Invaders from Mars | Scott MacQueen

My name is Amanda Salazar. I am a programmer with UCLA Film and Television Archive and welcome to the Billy Wilder Theater. Before we begin, as a land grant institution, the film and television archive at UCLA would like to acknowledge our presence on the traditional, ancestral, and unseated territory of the Gabriellino and Tongva peoples. We are humbled to do work in this community. We would like to thank a few individuals and organizations have helped us make tonight's screening possible for without them we would not be able to do what we do. All of the archive screenings in the Wilder are free thanks to a gift by an anonymous donor and we're grateful for their support. This screening has been made possible by the Hugh M. Hefner classic American film program. And special thanks to Ignite Films and Yan William Bosman Jansen for their support and collaboration on the screening. And finally, I would like to thank our motion picture curator at UCLA, Todd Winer, and tonight's team who's going to make this show run so well, Lauren Brown, our house manager, and Jim Smith in projection. So, thank you to all of those individuals and organizations. Invaders from Mars was restored by Ignite Films in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, George Eastman Museum, and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. It is a timeless science fiction thriller from 1953. And in fact, the film premiered on this day, April 9th, 70 years ago. So, right, very special screening. It actually also just was told it played um in New York this morning. So, we got a little by coastal thing going. Um so, and while there have been remakes of this film, as uh you know, good films tend to have, this film is really incomparable. Not only will the anxious paranoid tone of this film keep you riveted, prepare yourself for the beauty of the cinematography here by John F. Sites, a collaborator with Billy Wilder on such films as Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard with direction by the acclaimed production designer William Cameron Menses. This film is truly a treat for the eyes and us getting to see this film as such in such exceptional quality is due to the tremendous work of our special guests that I would like to now introduce. Scott McQueen has had quite the career in film. Uh first and foremost, he is someone that is enamored with cinema. He began his career as a production assistant and assistant director for 10 years working on commercials, music videos, lowbudget features, and some TV. He then had a 31-year career in film preservation, including almost 11 years at UCLA as the head of preservation at the archive. Invaders from Mars was featured for its excellence in restoration at the Turner Classic Movies Festivals and it received the inaugural Hollywood Professional Association Award for Restoration and Preservation. I'm honored to invite back to the stage at the archive our very special guest who will be leading a presentation on the lengthy and special process of restoring this film. So, please join me in welcoming Scott McQueen. [Laughter] Thank you, Amanda. Don't any of you have an Easter roll to go to today? And boy, I'm delighted by the turnout on a holiday Sunday night. Welcome. And uh here we are ready to meet the invaders from Mars 70 years after their first landing. The picture opened in uh Detroit, Michigan on this date in 1953 and the uh capitol was a picture palace that opened in 29 seated 3500 people. Uh the building is still there only now it's the Detroit uh opera house and it's where operas are staged. This was a very interesting project, one we had tried for a long while. Let me make sure I get this right. There we go. It's a project that we'd hoped to do at UCLA, but uh there were some political difficulties that prevented it happening at that time. Uh we'll talk a bit more about those later. A boy becomes a man when a man is needed is the basic theme of the John Steinbeck short story flight and it essentially is the theme of this picture. It was filmed in 1953 at the height of the science fiction film boom and at the height of the first big UFO flat in America. Uh 1952 was the year that the saucers were seen over Washington DC and made front page news everywhere. The movie uh parlays that and the Korean war cold war paranoia that was engulfing America in the anti-communist days. It it teaches if anything to the uh to the to the viewer to the audience don't trust authority and uh it does this by way of dream logic. Whoops. The picture was uh photographed on Kodak 5248 color negative. That was a brand new stock, the second generation of Eastman color negative um which was introduced in 1950 by Kodak and it um gave the serious challenge to the Tetacolor 3 strip process which was very cumbersome. However, uh Senakolor was a rival of Technicolor uh commercially though they didn't approach them for their success or their size. But the threecolor senol which was called super sinol had just been evolved to compete both with Eastman color positive and with tacticolor. Sakol