Hello!

I’m taking a pass on column entries today. The distraction of ‘larger world issues’ makes it hard to concentrate on our favorite pastime. This page’s readership comes here for escape, not to hear too many personal opinions. So we’ll proceed when this particular funk goes away. Don’t be concerned, I’m not the depressive type. Let us hope for the best.

We’re working on a book review and voting in the OFCS this week. I will do my best to concentrate on civilized values and common courtesy. Thanks very much for the notes and corrections; I’m grateful for my modest group of correspondent-friends. The comments on the reviews are becoming more constructive as well. I’ll try to contribute more responses to them.

Hasta el sábado… ¡ten coraje, sudamericanos!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Welcome to 2026 and a Brave New World …. this is the year in which Fritz Lang set  Metropolis, after all. We almost have flying cars and we definitely have big companies that grind up people. The dystopian developments we most fear are becoming more difficult to describe, let alone depict in a movie.

As we always take the easy way out, we therefore look back to the year 1955, to admire a pretty nifty YouTube promo for the big-format camera process Todd AO, posted by ‘marlbrouk’.

Presented in a ‘Smilebox’ format (here called ‘Ultra-Curve’), the 12-minute promo is a sampler of the 65mm film process, showing that it replicates the ‘enveloping’ effect of Cinerama without the cumbersome 3 screens and 3 projectors. It’s from an  Oklahoma! Blu-ray release; it may have been shown before some 1955 screenings of Oklahoma!  Could the neon-decked theater we see be the Egyptian on Hollywood Blvd?

Those Todd AO lenses were pretty incredible. Although the 30 fps version of Oklahoma! was a one-shot experiment, it sure looks good … and was incredible on a big screen.

(I have to say, I’m getting pretty fed up with forced ads on YouTube …)

Another link of note comes from Gary Teetzel — an informative video featurette about vintage Fin de siècle Flip Books, odd little publications from 125 years ago.

These are photographic movies printed on paper to flip with one’s thumbs … I remember spending afternoons as a teenager doing animated mini-cartoons in the margins of books, at least until my teacher caught me.

The theme of this discussion / show ‘n’ tell is finding bits of Georges Méliès movies in these flip books. Some fragments may be from films that are considered lost. ‘Re-animating’ the flip books without destroying them involved some clever cinematographic techniques. The speakers are International Scholars Robert Byrne and Thierry Lecointe; the host is Pamela Hutchinson, who so impressed us that we featured her smile instead of an image of a flip book. We’re bent that way.

The presentation was part of the 2021 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and begins with a Nosferatu– themed video promo. The speakers talk about the ‘Flip Book’ book that was generated from their research …  which I found here.

Scrolling down a bit further, we find about 30 fully recovered, restored and annotated flip book fragments, complete with mini-soundtracks. And since we like Pamela Hutchinson’s approach to film art, here is her  book on G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s our last column before the New Year … are we ready for 2026, a year that to me seems far, far in the Future?  Well, who is ready for anything any more?  The best of luck for everyone, is what we’re hoping for.

We start with a happy report about a 70mm revival. We have friends who work for companies that take care of studio film libraries, and oversee remasters and sometimes restorations. It’s not something that I write about because I don’t want to ask too many questions — everything they’re doing is proprietary information, which we all know is sacred.

Well in this instance I’m free to call out a friend who has worked hard and long on restorations of some pretty important pictures.

An article at Variety covers the restoration — in 70mm — of the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. It’ll be screened at the Academy Museum a few weeks from now in January, introduced by both George Stevens Jr. and Guillermo Del Toro.

The special news is that Variety reporters Jazz Tangcay, Payton Turkeltaub and Giana Levy call out Amazon MGM as the initiator of the restoration, which included an 8K scan of the original 65mm Ultra Panavision negative. They name the people behind the project — work that too often remains anonymous: Schawn Belston, Scott Grossman and Darren Gross.

I met Darren 28 years ago and have watched his career with interest. The only previous opportunity to call out one of his achievements was when he found and remastered an important group of outtakes for  Blue Velvet.  David Lynch was all but ecstatic — he’d been looking for them for decades. The article carries more information about the 70mm screening.

The generous web researcher Michael McQuarrie has found yet another page that pegs our juvenile interests — a site by a UK graphic designer who has an incredible volume of 007 paraphernalia on display. I couldn’t find his name on the page.

Michael wanted me to see the Record Album vault — it was practically my whole album collection in 1967. The page has giant photo files of toys, games, cars, model kits, figurines and guns; other galleries give us trading cards, badges and stickers, plus publicity promos, banners, standees and displays.

Yet more pages give us an impressive set of photos of the graphic designer visiting Bond 007 locations. The basic front page:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Happy two days after Christmas. You think your day was special — I got new bath towels … to replace a set so frayed, you’d think an animal had torn them. The nice thing is that it felt like a real treat. Correspondent “B” in New York sent me a fancy Big Apple coffee cup, and a compendium book of Nancy comics. My granddaughter is just old and patient enough to maybe enjoy them with me, the next time we get together. So no complaints here.

