What does it actually take to restore a Hollywood classic? In this episode of The Archive Room, Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho sit down with Charlotte Barker, Senior Director of Film Restoration and Preservation at Paramount Pictures, where she has worked since 2005 and led the restoration team since 2019. Charlotte oversees the preservation and restoration of one of the most significant film libraries in cinema history, including titles from the Republic Pictures catalogue and the Paramount archive spanning over 114 years of filmmaking. Her credits include To Catch a Thief, White Christmas, Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Dragonslayer, Ragtime and Harold and Maude. In 2023 her team won the inaugural Hollywood Professional Association Award for Best Restoration for The Godfather, and in 2025 the Sunset Boulevard restoration received the first DEG NTEC Award for Technology Innovation in Film Restoration. In this conversation we get into what preservation actually means versus restoration, how films are selected for the program, what happens when 14 frames of Sunset Boulevard were simply missing, and why VistaVision — a format most people had never heard of two years ago — is now being shot by filmmakers like Brady Corbet on The Brutalist. We also talk about nitrate, frozen vaults, the silent heroes of any restoration project, and the particular pressure of working on somebody's favourite film. Topics covered: film preservation and restoration, Paramount Pictures archive, VistaVision, nitrate film handling, frozen vaults, Republic Pictures catalogue, restoration workflow, film inspection, Dolby Vision, Il Cinema Ritrovato Bologna. right, so welcome to the Archive Room. My name is Dominic Dare and this is my co host Sandra Coelho Hello everybody! today's guest is Charlotte Barker. She is Senior Director of Film Reservation and Preservation at Paramount Pictures, where she has worked since 2005 and has led the studio's restoration program since 2019. She oversees a team dedicated to safeguarding and revitalizing Paramount's motion picture legacy with major projects including White Christmas, To Catch a Thief, Sunset Boulevard, and Dragon Slayer. Under her leadership, Paramount Restoration of Sunset Boulevard received the first DEG NTEC Award for Technology Innovation in Film Restoration in 2025. And in 2023, her team earned the inaugural Hollywood Professional Association Award for Best Restoration for the Godfather. Charlotte is also one of the leading historians on the VistaVision widescreen format and is currently writing the definitive book on the subject. So, Charlotte, welcome to the archive room. Thank you for having me. listen, we're delighted have you again. We had a we had an issue last time with my recording, so so we got to know each other a bit more, which is great. And and yeah, we had a wonderful chat. you know, just so that everybody audience can place you, can you you've been at Paramount since two thousand five. Just tell us your journey there and how you got to where you are today. Yeah, so I've been at the studio for two decades now. And I always wanted to work in either film restoration or editing. And as soon as I got on the lot, I had to figure out which one of those I really wanted to put my energy and passion towards. And I went with film restoration. I found the the one guy that was running the department at the time and overseeing everything. I talked to him, got some advice, I took it. It took a very long time, but eventually I found my way into the archive and running the restoration department. So yeah. Fantastic. I mean it's a hell of a journey and it's a hell of an archive. I think what you know, just for you know, for edification, like is there a difference? Your title is Restoration and Preservation, right? So can you just expand a little bit on what the differences are between those two in your view? Sure. So with us, preservation means migrating something from one media to the other to make to another one to make sure that it's stable and is going to last a long time. So for example, for us, that means we take film that may be in danger of being lost or is damaged. We scan it so that we have a high-res 4K or maybe a 6K scan, and then we preserve it that way. So that way we have something that we can use no matter what might happen to the film. Restoration on the other hand is when we take that, we take that preservation element, maybe that scanned element, and then we do digital cleanup to it, clean up the audio, and then we create something that hopefully can get released for consumers. Right, understood. Okay, and then so, you know, when you when we talk about the actual restoration preservation process, you know, the everything is in a frozen vault, right, as we understand it, correct? So what does that do? Wha how does that work and why why is that used for preservation? Well, there's been all kinds of studies that show that whenever you freeze film, you essentially freeze and stop or halt any of the deterioration that's happening. So if you've heard of vinegar syndrome that's happened to films, this is supposed to halt that. And this has been studies that were done in Europe for years that have tested this. So they show that keeping it at a you know below freezing temperature right there will stop that. So that's why we have all of our film there. Before we had it at a much not warmer, but you know, not definitely not freezing temperature. And so this was just sort of an ideal way for us to when we moved all of our stuff to a frozen vault, it was just our best way to help preserve the elements until we can preserve them, you know, in a digital sense. Yeah. And how do you kick kinda check on stuff? I mean, wh I know there's a A D strips and stuff like that, but what how do you kind of tell us take us through from you know, from a film can coming in and, you know, your general work of keeping up to speed with preserving everything. How does that work? Well, there's a whole team that works with the physical media here in the archive. They oversee intaking and shipping stuff out. And so whenever we get elements from maybe a different vault or somewhere's closed and we've got a lot of our own elements back, they'll go through and they'll look at things. They'll sort of do a quick cursory inspection of it just to try to see is this what the data or the, you know, the sheet says that it is. For anything like that we're gonna work on. We will actually we'll pull the