ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
RE-MADE MAN
‘The Godfather’ Restoration
by Bill Desowitz
The Holy Grail for digital restoration is definitely 4K. The Godfather
and its indispensable sequel, The Godfather Part II, couldn't
have been saved without it. Thanks to an assist from Steven Spielberg,
who convinced Paramount Pictures to finance their full-digital restorations
along with the re-mastering of The Godfather: Part III, the
landmark Mafia saga arguably looks better than ever.
The result is The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration, available
on Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment September 23,
following a limited theatrical run in selected cities (the Castro
Theatre in San Francisco, September 5-11; Film Forum in New York,
September 12-October 2; the ArcLight Dome in Hollywood, September
19-25; and the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, October 3-16).
 Before Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
 After Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
"What took so long was waiting for technology to catch up with
need," asserts Robert Harris (Rear Window, Vertigo, Spartacus,
Lawrence of Arabia), the specialist tapped by director Francis
Ford Coppola to supervise the six-figure restoration project under
the guidance of Paramount post-production chief and Spielberg alumn
Martin Cohen. They worked for more than a year with Warner Bros. Motion
Picture Imaging (MPI), while Pro-Tek Preservation Services inspected
and stored all of the surviving film elements.
However, the damage was worse than Harris realized as a result of
decades of overuse and abuse. "What was left of the original
camera negative [OCN] had been severely overprinted," Harris
explains. "When we received the element, I believe that there
were only five or six shots in the first 20 minutes that were still
original. Virtually every splice was held together with mylar tape.
Tears went into image in hundreds of frames. Sections were totally
without perforations. The Godfather was shot on Eastman negative
5254, which has wonderful fade characteristics, and although it had
faded, it was still very, very correctible for color. Part II
was probably 75 percent better, as many more prints were made and
there wasn't the need to continually go back to the OCN."
The MPI team, led by technical director/senior colorist Jan Yarbrough
and Daphne Dentz, vice president of Digital Services, first scanned
the negative and other replacement cuts, imported the terabytes of
data into the computer system and then repaired, cleaned and color-corrected
every frame. In addition, MPI also made a complete set of 4K preservation
negatives, separation masters, and back-up data tapes for the trilogy.
"Because of the way The Godfather was shot––because
of the exposures, because of the black levels, because of the grain
structure––it really couldn't be done without working
entirely in 4K [the equivalent of film resolution]," Harris suggests.
"We harvested an image from the negative and everything and anything
under the sun, and put the picture together shot by shot."
"Around 60 percent of The Godfather negative was destroyed
or unusable, so we had to replace it with images from six different
kinds of elements, including CRIs and separations from CRIs,"
adds Yarbrough. "The biggest challenge was finding the replacements
for the damaged areas, going through all the replacements that we
could dig up, evaluating them for what the best fit was going to be,
and getting that element to blend in color-wise with the existing
camera negative it would literally be cut into."
 Before Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
 After Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
Although Coppola was not directly involved, he was always available
for suggestions. One adjustment was to the famous opening shot: "We
wanted the blacks to be truly black, and the first image of Bonasera
[Salvatore Corsitto] was to appear out of that," Coppola recalls.
Thus, the bulk of the aesthetic heavy lifting rested with Gordon Willis,
the trilogy's iconoclastic cinematographer. Known as the "Prince
of Darkness," Willis typically underexposed light to heighten
the mood of a scene and maintained strict control so his films couldn't
be brightened.
"The Godfathers were designed to have a kind of classic
retrospective look," Willis explains. "The lighting structure
came out of a need to present Marlon Brando properly as an aging,
monolithic Don. My choice was to use overhead lighting to enhance
Marlon's make-up; the only thing I wanted to hide on occasion was
his eyes. All the lighting came out of Marlon's need, but it worked
extremely well for everything else."
Unfortunately, Willis was unable to travel to LA from Massachusetts,
so he led them through the basic design telephonically, with one imperative:
Do not dial out the grain structure. Cinematographer and Spielberg
alum Allen Daviau (E.T.) was therefore recruited as a liaison.
"Allen can see a quarter point difference from shot to shot,"
Harris notes. Daviau particularly helped in defining the color black.
"You have to realize that it isn't simply black," Harris
adds. "For example, the wedding scene was shot to look like 1940s
Anscochrome, along with its inherent tendency to sometimes be overexposed,
which in reversal means totally open whites."
For color, Willis chose an innovative combination of brassy yellow
and warm red that he maintained throughout the trilogy. "If you
notice," he added, "I change the visual quality throughout
Part II. There's a clarity in the 1950s that isn't there
in the turn of the century work, which had a softer, more diffused
look; keeping the color constant binds the entire tapestry together."
The most telling enhancement, oddly enough, was to The Godfather's
pivotal restaurant sequence in which Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)
guns down Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden).
Due to a printing error, half of it looks like a "Xerox of a
Xerox of a Xero," according to Harris .
 Before Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
 After Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
"The story behind that scene is quite interesting," he
recalls. "When Joanne Lawson, my long-time assistant, and I were
going over both recent prints as well as a 1972 print shot by shot
and frame by frame, we noted major problems in the sequence––many,
many dupes––and called Gordon. We explained what we were
seeing, and he became momentarily silent. He then broke into an interesting
grouping of expletives, and explained that the shoot had been over
two nights. Both were planned to have the dailies pushed by the lab.
The first night came back fine, but with the second––which
is inclusive of all footage after Al exits the men's room, as well
as the cutaways to Sterling Hayden and a few long shots––the
lab forgot to push it, and it came back very, very thin. Gordon switched
labs. Technicolor Hollywood did yeoman-like work in producing dupes
to attempt to match the footage.
"This was one sequence that we held to the very end of the restoration,”
continues Harris, “as we had Pro-Tek inspection technician Joe
Caracappa looking through hundreds of cans from which we could attempt
to harvest a better image and the sequence finally looks as it should.
You can really see the tension on Michael's face for the first time."
Another challenge was figuring out what stock to print on: Eastman
Vision or Vision Premier. "We went ‘round and ‘round
and did several tests and finally left the decision up to Francis,
who said to go with Premier because he really liked the deep blacks,"
Yarbrough says. "I get amazed with the digital tools that we
have––we use Baselight––and that we're able
to take the same negative and work some magic here and get a better
looking image than what Gordon could, photo-chemically, with the right
densities and image resolution."
Surprisingly, Harris, the film purist, has been won over by the digital
cinema version: "Higher resolution, steadier image, and blacks
that come quite close. A beautiful image overall."
Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld (www.vfxworld.com), part of Animation World Network (www.awn.com). He can be reached at bill@awn.com.
Editor’s Note: This is the first of two online exclusive stories on digital restoration of classic films. Look for a piece on How the West Was Won to be posted September 4.