What’s with the images of Lon Chaney?  The one on the left might be an AI generated ‘almost’ image of the great silent actor. We’re being flooded with interesting AI experiments; this week Gary Teetzel forwarded links to two parallel features touting ‘restorations’ of the lost horror thriller London After Midnight.

The first is from Sci-Fi N Horror A Go Go, with the title

It clocks in at 43 minutes. The second, from Bakémon: Japanese Monster Legends is called

and is 46 minutes in duration. They are curious exercises that grossly misuse the word restored. We immediately think of the disc companies that identify the cosmetic fixes they put on bad copies of movies, as ‘restorations.’  What the AI programs do is indeed impressive. Given a stack of high quality production stills plus the text of old intertitles, each AI experimenter has cobbled together what I would call a clever ‘enhanced photo novel’ narrative.

It’s truly amazing how dimensional motion is created from still images. We see attractive but mostly static images that rely far too much on inter-titles to tell a story. As the original production stills mostly pose characters in sets, standing next to each other, that’s mainly what the individual shots show.

Most of the action on view is conveyed via push-in and pull-out trucking motions, that have little connection with the way most silent films look. One of the AI presentations uses a few dissolves between shots, something even less associated with the silent era. Fake digital ‘film damage’ scratches and dirt here and there, a real ‘fan made’ giveaway.

The experiments are interesting to see, and too easy to criticize. Every so often we see something clever, but in most shots characters just ‘hover’ in motion. Sometimes they appear to move in reverse. It’s like a slightly vivified slide show.

Why are we not ecstatic about the possibilities of AI in visual media?  The idea that a lost film could be recovered this way is simply dangerous to cultural history. With more clever ‘borrowing’ of from other movies, one could probably concoct a bogus London After Midnight that would fool many viewers. We are already seeing completely bogus videos that can fool experts.  AI could be the end of movies, and the political possibilities are much worse.

Michael McQuarrie found this 1970 publicity piece produced by Hammer Films, promoting actress Victoria Vetri and Val Guest’s  When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. It begins with clips of Hammer’s offices just off Piccadilly Circus.

Sir James Carreras is fronted as the big name; the questionable voiceover identifies him as the ‘discoverer’ of Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch. We see a quick blip of (I think) Aida Young, the real producer of When Dinosaurs. We get a bit of behind the scenes footage, and some abbreviated shots of Jim Danforth dinosaurs that include a random shot from the 1960  The Lost World. Is the Ms. Vetri-versus-Snake scene in the completed film?  I don’t remember. [Note, 12.28.25: Bill Shaffer remembers … and says that both the snake scene and the Lost World stock shot are in the finished film…]

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Happy holidays! We wish we had some warm & fuzzy seasonal discs to promote, but we’re still dealing with residual fantasy releases from Halloween. We hope you’re among the lucky folk surviving the weather, the politics and the general state of the world. Thanks for all the notes, comments and corrections this year.

Oh yes, the first link … This ad piece for a disc company has already received a lot of circulation, but we wanted the link to be recorded at CineSavant as well. It’s a Joe Dante plug for Severin Films that’s edging toward viral status. Several readers tipped us to it, correspondent Phil Edwards being the first.

The extended video piece riffs on Criterion’s notion of a special closet where sticky-fingered celebs get to ‘shop’ for their most desired discs. Joe doesn’t bring a shopping basket, but instead pulls titles off the wall, to wax enthusiastic over their contents, or simply to praise The House of Gregory for going to the trouble to release something obscure.

Joe Dante is a great host, as usual. He’s the whole show. Severin spins the opportunity into a potent sales & image piece.

Plus, we proudly finish off our Parade of Notable Discs for 2025, adding to the group of titles we billboarded for the first half of the year. The presentation always reminds me to think “I didn’t get to see all of that one,” and follow that thought with, “Now can I find it in my messy shelves?”

Actually, we just like to see all the disc covers spread out in one place, like toys in an old Spiegel’s Christmas catalog.

The image just above  ↑  is another random shelf from the impossible archives at CineSavant Central … This time I’ve zeroed in on the Musicals department. The shelves are all two discs deep. That’s a lot of Warner Archive and Twilight Time product up front … I guess the older, more unusual titles are in the back row. Somewhere else we’ve got a couple of large boxes of older musical DVDs. I don’t toss them, in case they suddenly become ridiculously valuable. Someday I can finance my bid to conquer the world, Moo-ah-hah-hah-hah.

The ‘favored’ titles for All of 2025 are below. Good grief, there are some real favorites here, incredibly good movies. I could watch any of these, any time. Each image is a link to the corresponding review.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson