surgical background. So uh there's an entire two-parter about the Soviet Union, there's a two-parter about China. But I think to me, the centerpiece of that is in 1956, one year after the park opened, to the day, he brought his family to Disneyland in Anaheim and shot an entire documentary about Disneyland in Kodachrome stereo. There's footage of things there that don't exist anymore that I know Disneyland and Disney fans will want to see badly because this is great footage. You know, he had a little money, so he even hired a helicopter pilot to take him for some flyover shots of the park.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

That's amazing. Wow, what production value on this on these home movies.

SPEAKER_04 9:48

Very much so. He was his own documentarian, and the funny part was he really didn't show these anywhere. He showed them to his friends and family and you know, some local community functions and that sort of thing. But I think he more or less did it just to placate himself.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

It was his own personal journey.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

That's the thing, and people hear home movies and they think, oh, amateur, shaky, out of focus. No, uh, Dr. Strax knew what he was doing behind that camera, and and these are very competently done films that we're going to be cutting together about an hour's worth of that footage for Rarities 3. And it will include Disneyland, it will be pre-Castro, Cuba, Palm Spring, a few other really neat places. And we'll see what the reaction is. We'd love to get more of it out there and share this material with the world.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

The Strax box set is coming. Is that what is that what you're saying? Yeah. 24 hours of Strax. We shall see. What's the average length of one of these short documentaries that he did?

SPEAKER_04 10:50

They average from about 30 minutes to 50 minutes. Oh, wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

The human side of it that's really important and rather touching is why he got into this. He lost his first wife. This was a way to preserve the memories of his children and his family growing up. It really touches on the significance of preserving memories and preserving your family, you know, the importance of home movies. You know, what he inadvertently was doing was creating a time machine that now, seven decades later, we can look at, we all benefit from it. But it's a really great story and a wonderful human story.

SPEAKER_02 11:29

So, well, we're set in the 50s right now. I feel like we need to kind of segue into your big project, the one that you guys have been working on for a couple years, Money from Home. It's about to come out.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Yeah, that's our uh really our crown jewel. There's no other way to put it. It's the best work we've done. I've seen every vintage 3D restoration that's out on Blu-ray, and I'll say this is about the best. It looks so amazingly good. It was on the operating table for about two and a half years. We had to wait for the license to be available, and as soon as that was up, Keenel Warber secured it. Thanks to Andrea Kallas and Charlotte Barker at the Paramount Pictures Archive. They scanned every reel of 35mm Technicolor camera negative. So we had 72 reels of left-right master elements scanned, 54,000 feet in 4K resolution. When I say those are massive files, that's an understatement. But uh it looks incredible. Uh the detail. I used to have an original 1953 Technicolor 3D left-right print. And I thought that looked stunning until I saw these scans. And the level of detail, I mean, you could see fibers and clothing. It just is absolutely beautiful. But it was an uphill fight all the way, and it was Jack Theekston who had the uh rather daunting task of recombining those black and white separations. And and Jack, you want to tell folks a little bit about what you were up against?

SPEAKER_02 13:01

Yeah, I mean, I think we need to set the scene for everybody here, too. This was filmed in a unique format, it was three-strip technicolor, but doubled. So you had your left and right eye. So each eye had three different strips of film that had to be aligned in order to make your 3D image.

SPEAKER_04 13:19

Essentially six-strip technicolor.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Yeah, there's only what two films ever shot in this format?

SPEAKER_04 13:25

Two features. There was a short that was shot with a different but similar technocolor camera rig. This one, Money from Home, and then uh Nat Holt production called Flight to Tangiers.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Right. And for those who are gonna wonder, the short was called Royal River. We have that on uh our recent Blu-ray release of Dragonfly Squadron as a bonus. So you can see that as well. But yeah, no, it was a brilliant mechanical piece of technology, and bringing it back to life was not easy.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Yeah, do we want to talk about the dynotic camera, the way it was set up, the the two giant rigs that are shooting at basically at each other in an L shape, right? Against a mirror.

SPEAKER_04 14:07

Let's go uh micro and then come out macro so that the audience understands how a three-strip Technicolor rig works. In the 1930s, this camera was developed by the Technicolor Corporation and the Mitchell Camera Company, and they designed a very intricate system. What you would call chromogenic film didn't really exist yet. So, in other words, single-strip film that could just record all the colors and then give you all the colors. Technicolor had to figure out first off how to capture the wide range of colors from red to green to blue and everything in between. That's how our eyes see you. You can synthesize this using black and white film by taking individual color records of each of those wavelengths. So you have to put them through filters that are red, green, and blue. Now, setting up a camera for this to capture all of those colors is incredibly difficult, it turns out.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't understand that what what Technicolor did was actually take black and white records, like you're saying. And so the film isn't actually red, green, or blue on when it comes out, it is a black and white record that extracts all the other colors except for red, blue, or green.

SPEAKER_04 15:23

Right. They're just literally three black and white strips of film. Now, the way they're capturing the color is quite interesting. There is a cube in the middle of the assembly once you go past the lens. And the cube is a piece of glass that has been actually cemented together from two pyramids, and in between where the cementing was done, has been lightly flecked electrostatically with gold, so that it's a half mirror. So it's sending light one way and then straight through. So you're beam splitting, it's a beam splitter, is what it's called. The first beam of light has a green filter in front of it, and so it is filtering out only the green light to that strip of film. So that's taken care of. You've got your green, you need to get your red and your blue now. To get your red and the blue, you have to take the beam that went 90 degrees the other way, and you have a separate film gate on that side that has two films sandwiched together. The front film is what you would call orthochromatic, it's only sensitive to green and blue light. It won't record red. If you put a magenta filter in front of it, that's gonna filter out anything that's a green light. Magenta is considered negative green, it's only red and blue light, and that's exactly what you need. So the orthochromatic film only picks up the blue light that's coming through, which now leaves us with how do you filter out the red light? While the other side, the facing side towards the beam splitter, gets filtered only red light because that orthochromatic strip, the one that recorded the blue, has a red dye layer on it, and that's acting as a filter for the strip that it's sandwiched with. You'll really appreciate how versatile and ingenious and clever and just elegant the whole system was, because you have two gates that are running in synchronization with one another. They also have to keep registration, because if you don't keep registration with the films, you'll get a weird sort of fringing around the edges of the color because it would almost look like if you've ever seen a color newsprint that hasn't been really printed and registered very well, it kind of stinks. It looks bad, it's fuzzy, it's got colors where they're not supposed to be.

SPEAKER_02 17:52

Oh, yeah. The through strip films, you get that green fringing around everybody or blue fringing, or magenta.

SPEAKER_04 17:59

We had that problem with money from home, but we're gonna get to that in just a moment. I just want to get to the camera here. Extraordinarily precision, very elegant cameras, very big, very loud. And of course, because now you're going through not only a lens but a beam splitter and two filters, they sucked up a bunch of light. I mean, we're talking probably 10 times the amount of light that you would need for black and white production. And of course, you're also talking about the period where everything was incandescent light. We're very spoiled now with LED lights because they run so cool. But those sets were ovens. I mean, people would pass out on Technicolor sets because it got so hot. Imagine then you've got two of these behemoth cameras. Now we have to have two of them put through another half mirror so that we can converge the 3D as we like. To say the least, it's amazing that they got any exposure on the film whatsoever because this thing that was the size of a large refrigerator after it was blimped.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

I mean, yeah, they said it took six men to lift the blimp off of it to reload the wheel.

SPEAKER_04 19:14

With the crane, it was extraordinarily heavy, expensive, sucked up a bunch of light, but as you'll see with money from home, created some terrific color imagery and stereo imagery as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

I mean, to add to that, uh the camera rig weighed, I think, 730 odd pounds. When I talked to Jerry Lewis about it over the years, uh, one of his comments is that he was amazed at how the cinematographer who was Daniel Fapp was able to control the exposure because of the amount of light that was needed. It's beautifully photographed. And that's one of the joys of this restoration. All of these people came together to create a really stunning color stereoscopic image because of a faulty preview where the movie was shown out of sync to the trades, most exhibitors opted to play it flat. Only 2% of play dates in 1954 were the 3D version. So effectively, this new Blu-ray release is the worldwide 3D premiere. People are going to see it as it was meant to be seen. You know, kudos to Hal Wallace because, as the producer, there's a wonderful quote from him where he said that we don't consider 3D a gimmick. We believe it enhances the storytelling and the pictorial values. And that's the approach they take to it. It's uh, you know, it's a beautifully crafted uh stereo window into that world. It's really very fun and gratifying for us to bring that back to life.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

Yeah, I can attest that this movie is absolutely stunning. Um, you guys graciously invited me out to the first public screening of the 3D version of this film in in Ohio, and it was beautiful, well received. Everybody was very, very excited to see it. And uh now people at home are gonna get to see it. So, Jack, do you want to talk about how how difficult it was to line up all six of these and then the two eyes in addition to that?

SPEAKER_04 21:13

Yes. Well, uh, so we got the camera stuff out of the way. Now onto the film stuff. Technicolor used to print with a system that they called die transfer, where they would take those three strip Technicolor records and then expose them onto a special stock called matrix stock. It's basically silver particles that are being held in suspension on some gelatin that's coating the side of some kind of plastic. They found out that if you run an exposed black and white film, a print that has been made from one of these negatives, through a special chemical called a tanner, the areas where the silver are will stay hard, and then the areas that are light will stay soft. And then if you run hot water over that, you can melt away the light areas and leave. Basically, a stamp behind, and that's what it becomes. It becomes a stamp that is then soaked in either cyan magenta or yellow dye, just like a printing press would. And then that is stamped onto a blank piece of film one strip at a time. And what you're left with is a full color image that's literally been stamped onto the film. Dye transfer. We're working in a digital realm. So we scanned in all of the records in 4K from the camera negative. And then I reassembled them digitally using red and green and blue filters where they were appropriate, and then just stacking them up on one another. Problem is separate strips of film, and in being separate strips of film are subject to any kind of shrinkage or deterioration that could happen separately, depending on how they were stored, where they were stored, how many times they'd been rewashed, all sorts of factors that go into this.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

Yeah, and we're talking 70 years of age.

