For film historians, their are a number of cinematic Holy Grails that we continue to hope will be discovered one day in some dusty, dark corner of a film archive – lost silent films such as London After Midnight and the original nine-hour cut of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed or films that were edited down from their original length like George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954) or Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) where the original ct footage had been lost or outright destroyed.
And then there are the Holy Grails for things that we do have copies of but still need, the chief among them is the original camera negative for Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane.
Now some of you may be asking, “What are you talking about? Citizen Kane isn’t a lost film.” And if you have a half-decent physical media collection you are adding “I have a copy right over there on my DVD/blu-ray shelf.”
True but that copy, no matter what format you may have it on, does not look as good as it potential could and that is because the film’s original camera negative – the actual film that ran through cinematographer Gregg Toland’s camera during film – has been lost. And while the various home video releases have done fairly good jobs presenting the film’s groundbreaking and stylistic cinematography, those releases have been working from material generations removed from the original camera negative meaning that they are subject to the subtle and compounding issue of image degradation the further away they get from the original negative.
In the case of Citizen Kane, it was widely thought that the original camera negative for the film was lost in a lab fire in the 1970s, though some held out the hope that perhaps there had been a some sort of mistake, and that the negative was just waiting to be rediscovered.
(Welles seemed to have an inordinate amount of bad luck when it came to his films. In addition to the loss of the camera negative from Citizen Kane, his second feature The Magnificent Ambersons was taken from him, had approximately an hour of footage cut and new scenes shot. The 30 minutes of footage cut by the studio from his 1946 noir The Stranger has also disappeared into the mists of time. Welles’ 1998 film Touch Of Evil was similarly re-edited by the studio, although in this case, the director’s original intentions for the film was restored in 1998 based on a series of notes that the late director had left. His final film, The Other Side Of The Wind, had to wait over thirty years before legal hurdles could be cleared in order for it to be completed and released.)
This weekend, writer and Numb3rs co-creator Nicolas Falacci revealed on twitter that the Citizen Kane camera negative did not perish in a negative fire. Falacci was working at a New York City film restoration lab when studio RKO contracted them at their start of preparation for a new restoration of the film for it’s upcoming 50th anniversary when he learned of the negative’s possible fate.
But let’s let Falacci tell the story himself –
My long-awaited (by two people) CITIZEN KANE story:
After NYU, I was working in a film restoration lab in NYC. It had two employees. Me. And a crazy, secretive Yugoslavian chemist that had devised a treatment that could remove most scratches from film.
THREAD pic.twitter.com/WmNpJNygOi
— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
—cartoons so odious in their racial content you’ll never see them broadcast again. The original financiers of the Coen Bros brought in their early dupe negatives of Blood Simple to clean up. We restored the entire collection of Josephine Baker movies. And much to my delight
3/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
Then one day film cans began to arrive. Lots of them. Pallets stacked with canisters of prints. Boxes and boxes full of dupe negatives and fine grain masters. We were stacking it all right up to the ceiling. And it was my job to go through all of it … ALL of it …
5/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
-of American film art: Citizen Kane.
I was confused. Why was what seemed to be every single lab and print element of Citizen Kane doing stacked like a Great Wall of cinema behind my inspection desk? And why was there this older RKO executive showing up every day—
7/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
And this RKO man seemed to be incredibly anxious about that task. It was like … he *knew* I wouldn’t find any pristine prints. Or dupes. Or FGMs.
And I did not.
Reel after reel had problems.
Deep emulsion scratches. Negative dirt. Missing frames. Poor sound.
9/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
Just so you know … the phone rarely ever rang in the lab. We were in the Film Center building in Hell’s Kitchen. Most of the major labs were in the building. Most work walked in the door.
Now … the phone was ringing. All day.
But every time I opened a fresh box— 11/
— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
The blacks were not black. Not deep. Or the shadows were too black, too contrasting.
And the RKO man began to show up each day looking more frayed and desperate.
More people started to show up. Technicians from Technicolor. Fotokem. Other labs. This was a big deal.
13/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
I had been instructed to simply grab the best of what there was regardless of the element. Print, dupe negative, fine grain master. Mix and match. I did the best I could. Much of it was decent. But I could not find a replacement for one 6 second section. A section—
15/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
I went to see how it looked. The six seconds of brutal emulsion scratches were still there.
A week later, one of the lab techs who had helped came by and I brought up the issue. Why wasn’t there a pristine copy? Why was RKO man so upset? WHERE was the camera negative? 17/
— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
STILL to this day, no really good “pristine” HD or 4K master exists. The newest “pristine” master out there was cobbled together from private collection prints, masters and dupes. Slate did a piece on it. 19/https://t.co/HiTdVYhziE
— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021
The problem is … I think someone did. But it’s what he did with the camera negative that’s a problem.
See, when that lab tech came by a week after the release of the 50th anniversary and I asked him again about what was going on with the RKO executive … he looked at me—
21/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 27, 2021
And now he dropped his voice down a whole other level of volume. “—a reclamation plant.”
The confusion on my face led him to be more specific. “By mistake … he sent it to a *silver* reclamation plant.”
The tech arched his eyebrows and then pantomimed zipping his lips.
23/— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 27, 2021
… I hate to say it, but the odds are this will never happen.
The odds are this story is likely true. And Welles’ and Toland’s camera original negative was destroyed in a silver reclamation plant that strips the silver that used to be in the emulsion of older films.
-end- pic.twitter.com/8q24ZwctFY— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 27, 2021
—what a truly *pristine* 35mm Fine Grain Master from that era looks like … one struck from the camera original … it’s hard to convey how beautiful the image is. What we see when we put on the 4K Blu-ray DVD of the current Kane issue is quite nice.
Ep2
— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 27, 2021
—an inkling just how magnificent Greg Toland’s cinematography was. Fine grain masters of the era and restored frame stills from Kane reveal that trying to understand how beautiful his Kane work was is like if Toland was shooting HD and we’re viewing it in standard def. Ep4
— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 27, 2021
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