tips for ordering Una Storia Immortale

[jaime marzol]

eve:
the dvd i have of IMMORTAL STORY looks nothing like that.

jean:
if you saw the pastel version of AFRICAN QUEEN, you would know it. there is no mistaking it for anything else. when i saw it i didn't know such a thing existed. i rented the vhs, left it in my car for a few hours while i shopped. later that night when i popped it in the vhs player and saw the image, i thought i had damaged the tape. i though the sun had cooked it. that is how extreme the process was. years later after i read about the pastel version i realized what i had, and how rare that tape was, but the store where i rented it was no longer there and i've never seen it again. wish i had known what i was watching while i was watching it.

i did rent a laser disc of AFRICAN QUEEN and noticed the same disturbing pink skin tones and odd color that my dvd of IMMORTAL STORY has, which i attributed to the way it was shot, but that is only a guess. i imagine both films were lit a certain way to acheive a certain look when processed a certain way. when it's not processed that way, it looks funky. if this has been corrected today in THE AFRICAN QUEEN, i don't know, but the laser disc i saw had funky color, not the pastel colors.

huston also tweaked the color processing with REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, it was in a brown, sepia tone. i never saw that version, i read about it. but REFLECTIONS looks fine today, has beautiful color, so i attributed that to huston tweaking it in the processing, not in the shooting.

in the huston documentary that comes with TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, ozzie morris tells a story, while shooting MOULIN ROUGE, they were again tweaking the color in the shooting. the technicolor people on the set saw the way he was exposing their film and freaked out, they said to morris that huston was desecrating their film, and they would not be responsible for the results. morris repeated this to huston, huston thought for a moment, asked morris what he thought, morris said he thought there were on the right track, and huston told morris, "go tell the gentlemen to respectfully go f*ck themselves." huston, whatta guy, i love reading about him.

however, MOULIN ROUGE was not as extreme as the pastel AFRICAN QUEEN, and the brown sepia tone REFLECTIONS, so today it's still being processed the way it was meant to be.

[jaime marzol]

GORDON SAID:
The story of the filming of that scene, the darkening sky, the cinematographer agreeing to film it "under protest" the correctness of Ford's intuition that the skies, which were naturally darkening would be memorable (it was not in any way a special effect) is well told in McBride's books on John Ford.

MY REPLY:
that storm scene is fabulous, but it's not the scene that i was refering to. i said john wayne walking away from a river. just john wayne, a river, and a darkening sky, no rain, no storm, no cavalry.

i will pop in my FILMED BY JOHN FORD documentary and see if i can pin point the scene for you with the counter on my dvd player, though i don't think i can zero the counter on my dvd player.

have not read mcbrides book on ford yet, but i certainly intend to. he is one of those guys that you can always read and never feel he has an axe to grind, he just wants to present what he found. the same, "under protest" story is told in a ford documentary, and ford said the cinematographer won an oscar for it.

[jaime marzol]

because i get slammed around here for my crack pot opinions which later on turn out not to be crack pot at all, but right on the money, and because any producer that puts his hand in his pocket to put out an orson welles product deserves every consideration he can get, i just rewatched my italian dvd of IMMORTAL STORY, and this impression is just like that last impression i had the only other time i watched it, the colors are not right.

in IMMORTAL STORY just like in the laser disc of THE AFRICAN QUEEN, people are the color of dolls, those plastic dolls made of that pink plastic. any one that can watch the vhs that Eve got those captures from beside the dvd, will never watch the dvd again. and i can't turn off the italian sub titles.

as much as we all want to give every consideration we can to a producer that finances a welles product, we also want the producer that did it right to reap the benefits of his labor. i would buy the vhs and burn it to dvd, then sell the italian dvd on ebay.

[Jean]

Huston also wanted a desaturated look for Moby Dick. I am eager to see the vhs of Immortal story. Also there are two different editions of The African Queen and the colors of the first one were described (http://www.dvdlaser.com/) as faded and murky... I remember that the colors were quite saturated on my old CED videodisc. Jean

[jaime marzol]

i looked at that site. it's possible what that reviewer thought is faded and murky might be the pastel version. when i saw it i thought i had cooked the tape.