SPEAKER_04 23:02

Listen, if you can look good at 70 years old, you know, you're ahead of the game. So fortunately, this film was pretty well preserved. We did have to go in and shot by shot, literally shot by shot, adjust the shrinkage amount that it happened and adjust the registration. The registration was out of whack. Some shots it was very bad. Some shots it just fell into place. There was no rhyme or reason to it. But you also have to shift around three different panels to get them to all match exactly how you want it. You're doing it by eye. Some reels were fine, you know, some reels only had 20 edits, so you only had to set 20 keyframes in the whole thing. And then something like the last reel has something like 60 edits in it because it's a chase sequence. So a lot of time was spent on that. And then, of course, you have to do it manually for both eyes. So you have to do every you have to do the feature twice, basically.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Right, right. And then you must yeah, you do your alignment for each eye, so that's twice, right? And then you also have to do the final alignment, which is a third time.

SPEAKER_04 24:08

Yeah, and that is Greg Kintz, our technical guru. Greg does the stereo alignments intermediate between that. You would think, well, it's three-strip technicolor, and you know, the grading for this should be uh walk in the park, right? Uh, not the case. As good as the uh technicolor exposures were and everything, the film had to be graded shot by shot, and especially the opticals, even though they were three-striped, but they weren't faded, like you know, sometimes we do shows with Eastman color films and the Eastman color optical cut-ins, that's where they do the dissolves or fade outs or fade-ins. They're they're just toasted, you know, they're they faded to the point where you can't get any color information out of them. With Technicolor, you don't have that problem, but the gamma shift still changes.

SPEAKER_02 24:55

And so, did you you experienced a lot of color breathing because of that?

SPEAKER_04 24:58

A lot of color breathing. Even on the original camera negative, there was a lot of uh color breathing, especially in the blue record. So we had to do some judicious deflickering, and I think that was a a problem that the company was having at the time. I was actually watching the uh restoration the other day uh uh up on Criterion Channel of Niagara with Marilyn Monroe, and it had some of the same problems in the Blue Channel that we had with on Money from Home. And that was a film that had only been shot, I think, about six to eight months earlier. So I think that was a problem the lab was having. And we found that the dye transfer print that Bob had was, in comparison to what we did, very yellow, and I think they did that to sort of cover up some of that blue channel color.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Yeah, a little bit of color shifting, yeah, where the the it goes from white to kind of bluish, like that happens so often.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Yeah, I remember uh Jack, you were uh uh beside yourself because there was one shot in the party scene at the end of the first act where uh one of the background extras actually had like bluish purple hair.

SPEAKER_04 26:04

Yeah, I thought it was a color grading issue or something, and it turns out no, that just happened to be kind of a trend at the time with older ladies, they would use like bluish colored uh dye to like take the yellow out of their hair as they were older, and it's it's it was obviously just a visual gag that they threw into the scene, but it was uh yeah, they made her a literal blue hair, right?

SPEAKER_02 26:28

Right, exactly. Yeah, that's where the term comes from. Yeah, we we talked about your print, your IV print. Those prints, even back then, they were always a little softer. The way that people are going to see this at home now is gonna be like a revelation, even if you had seen this film on a print before.

SPEAKER_04 26:45

We're seeing it better than it ever possibly could have ever been made in the photochemical realm.

SPEAKER_02 26:50

Right. Yeah, what people are gonna see is is gonna be better than the representation that they would have seen in a theater in the 50s. It's just correct.

SPEAKER_04 26:58

Even the best print.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

And I'll just add that after uh Jack finished his work and the files went to Greg Kintz, uh, Greg is uh a genius about taking these left-right files and maximizing their their panel matching, make sure the left and right eye are are uh equal. Money from home was was fairly well photographed stereoscopically, but there is still occasional vertical misalignment that would creep in on certain shots. Uh, all of that's been corrected. After he had done that, uh the files had to be, as Jack mentioned, color graded. So we took them to Dave Northrop at Film Media in New Jersey. And Dave has been doing grading since the 90s. He was uh just wonderful in pulling out all the color that was retained in those records. So a lot of people spent uh very specialized time and areas to bring together this digital 3D master now. It's very gratifying because you get to see it on the big screen with an audience. You were there in in Columbus. Uh, we've done it at Film Forum in New York and the Wisconsin Film Festival, Madison, the TCM Festival in LA, and it just screened uh in Bologna.

