JTKirk
Tachan!!!
Por mi bien!
La verdad, la restauracion que tienen algunas, te deja con la boca abierta!
Salu2
La verdad, la restauracion que tienen algunas, te deja con la boca abierta!

Salu2
Última edición:
Restoring Heaven's Gate
Lee Kline, Criterion
When Heaven's Gate was released in the 219 minute version in 1980, it made the rounds in a few 70mm prints. As a result of the reception the film received, the prints were quickly pulled from distribution, and then a shortened 149 version was quickly released to theaters. There are few, if any, 35mm prints of the long version. The negative was quickly cut to the shortened version, but luckily YCM's had already been made. Using the YCM's was determined to be the best way to get back any sort of quality to the picture. Working with director Michael Cimino, the film has been brought back to 216 minutes, removing some sections and making various scene trims at the director's request. This was a gigantic undertaking for a small company and this presentation will focus on how to accomplish a project of this size on a tight budget.
It's a pity no one asked me for help on this project. I probably could have saved someone a lot of research time. Unless more footage has been found since I left MGM, the "sepia sequence" was really a B&W work print that was the only known surviving footage of several shots. Vilmos Zsigmond told me that the entire movie was meant to be in color, but with very unusual timing that only he was familiar with, I had to cannibalize film elements to make a completely-restored long version, and it would have been impossible to come out looking right without Vilmos's guidance. I hope Criterion at least used the high-def master that Vilmos and I produced as a guide, if they didn't bother to contact him for his input either.
[...] As for the sound, I discovered that the movie was only partially mixed in stereo. Because so much time had been spent on the picture to get the cut ready for the premiere, the sound was put together very hurriedly at the last minute - and because Cimino is hard of hearing (this story came from one of the film's sound engineers whom I serendipitously came across during my work on the project), he couldn't really tell what was in stereo and what wasn't, so everyone told him it sounded fine just so they could get through the mix in time. There were no surviving separate DME tracks, although there was a music and effects only track. However, the dialogue was what needed to be helped most, because a lot of the dialogue had been mixed too low against the music and effects. We were able to improve the level and quality of the dialogue somewhat, but we were hampered by the dialogue being married to the music and effects. What didn't exist in stereo I had "stereoized" so that the sound would be as consistent as possible. Stephen Bach told me at the Berlin Film Festival premiere of the restoration that if the movie had sounded that good at the original premiere, maybe it wouldn't have been the disaster that it was, since one of the main complaints at the time was that the dialogue was often difficult to understand. I took that as quite a compliment. The restoration was well-received there and at the Toronto Film Festival, but the restoration was booked into the Film Forum in New York the same week of the New York Film Festival, and it got virtually no coverage at all. In fact, the New York Times, very irresponsibly, reran its original review of the film instead of seeing the restored version. Therefore, the movie died another death at the time. I'm very curious to see what it looks and sounds like now.
Then came Lee Klein of the Criterion Collection, who had a lot to say about Criterion's new restoration of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. It's the full long original director's cut with color and sound supervised by Cimino. Even Cimino couldn't account for the fact that the only film elements for the long version had been color-timed very brown and red (previous MGM revival prints were overseen by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) so wanted to go back to his idea of what the color should be. The problem is that accessing the original negative wasn't an option. In the panic after the disastrous premiere UA had ordered Cimino to drastically cut the movie: the original negative had been conformed to that shorter cut. After checking out some useless 70mm prints, Kline had the entire nearly four-hour movie reconstituted in 2K from color separations -- 23 reels of film, times three -- and timed with Cimino's input. We were shown samples of the old and new color and they're like night and day. Heaven's Gate will once again look like a 'Big Sky' western.
The 6-track sound master was located, but one of the tracks had some distortion so it had to be worked over very carefully. No separate stems existed to do a swap or replace a track -- dialogue isn't just in the center speaker but spread across all of the front speakers. They attacked the track with new software instead. Kline said that Michael Cimino admitted that he had done wrong by judging the audio in the big state-of-the-art mixing room at MGM, where you can hear everything. He should have listened to some mix-downs and optical tracks in ordinary theaters. This is why it is impossible to make out important dialogue in noisy street and action scenes. Actor Richard Masur speaks with a thick accent, which doesn't help either.
What else? Cimino wanted the intermission taken out so that was done ... in a movie that long it's a nice idea to have an official kidney break. And I always thought that the intermission break for Heaven's Gate packed a (needed) dramatic impact, too. The Heaven's Gate BD is due out on November 20.