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Rediscovering The
Cameraman
Richard P. May, Vice President, Film Services, Turner Entertainment Co
The Cameraman is a movie that was almost lost.
In 1928, Buster Keaton entered into a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
to make his new pictures for that studio. This picture was the first under that agreement,
and his next to last silent film. According to Kevin Brownlow in his book on the silent
film The Parade's Gone By, The Cameraman was MGM's training film
for comedians, and it was obligatory for anyone working on a comedy to see it.
MGM was the first, and probably the most
thorough, of the major studios to transfer everything photographed on nitrate film to
safety stock, starting a major project to do this in the late 1960s. The work eventually
covered an almost twenty year period, and cost over $30,000,000. Everything was converted,
no matter how obscure. The Cameraman, however, only existed on safety
film in very poor condition. In researching the Turner Entertainment Co. files, which were
pat of the original MGM records, I found a purchase order from 1968 to the laboratory to
'make a dupe negative, using French print as a finegrain. This obviously meant that
nothing original existed ' and copying a projection print found in France was the only way
to preserve the picture. Nothing survives to explain what happened to the original
negative, but it can be assumed that it was subject to nitrate decomposition or was lost
in a major vault fire in Culver City around that time.
Adding to the mystery was the fact that producer Robert Youngson
included scenes from The Cameraman in his 1972 compilation MGM's
Big Parade of Comedy, and the quality of these excerpts was excellent.
In early 1991 I received a call from David Shepherd, a longtime film
historian who now teaches in the Cinema Department of the University of Southern
California. Mr Shepherd also runs a laboratory, and distributes pictures to which he
acquires the rights. He had recently purchased an uncatalogued collection of material from
the Youngson estate, assuming that it was all in the public domain. While inventorying the
collection, he found an almost complete fine grain master positive of The
Cameraman. He imagines that MGM supplied it to Youngson in order to duplicate the
sections used in Big Parade of Comedy, as those sections were among the
missing footage. Apparently it was made from the original negative before its
disappearance. Turner Entertainment purchased this fine grain from Mr Shepherd, and
proceeded to make the best possible restoration.
The newly obtained fine grain, together with the sections of the
compilation film and the poor quality negative, were put in the hands of Film Technology
Co. in Hollywood to use the best parts of each to make a new duplicate negative. It will
be used both for manufacturing new prints and mastering to videotape for later home video
and television distribution ...
Since reel one was missing from the Youngson copy, this print still
reflects the damage duplicated from the French print. Ten minutes into the picture you
will see a remarkable change in clarity, where the new restoration begins. The baseball
park scenes are still from the old negative, and there is a three minute section missing
in reel three, where Keaton photographed the launching of a ship. This does not have any
effect on the storyline, but a rather clumsy transition to the swimming pool sequence is
evident.
We don't know how many other supposedly lost films may reside in
unidentified vaults round the world. Still not known to survive are the 1927 Lon Chaney
film London After Midnight, Greta Garbo's The Divine Woman
and the 1930 Technicolor musical The Rogue Song, with Lawrence Tibbett.
With luck, these and others may yet turn up. |