elements and then we'll send it to a film inspector, someone who's trained to go through, wind through something on a bench, look at every frame by frame, and will really give us a detailed inspection report on the condition of the element. Is it suffering from vinegar syndrome? They test it with those AD strips, like you said, which will give you a color to indicate how severe, you know, the the the vinegar syndrome might be on that asset. So they'll put all of this information onto a report and send it to us. And then I will track that on my I have a an air table where I indicate how bad things are if something's been inspected and they say, you know, this really needs to be looked at or scanned or steamed to immediately. I'll put that to the top of the list for preservation either that year or the following year. So And so, you know, you've got nitrate in that vault, presumably. I mean, how important is that and how dangerous is that in terms of your priority cre queue for for for restoring and preservation? Yeah, we work on a lot of nitrates every year. There's a certain amount. There's buckets that I try to fill to to build our schedule every year. And one of those is nitrate films. All of our nitrate is currently held at UCLA because it's not allowed on the lot. Protec, where we keep all of our elements or at least our original elements off-site in the frozen vault. They just built a nitrate vault, but we haven't moved any of our elements in there yet because they're all at UCLA. But that is something that we try to prioritize. getting work done. As far as how dangerous is it, I you know, I think it's probably blown out of proportion a little bit. You don't really in our community, you don't hear of, you know, random nitrate fires all the time or things like that. So but also people are being very respectful and careful when they're dealing with things. They have special coolers and things that they have to transport, the special vehicles that transport nitrate to and from and A lot of facilities are only allowed to keep X amount of film reels in their facilities. So everybody's taking a lot of precautions just to make sure that nothing happens. And do you transfer the Nitrate at your place or do you transfer it at UCLA or how is it? UCLA will transport it. So again, there's only certain vendors that are allowed to transport, to pick up and transport that sort of thing. And we also sometimes we'll find elements within our own archive here that are maybe a mix of, you know, nitrate and acetate. So sometimes you have to figure out what do we do with this? And usually you have to send if it's got any bit of nitrate, you do have to send it to the nitrate vault and then handle it with special care. you know, so when you said earlier, so you basically you're you're scanning that element in order to preserve it future. Who decides on whether you go four K, six K? How does that work? Is there a sho is there a decision point there in terms of what format you scan it to, or is it just the highest available? Yeah, so 4K is what we do for regular 35mm 4 per film. 6K is something that we employ when we're working on a Visdivision film, which is a horizontal eight per format. And we found that that's comparable. That's basically 4K to scan that. So that's our workflow. There are other studios that are scanning VistaVision, say at 13.5K, which I always kind of make fun of them for that, saying, What are you doing this for? Because nobody can work in that. But you know, that's just their long term preservation strategy. But for us, it's generally four K or six K if it's Vist Division. Right, right. And so, you know, let's go to the physical I mean the archive and the content in the archive, 'cause I think when we chatted last time, I don't think we touched enough on that. So kind of huge question really, but can you give us a potted overview of what's in there, the collections in there, the gaps? I know we talked a little bit about Republic Pictures, I'd like to get back into that again, but just tell us about the content itself and what's in there from a broad point of view. Just the element types or Yeah, yeah, the element types would be great, yeah. Yeah, well you should really have Chuck from the archive on because he could tell you all about that and specs and everything. Ha ha ha. But we have, you know, we have film, original negatives, we have prints, we have all kinds of audio elements. So Mag or we'll have Music Masters, things like that. Also video tapes. So back whenever they would create a a tape that had a specific language, you know, a French version of this film. We have all of those too. In addition to that, we also have a stills archive, whoever sees new, you know, new photography from sets or old ones. We have stills that go back probably a hundred years, I hope, not misquoting. But they they have a huge, huge collection of stills, and those get licensed a lot. We also have a costume archive, so it has costumes and props, and those go back a really long time too. We have, what else do we have? A digital archive here. So they oversee all of the whenever we're finished working on a restoration, they'll intake that. They'll also take stuff from new productions. So a new film that comes in and sends hard drives or digital deliveries, they'll they'll do that. So there's a lot of little mini archives within the archive itself. And then so, you know, we talked a little bit about the collections in there. Like Paramount hasn't got its own titles from the thirties and the forties, and that's correct. Tell us a little bit about that gap and and and why that's occurred. Yeah, so in the fifties, Paramount was looking for a way to, you know, stay afloat basically, like a lot of the other studios. You had television that we were competing with. You had audience audiences going to the theaters was dropping because of that, because of television also car culture was becoming a big deal. So people were taking a lot of trips and stuff like that that maybe they hadn't been before. So you know, theater attendance was waning back then. So they were looking for ways, how can we use our library? What what can we do? And they thought, you know, we don't really need our backlog of movies. If we re-release these, nobody's gonna see these. They want new movies. They want big spectacles. Cinema scope was a thing, Cinerama. So they were looking at that sort of thing. So they sold the 19, I think it's the it's the sound films from 1930 to I believe '48 or something