had been a twocolor orange red and blue green process up to that point. Very popular in westerns and lowbudget pictures. Now the printing process for the super center color process was to make red, blue, green positive separations from the Eastman color negative and then make YCM black and white dupe negatives from those fine grains, those master positives. So at that point you've emulated the taking negative of the uh tentacolor process. However, the negatives weren't complete. They did not contain any of the titles or the optical effects, dissolves and uh fadeins, fade outs. Those were created as original three strip dupes and then cut into the uh threecolor negative for printing. When it came time to make the prints, colorblind black and white positive emulsions on both sides of the film, it was duplicatized stock were impregnated with the water-soluble yellow dye and then the the print was step printed cyan and magenta simultaneously on either side of the dupletized Dupont stock along with the cyan where the the soundtrack which would be uh printed in cyan. And the dupletized Dupont stock captured the latent black and white images which were then developed into silver. The cyan laid face down on a solution that converted the soundtrack into a cyan tone pigment. And on the other side it was floated on a on a uh a bath that turned the latent silver to a magenta pigment. the the yellow dye was then exposed in in a separate pass on top and uh in a very complex process you wound up with a threecolor print. Duplicize stock has one problem which is which side of the film do you focus on the front or the back? So it tends to be soft. Why did the film become lost? Well, again, as I say, the titles and opticals were assembled on the the Senate color printing dupes, which either don't exist or are or were actually, I believe, spirited away uh from the archive many years ago by a lency who was granted a uh a license to make pre to make prints for his territory and then refused refused to return anything he had borrowed following the death of the original depositor. Within a year, the original facilities had to be recut as well to accommodate the 10 minutes of new scenes for the foreign market. after it was shown to exhibitors to trade exhibitors, uh they insisted that Albertson make uh a longer film and changed the ending because they claimed that European audiences did not like the dream ending that the film had. So the Eastman color negative became redundant. Everything printed off of the uh three the YCM dupes. Albertson went bankrupt by 1956 as did Syncolor who were acquired by Ansco and uh got out of the film business. The prime elements were scattered and that the lency did not return the elements he borrowed. Um the sad thing is um the lency died not too many months ago. He certainly would have been aware of our activity, but uh it would have been nice to have had the dish eaten cold that we could have shown to him. It turned out that he didn't have the rights he claimed he did. He had limited rights, but he bamboozled people for many, many years. In 1955, the picture was reissued in America. I suspect they recycled uh prints from the inventory because by that time it was really getting impossible to print new cinnol prints. In fact, in 1958 when it was released in Italy, an Eastman color negative was made, probably duped from uh Albertson's master color print and that negative sent to Italy to make release prints. That negative does exist, but we did not have access to it. Again, it's among the pearlloined elements. In 1962, the picture went to TV in black and white 16 millimeter, which is how my generation first saw it. And even in black and white in the early 60s, it scared the hell out of all of us. I didn't see it in color till I was in college in 1970 when uh a color intergative was made and uh it went out for non- theatrical and then later television use. Um I remember a friend of mine had booked it in color for a film series he was running at his university and we took the print home. I ran it three times in one day. I was so impressed by the color and wondered if I would ever have a chance to see it again anytime soon. So in 76 it was licensed by Rosenfeld to that lency for US release. They made 35 uh prints and they created an amalgam version. This kind of bastard speurious version where they cut the European scenes into the American version and completely destroyed the the continuity of the film. So here's what survives on it today. Uh, the original camera negative was discovered by Ignite with Producers Photo Library here in LA who had acquired it as stock footage. Um, he bought it outright and again of as I mentioned it proved to have no optical, no dissolves, no titles on it. Uh we had two overseas prints that Ignite located from the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia. one cinnol print of the domestic version which came from Eastman Museum in Rochester and Ignite had a faded 35 color print of that spirious reissue version uh which turned out we needed for two shots because the uh the materials we