SPEAKER_02 28:13

Bologna too, Bologna, Italy.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

Yeah, yeah. Uh so yeah, it's it's a real big kick to bring these things back to life and get them, you know, get them back up on the big screen and and so people can enjoy them.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Coming soon from Keno Lorber, and uh then you guys can have money from home in your own personal collection.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Yeah, and uh, as we always try to do when time and budgets permit, there are some very cool bonus extras. Uh, we've got two commentary tracks, including one from uh James Snyder, who co-wrote the definitive book on the films of Jerry Lewis, and uh provided James with a lot of production background on the film. So there's information there that people have never heard before about the making of the movie and about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at that time in their lives and their career. The commentary track has a 10-minute guest appearance from Mike Blue, who's our 3D historian expert, and he gives you a lot of good details about the 3D angle and the technocolor dinoptic camera. And then we've got some really cool bonus shorts. There's a new documentary film called Coming Back Home that was made by a really talented young documentary filmmaker named Sean Frunk. And he talks about my background with the movie, which goes back to 1975, and then takes it through to the current uh restoration work and interviews pretty much everybody that worked on it. We have another bonus extra called Dean's Disc, which is a private recording that Dean Martin made for Jerry on his 27th birthday during making of Money from Home. Uh, it's a little bit saucy, you know, uh, but this was not meant to be heard by the public. But it's a very sweet uh private recording that was cut together by uh Josh Carmona for this release. Uh then the third segment with uh photos taken on the set and behind-the-scenes images that was cut together by Brandon Lang. And we've got the teaser trailer and the regular trailer. So for $20, I think you're getting a lot of bang for your buttons. Fully loaded.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

Oh, and you actually provided me with the actual documentary that you were talking about coming home, and uh, I'll play a clip here for everybody to enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

I had heard from Jerry's assistant that he had a warehouse in Hollywood that was full of film and everything relating to his career. And a little light went off, and it's like, oh, so he sort of needs an archivist. So I came home, gave notice to my employer, and I did what any person would do given that opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

I I flew out to LA and I called Joe Steele and I said, I'm here. He was affectionately known in our family as the Hollywood ferret. He could find anything anywhere. My dad was in awe of his ability to find things that were out there, such as my dad's films or television shows that were left in vaults by people he had sent them to to review, and they were never returned, and Bob was able to identify and find a lot of these things and bring them back to my dad's vault.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

And I was going to have access to storage units and warehouses and vaults and all kinds of places where orphaned and abandoned elements are kept. It was very likely I was going to find some pretty unique things. You know, he said, look, if you can use my name to get access to these facilities, have fun with find some 3D material. You know, if you can, good for you. All of the rare things that I found that we've now restored, many of them would have probably been destroyed if I hadn't been in the right place at the right time. And I wouldn't have been in that place without Jerry Lewis.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

So well, that's money from home, guys. And I know this one was very personal to you. Having worked for Jerry Lewis, Bob, this was like one of your holy grails.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

It really is. Uh, and uh, you know, I I knew Jerry from 1982 until he passed. He was uh incredibly kind to me, a wonderful man, a fascinating guy. He would have been very pleased with this. And I say it in Sean Stock. Would he have watched it? Probably not. He wasn't fond of any of the movies that he indented, especially the Hal Wallace ones.

SPEAKER_03 32:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

But I think Jerry was very technically oriented, and knowing what we did to bring it back to life and realize the vision of the people that made it, I think he'd be very proud of that. Jerry Lewis would have been 100 years old had he lived. Uh so this is his centennial. And uh Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis teamed up in Atlantic City on July 25th, 1946. So this is the 80th anniversary of the birth of Martin Lewis.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

So we're in the 50s right now, and I just kind of want to give a shout out to one of my favorite releases that you guys have ever done, The Glass Web. I had not seen that film until you guys worked on it and released it. It is an amazing film that I think everybody should see. Film Noir, Edward G. Robinson. It is just fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

The Glass Web was uh we were trying for years to get that out of the vault, and it was delayed because of a music clearance issue. A lot of people don't realize that, you know, these films from six, seven, eight decades ago, the music was never cleared for anything other than theatrical. So you start getting into uh residuals and royalties for publishing, the it was a real nightmare. And the song Temptation, the classic, is used throughout the movie.

SPEAKER_02 33:34

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:35

You couldn't you couldn't substitute it for something. Yeah. Yeah. A shout out to Frank Tarzi at Keynote Larber because he was persistent and he worked with uh the legal department at Universal. It always varies uh who gets brought into a project. And sometimes you'll get someone in legal who will look at a title that's red flag and oh, there's a music issue. How how many hours are we gonna have to work to resolve this? Okay, it's gonna take us 20 hours, it's not worth it. So, no, you can't license it. God bless him. Frank was persistent and he worked with them to iron out those problems. And thank God, it's a great film, one of my favorites personally. And it's uh it's underrated and unknown, but now it's out there on 3D Blu-ray. So uh, by all means, yeah, seek out the glass web, you'll you'll be glad you did.

SPEAKER_02 34:22

So the 50s boom happened, right? For 3D, and then 3D kind of goes into a recession. Wanna Devil kicked it off.

SPEAKER_04 34:29

Yeah, that's uh November 1952. Yes, 52. The last filmed feature that was distributed in 3D would be Revenge of the Creature in 1955.

