Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder's sublime 1950 film noir masterpiece, starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, and Eric von Stroheim is finally coming to blu-ray on Nov 6. The disc will carry over the extensive special features from the 2-disc Centennial DVD release (an audio commentary and around 2 hours of documentary material) and offer new exclusive content, including a never-before-released deleted musical number.
Sunset Boulevard is the story of Joe Gillis (Holden), a hack screenwriter hired by has-been silent movie star Norma Desmond (Swanson, a real life starlet of early Hollywood) to write her career comeback. Gillis, who's deep in debt, retreats to Desmond's dilapidated mansion on the famed Sunset Blvd, where he begins to work closely--perhaps too closely--with her on the film they eventually want to make. There, Joe meets Norma's ex-husband-turned-butler, the famed silent movie director Max Von Mayerling (von Stroheim, who, like Swanson, was a staple of the early silver screen; he directed Greed, one of the longest films, silent or otherwise, ever shot) and soon discovers that, much like the mansion, Norma's mind is slowly decaying, driven mad by a desire to have just one more moment in the spotlight.
Apparently, the film has been remastered from the "best available 35mm elements" and scanned at 4K resolution, and will be presented in the original 1.37:1 black-and-white format in which it was photographed. The restored soundtrack, again taken from the best elements, will be presented in lossless TrueHD mono. (Basically, if you don't understand the technobable, and who does, what that means is, well... good things.)
I'm very interested in seeing how this all works out, on the technical front especially, because...
Like a lot of movies in the era (actually, this was changing, but true of a fair few films into the early 50s), Sunset Boulevard was shot on nitrate film stock, which, when improperly stored, deteriorates almost exponentially. It's also the stuff that liked to blow up; or, at least, catch fire really easily--like that part in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds--which is why most movies made after 1950 switched to the newer, less volatile, triacetate (negative) or polyester (intermediate, release print) stocks. Sunset was right on the cusp of this transition and was made using the more flammable nitrate. Unfortunately, film preservation wasn't even an idea on a large scale until the 1980s--some 30 years after the cans of Wilder's masterpiece were put into storage--and only then because the studios finally realized they should probably take care of their property, seeing as how it was suddenly profitable again on the VHS and Beta-Max markets.
By the time VHS and Beta battled it out and the JVC-backed VHS won, the negative of Sunset Boulevard was beyond repair; the original camera negative was too far-gone after years of neglect, to the point where it can ever be used again for anything. That particular element will never be able to be restored.
Fortunately for most films, duplicate elements a mere generation away from the negative usually exist somewhere--for some reason, they're usually found in a salt mine in the desert. Better still, for many films, if they were shot on nitrate, at least some of their dupes were done on the less-flammable, and more easily preservable, triacetate. This was done specifically for safe storage.
This is what happened to Citizen Kane, the original camera negative of which was, for years, thought lost (destroyed by the tire company that bought the shell that was RKO Pictures in the late 1950s), only to have a considerable amount of the original negative and even more of a pristine safety-stock duplicate found in deep storage. Kane has been remastered, and restored, quite impressively using a combination of these film elements, and is available in a rather nice looking package on blu-ray. Other films, like the original King Kong, which did have all of its original 35mm elements (even the first generation dupes) destroyed by that same tire company, aren't as lucky. And what we get now with a film like Kong is something grainer, grittier, less detailed, taken from second or third generation duplicates, with more damage and less image density. These films, without an OCN to remaster from, don't look nearly as good as they should, and although the King Kong blu-ray is easily the best the film has looked it years, it's quite unimpressive to the naked, untrained, eye.
But, as John Logan wrote in Scorsese's Hugo last year, time hasn't been kind to old movies. And at least these less-pristine versions of Kong and Kane still exist. Sadly, the same can't be said for other titles. Entire films have been lost to time because of poor preservation; perhaps ironically, the full 10 hour version of Eric von Stroheim's Greed mentioned earlier is lost forever.
But in the particular case of Sunset Boulevard, something weird happened. There's really no other way to say it. Weird is what it is. Despite its popularity upon release, and Academy Award winning status, somehow most of the duplicate prints--some nitrate, others triacetate--disappeared in the years between the original release and the mid-80s and early 90s when the archivists came a-knockin'. And the negative, well, it was an improperly stored nitrate element. It fell apart. What they found in the place of viable elements of respectable quality were the few acetate duplicate prints that still existed, but had essentially been savagely raped for over those 40 years, continually subjected to the wear of supplying more and more second and third generation dupe and release prints.
Each time a film is duped, the source element deteriorates. Usually, the many first generation prints made upon initial release will be the ones subjected to this process, a thousand times over for the rest of eternity, while the negative survives relatively unharmed, presumably in safe storage, only tapped to make a new inter-positive (or first gen dupe) from time to time.
Because the original negative of Sunset was improperly stored, it deteriorated too severely to be viable and so one of the few dupes still in existence basically became the new source on which all versions, from theatrical revival to home video, have been based. A negative, but not actually a negative, you might say. Because of this, Sunset Blvd looked awful until about 2002, when a massive undertaking by Paramount brought the film back from the dead using new digital restoration technology, by erasing much of the damage on the various surviving first and second generation elements cobbled together to form the new DVD presentation. A new master element, using the best possible portions of the various duplicate sources, was created by scanning the film at 2K into computer files, or a Digital Intermediate (DI). Lowry Digital and Paramount then processed the 2K DI with their tools, before putting it back out to 35mm film, resulting in the version we have today. The DVDs look pretty good, at least considering the history, and the fact that the film is sourced from what amounts to a celluloid hybrid.
Supposedly, the blu-ray has had even more work done and should look even better, and from the wording of the press release, it seems that a better triacetate element may have been found and used in this new, 4K, remaster. I hope so.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this disc ends up getting less-favorable scores from those not in the know. I imagine the increase in resolution will only make the imperfections of the Frankenstein-monster-esque source all the more noticeable. Still, digital tools have progressed rapidly in the 10 years since the first Paramount restoration. Maybe some magic will get Sunset Boulevard looking like it did 62 years ago, or close to it. Regardless, the blu-ray is without a doubt going to be the best version most of us without 35mm projectors (and access to a quality dupe print), or lucky enough to have seen it in initial release and still remember that, have ever seen.
Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard streets on November 6, with an MSRP of $26.99, and will include the following special features:
- Commentary by Ed Sikov, author of On Sunset Blvd: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder
- Sunset Boulevard: The Beginning
- Sunset Boulevard: A Look Back
- The Noir Side of Sunset Boulevard
- Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic
- Two Sides of Ms. Swanson
- Stories of Sunset Boulevard
- Mad About the Boy: A Portrait of William Holden
- Recording Sunset Boulevard
- The City of Sunset Boulevard
- Franz Waxman and the Music of Sunset Boulevard
- Morgue Prologue
- Script Pages
- Deleted Scene—"The Paramount-Don't-Want-Me Blues" (HD)
- Hollywood Location Map
- Behind the Gates: The Lot
- Edith Head: The Paramount Years
- Paramount in the '50s
- Galleries:
- Production
- The Movie
- Publicity
- Theatrical Trailer (HD)