looked at had damage in those areas. Well, I used it for two shots of the domestic. We also needed for much of the foreign version because the Cakol prints we had were heavily heavily damaged. So the domestic version was purchased by Ignite in 2014. It was conformed for Cakol printing as I said with no titles or effects and no real 1B at all. The the second reel was missing. So that came entirely from uh a cinnol print. The European version print from the National Film and Sound Archive was four 2000 ft reels. Uh RKO distribution. The picture was released in this country under Fox, but RKO and uh other companies issued it overseas. That print was substandard and the quality control uh of the uh physical elements was lousy. Most of the European observatory sequence was missing, just cut away. It had the repeated stock and optical shots missing. And Invaders has a lot of obstacles there. There's a whole sequence during the climactic chase with military maneuvers and the mutants running through through the tunnels and those had repositions, repeats, flop overs and uh those of course did not exist in the in the camera negative. This print was well worn and scratched with huge field splices. uh the color dirt included hairs and silver halalley particles which appear like they were induced during the printing because of the nature of them. I won't I won't bore you with the um inside baseball story on it. You'll see here where there's a big chunk of missing emulsion and that's same down there. Another problem we had with the um European versions was this problem in the shadows, the shadows coming up bright blue. We don't know why that is, whether uh the the what the new YCMS, if they were new, were were underexposed. Uh, but all these night scenes that are meant to have dark black shadows had these bright blue flashing shadows. There were actually shots we had to use and we did find a way to resolve those. The third source was a COL print from Eastman Museum. It too was a Dupant 2000 ft for real print, an RKO sister print to the film National Film and Sound Archive print. The grading was erratic. It had eccentric damage and printing defects. But worst of all for us, the scans that we got from Eastman Museum were not usable. They would not send the print and the scans had much movement to them. Um, I think we could have transferred that print on a Hollywood scanner here and gotten good results, but they would not let the print leave the premises. So we only used it for a handful of shots because we destabilizing frame by frame is very expensive and tedious. Notice Barbara Billingsley from Leave it to Beaver in an uncredited role. And uh there's another Leave it to Beaver player in the film. And uh since you won't know him, I'll I'll tell you who he is. There's a scene where the general and his ataché are now possessed by the aliens are trying to blow up uh uh a plant and they're stopped by two military police. One of whom is Richard Deacon, Lumpy's father, but he's not wearing his glasses and he's got a helmet on and and uh you know you won't know him unless you you stop frame it and examine the face. So there are two lever to beaver connections. So here's the uh European Eastman Eastman Museum print on the left. You can see the color grading is very erratic, very yellow flesh tones. This is an actor named Bill Fipps who was the last surviving adult cast member of the picture. He lived to be almost 100. If you ever seen the science fiction picture five, the arch oer film, he's the male lead in five. And there's another example of the color grading. These these are William Mensy's white walls coming up magenta in cinnol print. Here again, the Martian shadows all coming up bright blue. Here's another artifact. These are all minus red artifacts which are probably in the YCM printing negative. They they show as a as cyan greenish there. Here are David's bedroom again. the bright blue shadows in here. We actually had to use these shots and we were able to work out an algorithm at roundabout that was able to knock that knock that out. I was I didn't know they would be able to do it, but they did. Here again is another matrix artifact. It looks like a a a chemical developing pro problem. You got the water spot and these big chunks of color in the emulsion missing. Here's physical damage to the film. Uh, big chunk of the film torn away. And then here's the end title from the Eastern Museum print again with this is a hair. And that's why I think this is a pre-developed uh emulsion problem because it's it's caught in the emulsion and wherever the hair is, you're not getting normal processing. So, here's the 1976 reissue print that Ignite has a print on deposit from. Uh, badly faded. You can see it's got a re-recorded soundtrack. We needed this one shot of uh Milbour Stone patting Jimmy Hunt on the head. It's cut in preprint in the uh overseas versions. I suspect it's a visible moment even for us. You know, you'll laugh out loud at it. And I think they saw that right away. And so overseas they cut it out. What happens is, you know, there's the boy's