MRH : Were there any unique challenges that you faced when you were transferring from the negative?

DM : Well, I was scared to death, and anybody would be when you're dealing with the actual physical negative from the camera. I mean, this thing was the actual cut neg with splices and glue! It was really scary for me, because here we are, running it through this machinery that tugs and pulls and moves them back and forth, and I thought 'Well, it would be great to restore it from the original negative; it's going to be great.'

And then, when I sat down and realized what we were going to do, I though 'Oh my God.' I was just keeping my fingers crossed and praying the whole time we were doing the transfer that nothing was going to happen.

You always run into the possibility of the film breaking, or a splice coming loose, or somebody drops a reel on the floor. And when you're dealing with something that's like an interpositive or a 35mm print, [the pressure is still scary]; but when you're dealing with the actual physical original negative - I mean, the element doesn't get any better than that - you run the risk of actually doing some damage to it. I was very, very nervous…

It's the first time I've ever done anything from an original negative before. Even when I had done mastering for Texas Chainsaw Massacre [at Elite Entertainment], we had created our own negative from the A/B roll; we never actually physically ran the A/B roll through the machinery. So it was a challenge, and a very scary one, but it all worked out.

MRH : A classic, and rather horrifying example of loss occurred when a small label was planning on releasing an album of Bernard Herrmann's music for It's Alive (1974), and the master tapes were destroyed in a fire. Apparently there are no copies of the music masters, so Herrmann's music, with the exception of the mixed film soundtrack, literally went up in flames.

DM : Well, we were running into that with some films. You'd be surprised [at] some of the films that have just vanished because of fire, or error, or whatever. I think it was Joe Dante who said that once Avco Embassy went out of business - because they had released The Howling [1980] - they started throwing things in the dumpster.

They didn't want to pay the storage fees, and it was just elements that had been unclaimed by the companies that they had released them for… I think it was Joe that has said… he'd always go out before he'd go into his office. He'd look in the dumpster and see if there were any elements for The Howling, and he said he saw stuff from Take This Job And Shove It [1981], laying in the trash.

We ran into a similar problem with [director Jeff Lieberman's1976 film] Blue Sunshine, in that it was a Movielab picture. They did the prints and everything, and then Movielab went bankrupt in the eighties, and had sent out notices and said, "Hey, we're closing. Get your stuff out of here." But sometimes the movie producers just didn't get the letters for one reason or another, didn't know what was happening, and whatever was leftover in Movielab when they were timed to throw the wrecking ball they just destroyed everything with it.

And unfortunately that's what happened to - we think - the original negative for Blue Sunshine. We were able to get the audio mags - or the original producer Edgar Landsbury was able to get the original mag tracks out - but the original negative has not been found for 25 years, and they think it was just destroyed when Movielab went bankrupt. It just went down with the building, I guess.

MRH : Bruce Kimmel explains on his commentary track for the new First Nudie Musical (1976) DVD that the transfer was made from sections of the best available prints, as no one knows where the negative resides.

DM : We used the only existing 35mm print that we could find for Blue Sunshine, and it actually came out a lot better than we anticipated. We spent thousands, and thousands, and thousands of hours painting out scratches, fixing splices. This is the best it's ever going to be… There's no pre-print element available, no IPs [interpositive negatives] or anything, and the only materials that we could find outside of this print were old 1" [video] masters.

What's better? The old 1" masters, or actually doing a new 35mm print transfer to digital Betacam? Of course [the latter] option is always going to be the best one. Even the Blue Sunshine tape from Vestron, when it was released in 1984, was horrible.