Universal blaze burns classic prints

Festivals, arthouses reeling after backlot fire

By MARC GRASER, ANNE THOMPSON

Some movies made it. Others were lost in the fire.

That's what bookers are discovering while trying to determine whether they'll get to screen the classic films they intended to show at repertory theaters, film festivals, museums and college campuses in the wake of Universal's backlot fire.

U's film vault, which was damaged in the June 1 blaze, housed more than 1,000 prints, including many of U's classic horror movies, and films from directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges, as well as early Marx Bros. and Marlene Dietrich pics.

It also included libraries bought by the studio, such as classics produced by Paramount between 1929 and 1949. Prints from the Gramercy, October and Polygram shingles were housed there.

The loss of Charles Boyer's 1941 classic "Hold Back the Dawn" will hurt a three-week retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July, although courtroom drama "A Woman's Vengeance" survived the blaze.

Those that had ordered prints from U to play in August and in the fall included Facets Cinematheque and the Gene Siskel Film Center, respectively, both in Chicago. Arthouses like the Film Forum in New York, which had a Sturges fest in the works, are also affected, as is L.A.'s Cinecon, which runs over Labor Day weekend at the Egyptian. In the past, U supplied 40% of the classic film fest's schedule. The Castro in San Francisco, the Brattle in Boston and Cleveland's Cinematheque are also hit.

U confirmed that prints of "Flash Gordon," "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" and "Out of Africa" had gone up in smoke.

But it was unclear whether a print of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" was spared from the fire; the Museum of Modern Art's film department had just shipped it back to U after screening it at a recent jazz series.

But there is some good news. In Los Angeles, planned screenings of Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter" and "Breezy," for example, were on schedule for the June 6 weekend at the American Cinematheque's Aero and Egyptian Theaters because booked prints were delivered by Deluxe, unaffected by the fire.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science's James Stewart tribute will take place June 12 because U was able to find prints. "They had different prints in different places," an Academy staffer says.

The Cinematheque's July's screening of Dorothy Lamour starrers "Her Jungle Love" and "Aloma of the South Seas" also will unspool on schedule, but "Weird Science" had to be canceled because the print was destroyed, and a restrospective of fantasy, horror and sci-fi pics in August had to be reskedded because of losses.

Chicago's Music Box Theater was able to avoid canceling its showing of the 1932 musical "Love Me Tonight" on the June 8 weekend; the print of the Par pic had left the U lot just days before the fire. A July screening of "Vertigo" is also safe because the 70mm print of the Hitchcock pic was waiting elsewhere on the lot to be shipped to another theater.

All the prints were insured and no negatives were torched. The studio said it will produce new prints of the movies, with each expected to cost around $5,000, but they'll take months to produce. Few film labs are equipped to handle archived material. The first to be reproduced will be prints that were supposed to ship over the next six months.

"Nothing was lost that, for some amount of money, can't be replaced," says the American Cinematheque's director Barbara Smith.