parents have been uh absorbed by the Martians and they're at the hospital to be operated on and they they know they've got to get the electrodes out of their necks before the Martians detonate them and kill the parents. And so Jimmy goes over to Sergeant Roth and says, "Hurry, sir." And he looks at him and he pats him on the head. It's pretty funny. First thing we had to do was make an editorial decision list in EDL where I compared proxies of every version we were using shot by shot. There are some I believe it's 677 events as I call them in Invaders from Mars. And an event might include a dissolve or a series of dissolves. So, if we dissolve from shot A into shot B and dissolve into the next shot, that's one event because it's one piece of cut film. And the highlighted ones were my choices going into it for where we would begin the work. Here's an example of the flop over. This is the camera negative of the overweight Martian moving left to right. Well, of the Martians are like six and a half to seven foot tall. You've got Lock Martin and Max Palmer as these giants, but they've got this one little tubal lard and you can't mistake him. They use this shot, I believe, three times on the movie changing the orientation. So, here it is in in the print flop to have him run the other way. So, I sat in with the editor and reviewed the rough cut and we still had shots missing and we had to identify which ones were indeed optical and then look for them if they were enlargements. Look for them in the footage. For example, this shot here turned out to be this shot zoomed in about 30% and flopped. Here's the famous shot of uh Hillary Brooke embracing her son at the police station. To me, still one of the most chilling moments in any movie. Uh the loving mother. And of course, in Menchie's iconography and and and uh design, she's dressed in black and with the with her hair up in a Tutonic coil, she looks very Germanic. This, of course, in the years right after World War II. And Jimmy runs to her and hugs her and she just looks out emotionlessly. And I won't I won't ruin the shot by telling the audience, those of you who haven't seen it, how it pays off, but it's uh so here's the center print of the scene with these purple walls, which is again false coloration and plugged up here. Here's our restored print. You can see that Helen Darter is wearing an ivory white uh doctor's uniform. Jimmy's got on a white to tan shirt, not a pink shirt. And uh this is how it looks now. And this is how it should never have looked, but it did in color. Here's the main title sequence. If I do this correctly. Okay, Jim, I'm not seeing the cursor. Hit the arrow. There it is. So, this is the main title from one of the cinnol prints. This is the Eastman House print with all the jitter. And we couldn't use it because it would have been massive. But here's our final. We used the faded 1976 print. It just shut itself down. Jim, she's gonna She's gonna do some magic here. It's kind of for the program. Maybe we'll give me a second. Let's start this again. You're gonna watch it all happen. We were right here at main. I'm gonna start. I'm going to Okay, Jim, are we back on screen? There it is. Let's try that again. Okay, then just hit the right when you're ready. Okay. Thank you. Oops. Here we go. I'll stand here. Oh no, it did it again. Technical difficulties. Okay, say a prayer. Here we go. So, this was not usable. It would have been far too expensive and taken too much work to restabilize this. So, we use that faded print and we're able to recover the color. Wow. It just doesn't want us to show the sequence. We'll go on to the next one. Maybe there's a problem with with that particular slide. Okay. But, uh, so we'll go to the police station slide. We won't do this with all the all the video clips. Let's hope that's not the case. I think your video clips are going to shut down our thing. Well, they worked before on the dry run. They did. I'm so glad we came in early to double check everything and everything worked. You can tell an anecdote. I'm going to restart our computer. So, I don't know if any of you heard my uh my my Siri phone go off before and ask me, "Do you want to call Ron Hunt?" Did anyone hear that? Yeah. Ron Hunt is Jimmy Hunt's son. And I found that very odd that I wanted to call the Hunts on Easter Sunday to we'd invited Jimmy to join us, but uh given the holiday, he wanted to be with the family. He's 83 years old and Sharpest Attack, remembers everything. And uh did he join you at any of the He was at the TCM festival and uh spoke at length there on the Blu-ray. He's does a long interview um on there, talks about making it. He uh he got a start in pictures inadvertently. He the family grew up down in Hollywood near the MGM studio and they were doing a Van Johnson picture. Needed somebody to play Van Johnson as as a boy and a scout went by their classroom and saw this frecklefaced red-haired kid and said, "Hey." So they they hired him to be uh young Van Johnson. I don't know what the picture was, but then he started he did he did uh about 40 films and