SPEAKER_02 34:41

By that point, most everybody was dead, yeah. It was it was dead.

SPEAKER_04 34:45

I used although that one played surprisingly quite a few 3D play dates because they were looking to see if they could jumpstart a revival for it again.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04 34:54

And but but it never really took. And then a few years later in 1958, Warner Brothers and Universal both dusted off a couple of their early 50s titles and sent those out, and those surprisingly had quite a few 3D bookings in the late 50s. So if you hear of somebody saying they saw House of Wax or Phantom of the Remorgan in 1958, you know, they're not blowing smoke. They actually did do reissues of this stuff in 3D. Yeah, for the most part, by 1954, 3D was dying a quick death. Uh, it wasn't completely being dismissed, but I think everybody had pretty much jumped on the CinemaScope bandwagon. And all of it.

SPEAKER_02 35:32

I mean, it was more expensive for an exhibitor, right? Because of the glasses and then, you know, special equipment to show 3D. Yeah, although uh and sometimes bad exhibition gave 3D a bad name.

SPEAKER_04 35:44

And so the uh presentations, if they were done improperly and they frequently were uh dual strip 3D demands uh frame precision execution. If that wasn't done right, it could make it very uncomfortable for the audience to view the film.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

The Polaroid Corporation had a vested interest in seeing 3D succeed because they were making millions from the manufacture of the glasses and the filters. When the first rumblings of box office trouble began hitting in the fall of 1953, they sent out technicians and did field studies, and they found that nearly 50% of 3D presentations were shown poorly. They were either out of phase, meaning that they were in synchronization, but the shutters on the two projectors were off. Uh, so that would give you kind of a watery image on screen. And, you know, you can watch a feature that way, it wouldn't give you a headache necessarily, but there'd be some eye strain. That was the least of the sins. The the worst was synchronization, where if the prints were not precisely frame accurate, you'd get a headache with that amount of bad presentations. It didn't take long for people to, you know, buy their 75 cent ticket and see a bad 3D presentation. They didn't quite understand what was wrong. They thought it was the glasses, they thought it was the cinematography, right? And they stopped going. You know, Money from Home was a victim of that. By by the spring of 1954, people had had it with 3D. 3D died pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_04 37:14

Similarly, CinemaScope gave you everything all on one strip of film. Wide screen and stereophonic sound, and all you needed was the lens, the mag pickup for the soundtrack, some new amplifiers, some extra speakers in the auditorium, which a lot of these exhibitors were already putting in anyway, because many of the 3D films were also being exhibited with stereophonic soundtracks on a separate, its own separate strip of film. The culmination of all that stuff on a single package, even if it was more expensive than a 3D installation, was very uh desirable to exhibitors because what really kicked off everything more than anything else, more than 3D, more than Cinema Scope was Cinerama. And Cinerama was like IMAX, it was a large premium format system, and it knocked everybody's socks off when they first saw it. And CinemaScope was trying to be the next best thing. And here's a similar experience at your at your at a normal neighborhood ticket price.

SPEAKER_02 38:18

Cinerama kind of kicked off the size wars, right? The the aspect wars, and you got VistaVision and Vista Rama, and like all these you had Tadeo and all of the it was all about size at that point. It wasn't about like the gimmick of big screen.

SPEAKER_04 38:35

Everyone wanted a big screen.

SPEAKER_02 38:36

Well, and that was the TV influence, right? Because you know, they had to differentiate themselves from any entertainment that you could watch at home, and the only way to do that is to make it big, big, big.

SPEAKER_04 38:46

Color has to be unanimous now. Stereophonic sound you can't get on television, widescreen you can't get on television. But even by 1954, the industry accepts television. They realize that it's not just the enemy, it can also be an advertising tool. That it is the enemy that you have to learn to love and use in your best interest. That's a very interesting footnote in film history that's forgotten is how quickly Hollywood accepted television at the same time trying to differentiate itself from it.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

I was doing research on that DeMille project that I'm working on, and I read a memo from Paramount that was talking about how a lot of their B pictures were doing better because of the advertisement on television. They were up like 30 to 35%, and some of them were doing better than their A pictures because of all the advertisement for them on TV. They realized that value very early on.

SPEAKER_04 39:43

The writing was written on the wall that there was gonna be a point where there was gonna be a back catalog being sold to television of films.

SPEAKER_02 39:51

Oh, yeah, there was a lot of back and forth with DeMille about selling his old films to television. Right. What he could expect for each film.

SPEAKER_04 39:58

And the big question was who is gonna pull the trigger first? Aside from some independent and poverty poverty row studios at the time. The first major that really did that was RKO, and they sold their package to television, and then the the floodgates just opened.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

3D kind of recedes uh in the later 50s, but it doesn't disappear, right? You guys have been working on a lot of projects that were done in 3D in the 60s and in the 70s.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

The big uh breakthrough for 3D was something that had been in the works since the early 50s, and that was to uh successfully uh put both uh left-right images on one strip of film. Colonel Robert Bernier had been uh working on that since the early 50s, and by 1965, he successfully developed uh space vision, and that took a standard uh four-perf 35mm frame and split it horizontally so the left eye were the image was the top two perfs, the right eye was the bottom two. I guess it's similar to technoscope in a way.

SPEAKER_02 41:02

Uh yeah, I was just gonna say that sounds just like technoscope.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

It enabled the 3D exhibition to be done from one strip of film, which eliminated all of the costs that helped ruin it in 1953. You didn't have double prints, you didn't have to have two people in the booth, uh, double shipping, all of that.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

The cost was half of what it was before to shoot a 3D film, right?

SPEAKER_04 41:25

What you ended up with at the end of the whole process was 3D CinemaScope because it is essentially the cinema scope aspect ratio. Right. So you're getting the best of both worlds.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

The first person to use it was Arch Obler, uh, who had been the first with Bolana Devil in 1952. He produced a movie called The Bubble. It's a very Twilight Zone kind of eerie story about uh a group of people who wind up trapped under this mysterious dome and they don't quite know how they got there and what's going on. There's all these people walking around in kind of a catatonic state. It's an interesting movie. I mean, don't go into it expecting, you know, a lot of explosions and chase scenes.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

It's not coming back to her, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

Well, nothing is, you know, but we just that's the high watermark. We own the rights to it, and we did uh one of our first restorations for Blu-ray in 2015. That is out of print now, and we have done a brand new restoration of the film. We've gone back to the original 35mm space vision camera negative. We've been able to do all the things we didn't have the budget to do 12 years ago. Digital cleanup of all the dirt and damage, a much, much improved color grading, a brand new high bit rate scan of the original 35mm optical track. And most excitingly, we have found 21 minutes of footage that Arch Obler cut in the late 1960s and restored it uh to the movie. So we have a brand new Kino Lorber 3D Blu-ray release that'll be out in August, and it's Arch Ober's original 112-minute version of the movie. I won't twist.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

It's a completely different cut of the film.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

It really is, and a lot of the cuts uh you know explain some plot points that were were lacking in the shortened version. Uh, there's a particularly eerie scene where Michael Cole comes into the town at night and sees where all the people are going. So I think people are gonna really enjoy re-evaluating the movie, seeing Arch Obler's original vision for it.

SPEAKER_04 43:30

And it looks spectacular. We found the camera negative on almost all the trims. It looks like it was shot yesterday.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

I have to shout out to uh George Wellman at Library of Congress, who helped find those negative trims in the Arch Oblard collection that they hold, and Matt Robner, who's working on an Arch Obert biography, and he's kind of the definitive historian on Obor's work. One of the cool things on this release Matt does a uh partial commentary track for it. He Helped us select uh an appropriate episode of Lights Out, the landmark radio show that Art Schobler produced to include as a bonus extra.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

In the 60s, you know, a lot of independent films were being made in 3D still. What about the 70s? I know you have several martial arts releases that have come out.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Yes. Well, the 70s for 3D was a bit of a lost decade in that Hollywood wasn't touching it, but the porno producers were all over it because of the stewardesses, which made a fortune in the late 60s, early 70s. In fact, we have a new reissue of the stewardesses that is out there on Blu-ray as well. But uh uh yeah, there were a lot of X-rated fare. Uh but in Hong Kong, there were several martial arts movies done. We were given the opportunity through 88 films uh to work on a restoration of magnificent bodyguards, which was an early Jackie Chan movie. One of the great delights about doing that was they had access to the camera negative from Fortune Star. The negative was in really rough shape, it hadn't been stored well. There was moisture damage throughout the film. It was a real painstaking uphill fight for 88 Films and their team to just restore the film visually. Yeah. And once that was done, we were brought in to do the 3D. And the 3D was quite challenging because it was photographed with a rather low-budget uh lens system called Super Touch that was developed by Michael Finlay out of New York. It had uh the unique uh concept of putting the two images onto one frame of film, but they were not aligned vertically. So that meant that in trying to align it today, you have to decide in each shot, okay, am I gonna align vertically on the foreground or the background, or you know, what do you do? And Greg Kentz was pulling his hair out, trying to make this thing look the best it could, right? Uh, very challenging. He made it look the best that it possibly can look.

SPEAKER_02 46:00

Well, I have to say, I watched it a few nights ago, and it's it's amazing. There's a fight scene right at the beginning with a bunch of poles, and uh, you know, you want to talk about coming at you, those poles they come shooting towards the camera right into your eye, and there's a lot of like you know, those moments where you're ducking in a lot of the shots where people are jumping or flying over you or in the middle of an action shot, they uh they wanted to speed the action up, but they couldn't undercrank the camera and then crank it back up to 24 frames again.

SPEAKER_04 46:32

So, what the editors did, which was actually quite clever, was go in and physically splice out every other frame for X amount of frames, and it gives it that that jumpy punchy quality that you you expect out of Hong Kong films. I've never seen that.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

The horses jumping over the camera, they were really putting that the camera through its paces for sure.

SPEAKER_01 46:54

Well, that was one advantage to the super touch lens, it was very compact, despite the vertical anomalies it introduced. It was relatively easy to work with. So it gave them flexibility that they wouldn't have had with some of the other perhaps more cumbersome camera attachments.

SPEAKER_02 47:09

There's a booklet with the 88 films release that they said that the producers came to a porn set in order to watch them shooting with the actual system. They really enjoyed the shoot. Uh, so they decided that they were gonna take it back for three pictures.

SPEAKER_04 47:25

Well, Finley, the guy that was selling the system, had previously been a soft porn producer. Uh, he did a lot of like what we would call nudie cuties back in the 60s and early 70s, and so they were very agnostic about who they rented the lens system to, as were the other companies like Stereovision, who had basically made their fortune making a soft porn film, The Stewardesses. And so by the time you get into the 70s, there's a pretty wide selection and variety of every genre of porn you could possibly want in 3D.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

That brings us to the big boom again in the 80s. We saw Jaws 3D, we saw Friday the 13th 3D, the the studios re-embrace 3D. What set that off? What caused the studios to re-look at 3D again?

SPEAKER_01 48:17

Coming at you. Uh Tony Anthony and his partners did that very low budget Western, perhaps the most gimmick-heavy 3D movie ever made. It was an enormous success all of a sudden, similar to what happened with Bowana Devil in 1952 and 53. There's money to be made, so of course the studios are going to look into it. It was another short-lived revival, but it benefited from all of the films being on a single strip of film where it fell apart, and I could speak to this personally, was in the exhibition end again. I remember when Coming At You played. We had to go to three different theaters before we finally found one that was presenting it properly. Because for projection, you had to have an attachment on the front of the projector in the booth that would take these two images and overlap them onto one. There were all sorts of problems with light uh balancing, and one eye was brighter than the other. And I remember one theater we went to, they had a third of the image on the theater ceiling. I mean, it was just it was a mess. So again, it was an exhibition. And also technically, I have to say that the cinematographers in 1953, there were a lot of veterans, and these were people that went back in some cases to the silent era. They knew cinematography, some of them had stereo cameras. They knew how to compose for stereo in the 80s. No, it was kind of the Wild West. And all of the basic rules of comfortable stereo imagery were thrown out the window. Even in the best scenario, the films could be very hard on the eyes. I think that combined with the bad exhibition, it pretty much killed 3D again within a very short period, maybe, maybe two years, maybe three years.

SPEAKER_02 50:03

It was pretty much similar to the other one, where it was only a couple of years. I think 85, it was pretty much done by then. Do you think that part of that is that the studios back then were looking at 3D as a premium format because it would it was going to cost them more? So they spent more time with it as opposed to in the 80s, even the studio films were low budget films.

SPEAKER_04 50:21

I think most theaters at the time, if you look at it from an exhibition standpoint, kind of like a little mini technological burst that happens in the late 70s, starting to see the rise of the multiplex. A lot of theaters setting up for Dolby Stereo. That was the huge push between 77 and like 81, 82. Because it was, again, like CinemaScope, Dolby Stereo, it's on the print, it's not going to mess up if you if you set it up properly. And it's basically an all-in-one package that you can be guaranteed is going to work every time. Even more so than Mag Sound, which was the gold standard for stereophonic sound in movie theaters. Those tracks could still be compromised. Adolby stereo track is at the end of the day the same optical track that you would be running if you were running it in mono.

SPEAKER_03 51:11

Right.

SPEAKER_04 51:12

So stereo comes back, and you're also fighting two new things. First, which had been something that had been brewing since the 50s, is cable television that had been always considered enemy number one because that means now you can watch movies at home and new movies at home, and that means you don't need to go to the movie theater anymore to see it.

SPEAKER_02 51:35

And without commercial breaks. That's it.

SPEAKER_04 51:37

Without commercial breaks, yes, yeah. And then the other thing that gets forgotten, but was largely true, is that by 1980, 81, 82, home video is now completely prevalent, and many people have either VHS or beta tape recorders at home. And that means now they have their own collections of new movies. And even though the theatrical to video window is quite large still, quite significant, you can see that even crunching in even in the early 80s. So to have something that can stand out a little bit more like 3D or stereophonic sound, that was gonna make the big difference.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

I know you have a release coming out here shortly that was part of this boom, right? Hyperspace?

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Yeah, uh Hyperspace, uh directed by Todd Durham, produced by Earl Owensby at his studio in the Carolinas. A very fun movie, low budget, uh, but kind of a Star Wars spoof with the famous character Buckethead. Uh and it it's fun.

SPEAKER_02 52:40

Uh Buckethead ran for parliament in the 90s.

SPEAKER_01 52:45

As well, he should. I mean, why not? Uh uh we got to work directly with Todd. He was a pleasure. He had you know very specific ideas on how he wanted the film to look, and his team handled pretty much the the scanning and color grading, and uh Greg Kentz did the stereoscopic alignment. It looks good, it's a fun movie. Uh, there's a lot of bonus textures on that 3D Blu-ray release as well.

