`Gone With The Wind' Restored; Now At Varsity
Friday, November 25, 1994
By John Hartl
Published on Seattle Times

For those who frankly don't give a damn about that odious sequel, "Scarlett," the Varsity is showing the original "Gone With the Wind" today through Tuesday.

The theater has a new 35mm print of the 1989 restoration, which set box-office records during its 50th-anniversary showings at Radio City Music Hall. Despite the millions made by "E.T." and "Jurassic Park," David O. Selznick's 1939 Civil War epic has still sold more tickets than any other single event in entertainment history.

Ted Turner, the movie's current owner, spent nearly $300,000 to bring back the flesh tones and warm hues that had given way to a harsh look in the 1980s. Working with the original color-separated negatives for the first time in more than two decades, technicians claimed they got there just in time.

"The colors were fading, going toward primary colors," said MGM veteran Roger Mayer after the restoration was completed. "They didn't have the subtlety or richness of the original. It had reached the point where we couldn't even get a good 16mm print out of it for the college circuit. This is the star of our library, and it took no genius to tell that it should be in as good a shape as possible."

"Gone With the Wind" had gone through a similar reconstruction in 1967, after the original Technicolor lab had gone out of business (its three-strip printer eventually ended up in China). At the time, a composite negative was made for a 70-millimeter reissue that ended up grossing $30 million during the Vietnam War years - in dollar terms, the movie's most successful release ever.

"That negative was finally showing wear and tear," said Mayer. "In most cases, the negatives of older movies are simply not used as much as `Gone With the Wind' had been. Film stock is better today than it was in 1967, for both negative and printing, and there's less chance of fading now.

"So we went back to the original three-color nitrate strips, which were in quite good shape - not perfect, but very good - and we combined them through an optical printer. It's an extremely expensive, slow process, and it took more than a year to do it frame-by-frame."

Wednesday night, the Varsity plays a couple of John Dahl film-noir gems, "Kill Me Again" and "Red Rock West," followed Thursday by the return of the theater's popular "Festival Hong Kong" series.

The first program: Tsui Hark's "Green Snake," a 1993 fantasy about sister snakes who want to take human form, and "Dragon Chronicles: The Maiden," a 1994 martial-arts epic featuring Gong Li.