Invaders was not his last one. He was 14 when he did this. I think he did one or two more after, but he quit on his own because he wanted to play baseball and he wanted to be a normal kid and uh so I was pleased that when we showed him when he when he saw the final restoration, he pronounced that it looked better than the picture looked the day it was new. Right. So, Try one more time now and see if this works. We've rebooted the entire computer this time. Okay, so that seems to be holding. So, and here's the restored which came off the 1976 faded print rather than the cinnol print. Okay. Don't don't don't don't don't encourage it too much. It might break down. All right. Can I Next slide. Next slide. Here. I'm gonna be right here. Okay. Okay. So, here's the police station. This is the final restored final graded from the camera neck. And if you can see white walls, folks, not purple walls. That's the moment. Oh, the stuff nightmares were made of. Okay. And here's when they meet the Supreme Intelligence from the camera negative. It turns out Jimmy's mother went to high school with the Supreme Intelligence. No, she did. They get on the set that day and Jimmy sees this little person sitting on an apple box with her head in the globe getting made up to look like this. And his mother's there with him. She goes, "LSES, how are you?" They've gone to school together. So, All right. Should be playing right now. Here we go. Oh, we just didn't we just see this? No, this one we didn't allegedly uh the night before shooting his storyboards vanished from the production office. He'd have the whole thing sketched out and he had to do it all from memory, but you never know. So, this is from one of the the faded uh this is from one of the um this is the observatory scene from the European print which was re-shot in September of 53 months after it opened in in the states for the uh for the reason that the foreign exhibitors wanted a longer movie. So they hired this fellow named Wesley Rugles who' been a kid actor in the 20s with freckles and would led to direct uh creation of the humanoids. And he shot all this in one day at KTLA TV station. And of course stupid things like Arthur France had this had this battle scar, this war wound, which you never see in most of France's movies. Well, what do they do? They turn him toward camera so you can't miss a scar. These are the lic lights that were seen over Texas in 52. You can go ahead and hit play. And again, we had to come off that faded print which looks like this. Greg Kimble did this particular work, not roundabout, and that did a superb job bringing the color back to something resembling normaly. And as you'll see in the movie too, not only is Jimmy almost a year older, he's just had a brand new haircut and he's wearing wardrobe he doesn't wear in this scene in the movie. So he walks in without without the sweater vest. They start talking to friends. They cut to this. Then at the end of let's go back to my desk and we talk some more. And the vest vanishes. So, these scenes are not back in the movie you're seeing tonight, but they are on the Blu-ray as value added sequences. And the Blu-ray, by the way, is available uh from Ignite directly on their website. today began a 20% off sale for the next three or four weeks. So, it's a pricey discs. Say again. We're going to be probably quick to finish if we have a handful of questions right now because I don't want to we won't have time for any Q&A after. Anyone have some quick questions? Right here. The um formerly the credit for the music is to a composer to a guy named Ral Kraar who was more of a music packager and producer. He would hire ghost writers. The belief now is that Mort Glickman did most of the scoring for this. He'd been a composer at Republic. Um we don't know with any certainty. Crasher always took credit for this. He even claimed about the orchestra, about the choir in Rome. He said recorded it for him. I don't know that I believe it but uh uh we just simply don't know but it's you know the the choir work is amazing and it's used elsewhere in the film in different guises is as is the is the voice of the Martians essentially when they appear you hear the the four-part choir in toning these in these strangely postimpressionistic chords I was just wondering about this pres right now. You can find a my first doing of this version on YouTube when I presented this in Bolognia, Italy last year and just type in uh retrovat menses and it will come up rit ova tta menses and it will come up on YouTube and you can watch it there. Anything else? Yes. All right. Last question we get started. Uh I oversaw with Roundabout here in town. Our our our produc our uh what do you want to call him? Our project manager Roundabout was Vincent PZI and our colorist was Greg Garvin who was an excellent colorist. He I've done a number of things with him. He did Dr. direct mystery of the wax museum for us and um see fantas conventto and roundabout also did the sound work that was Greg Fa okay well let's get started and I wish you all enjoy the movie thank you for coming.