SPEAKER_02 53:10

Yeah, also a really underseen film. So, yeah, I think this will be a way to get it out there for people to actually see for many for the first time.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

That's true. I don't think it had uh many 3D play dates at all in 1984. There might have been some in the South where the Owensby films were strong in their presence, but that's about it. This is a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 53:30

It has a really fun aka too, grimloids.

SPEAKER_01 53:33

What's crazy looking at the overall picture here is you know, sometimes people, when a title is announced, they expect it sooner than later. And when you run into technical problems, as we did say with Money from Home, or you run into other unforeseen delays like we did with the bubble, release dates are not met. I always make the point that these films are gonna get probably one shot at 3D restoration. So let's take the time and do it right. Let's not cut corners. You want to restore the film in the best way possible. But now, all of a sudden, within a very short, like two-month window, we've got, you know, four releases coming out of things that have been, you know, out and back burnered for a very, very long time. So it's good to finally get this stuff out there, almost kind of clean the slate so that we can put 100% of our focus on Rarities 3 and focus on the next group of titles. People have a lot to look forward to with these current releases and things that are in the pipeline.

SPEAKER_02 54:35

Do you have anything that you can announce that you're working on other than we've already talked about rarities three?

SPEAKER_01 54:40

Uh yes. In fact, for the first time anywhere, we can publicly announce that there will be 3D Rarities Volume 4. A lot of cool stuff has turned up and things that I didn't expect to find. It's gonna be down the road a little bit because we want to get Rarities 3 finished and out the door. But I'm gonna optimistically say that we will be in a position to put up a Kickstarter for 3D Rarities Volume 4 by the end of this year with a release in 2027. Stay tuned for more information.

SPEAKER_02 55:15

Yeah, you also have something up right now, a Kickstarter that you're currently running, right?

SPEAKER_01 55:22

Well, yeah. Um, we dipped our toes into a different pool uh a year or two ago with our first book, our first graphic novel release, uh, which I just happened to have in my hand here.

SPEAKER_02 55:34

And I just happen to have that as well.

SPEAKER_01 55:37

Well, look at that. What a small world it is. Jack has the Kindle version.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

Yeah, he has the Kindle version.

SPEAKER_01 55:46

But it's a which no, there's not a Kindle. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. But but you know, Robot Monster was a fun project for all of us. We did it for the 70th anniversary. The Blu-ray is packed with two over two hours of bonus content, still available from Bayview Entertainment. So check that out if you don't have it yet. And this was well received for us. So we are right now on Kickstarter active with our next 3D book project, and it's called The Great Golden Age of 3D Comics. And we are going back to again the year 1953, when for a very brief window, 3D comics were the rage. And we've got stories from people like uh Joe Kubert, Jack Herbie, Bob Powell, Howard Nordstrom, Norman Maur, uh, some of the best talent that worked on 3D comics in that short window. And a brand new story from uh Carl Scheckel of Carlscomics.com, who's an amazingly talented young writer. He's doing wonderful things with comic books. So the Kickstarter campaign is live. The restorations, I have to say, Charles Barnard has developed some really advanced digital techniques to restore these vintage stories. You're gonna be seeing them better than ever before. If you go to the Kickstarter page, you'll see a before and after example from Captain 3D, the Jack uh Kirby 3D comic book.

SPEAKER_02 57:14

Oh as soon as you mentioned Jack Kirby, I'm I'm in. I'm all in on that one. If you like 3D, if you like comic books, this is for you. Go to Kickstarter, sign up now. All right, I have one more question before we close this. What is left that you haven't worked on? What is your unicorn project 3D wise?

SPEAKER_01 57:32

I think right now, if someone were to say, okay, we can give you one vintage title to restore, which one would you like to do? I'm gonna pick Southwest Passage because it's a Western that was photographed by Lothrop Worth in the natural vision. And Lothrop, in later interviews, said he felt it was his best work. It was released in uh the spring of 1954 and had very, very few 3D playdates. So not many people got to see it 72 years ago. Most significantly, though, up until about six or five or six years ago, it was lost in 3D. Only half of one eye existed. And thanks to the unending quest of Darren Gross at MGM Amazon, uh, they finally located the missing reels at an abandoned laboratory in Italy. The film survives in 3D now. And we came close to doing it a few years ago with Keno Harbor, and we hadn't been given the green light to announce it. But unfortunately, uh due to a licensing issue with MGM, it got pulled. So that one is still in limbo. But for a 1954 Golden Age 3D movie photographed in natural vision, I would love to see that one brought back to life and get it out there and restored. So that's my current wish list title.

SPEAKER_02 58:49

Well, all right, guys, thanks so much for joining me. This has been so much fun talking about 3D with you. I'm gonna include all the links to your Kickstarter and and things in the uh show notes. Thanks Sean Thrunk again for providing that clip for from his documentary. I will say goodbye until the next Geek Motif video. Thanks again, guys.

SPEAKER_01 59:09

Thanks, Adam. This was a pleasure.