like that, to NTA, which is a television Station. And so they sold everything to them. And then that eventually ended up at Universal, just through you know, different companies buying each other. So Universal has all of our the Paramount films between that era. And kind of a funny side note on that: the woman that runs restoration over there, Cassandra, she'll introduce a film at a festival. She's also blonde. So she'll introduce a Paramount film. So often I will get emails telling me how much they enjoyed my introduction to this film. hahahaha And and so I I always forward that to Cassandra Yeah. saying, I'd love I'd love to take this this compliment, but it's yours. And so that's that happens a lot. You got your dress your doppelganger. Yeah. Yeah. that's great. tell us a little bit. So, you know, so you've got that gap there. I think last time, you know, for people that are some of our audience will be really interested in the content of what's in there. So we touched upon Republic pictures. I don't I didn't know anything about that collection. Tell us a bit more about that if you could. Yeah, so where we're lacking from films from Paramount from the 30s and 40s, what we do have are Republic Pictures films. So we bought that catalog and I don't I'm not even pr pretend to remember. So we have all of these films, and if you're not familiar with Republic Pictures, they were a poverty row studio. And so that means they made little B pictures. So they weren't making the big pictures, they were making the smaller ones. Republic was also known for making these Republic serials or chapter plays, and those were basically episodics that would play in a theater one new chapter a week. And a lot of them were aimed towards younger, younger kids. So there's Western ones, there's sci-fi ones, Baylor Lagozi's in one. So that's what they were known for. But they also had John Wayne was one of the people there. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers. A lot of stars worked with Poverty Row either at the start of their careers or when maybe Things weren't going so well with their careers, they would work for them. So we have that whole library, and a lot of that stuff has not been seen. So you'll find films that the negative is in pristine condition. I mean, hardly any dirt, no scratches, because it just hasn't been seen. So that's one of the most fun collections that we have that we get to work on just because of the discoveries that we find. There's an actress, Estelita Rodriguez, who I'd never heard of. And She was in quite a few Roy Rogers films. She always played the the girl that got the had the love interest with the the sidekick or something like that. But she's she's beautiful and you always thought, like, you you look too good for this guy. What are you what are you doing with this goofy guy? Ha ha ha. but she's she's incredible. She lights up a screen. she's an amazing singer and and dancer, and I absolutely adore her. So there's people like her or Judy Canova is another one who was a huge star back in the day. And I don't think a lot of people know who she is. She was sort of a goofy, It was always a rags to Rich's story with her, and often her characters were named Judy. And she's an incredible singer. She was a trained opera singer, I think. And some you get these moments of her. A lot of times she's acting really goofy and just a little little crazy, but you get these moments where she just sits at a piano and plays and it just takes your breath away because she's just so good. So yeah, I mean there's smaller films, but there's some that are just really lovely, and I I love working on it. It's amazing. I mean the d the breadth of it, we talked a little bit about Scalawag as well, which was another one that you Yeah. Yeah. found. So tell us that story 'cause that's great. Yeah. So Scalawag was a film that Kirk Douglas made, produced. I think he directed it. I should have looked this up. I knew you'd ask me about it again. But it's a Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I think last time I was saying Michael Douglas. so Kirk Douglas Kirk Douglas directing. I I d that's how it was, yes. Yeah, that's right. so this is a film that I don't know if anybody's ever heard of it, but it's sort of a pirate tale and Danny DeVito is in it. I think I think it might be his first film and he was Michael Douglas's Roommate at the time, and that's how he got cast. But the Douglas family dog is in the film. I mean, it was a whole family affair, and it's just there's a couple songs in the film, and it's really great. And I'm hoping that we can get it out there someday. We didn't have the original negative for it. We had what's called a CRI, which is a, you know. a a later generation element, but it looked beautiful. It the colors are great and it's just one of those films that you discover you've never heard of. You see a poster for it and you think, what the heck is this film? Which is Hahaha Ha. kind of exactly how it got put on the schedule, in the in the culturally significant bucket. I think that's that's where that went because of the the family and the names attached to it. So if you should definitely find the trailer if you can because I don't know if the film has been released. think we may we may pop it up on this see if we can find it. Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah. so just thinking about this, so you know, we you're effectively preserving the and creating a digital element which is, you know, got a longer life short not not a longer shelf life, but it's another way of preserving it. Do do you get to actually project the original film? Does that happen that often these days, or is that a rarity if that to actually an audience watching the reel go round on the projector, or is that something that's not normally happening? Are you talking about the negative or just Yeah, well no, just a copy of that you've done. I mean, do you normally project digitally or is there a is there a an appetite for projecting film elements themselves? Well, I there's definitely an appetite for projecting film. It's just there are not a lot of film labs. I mean, there's hardly any. And so we don't make film prints anymore. We were doing we were creating film outs for a little bit of our restorations. But that's something that we stopped doing just because it was taking so long to get them finished. You'd finish a restoration and two years later, here's our film out. Yeah. And and you know, I mean that's that's great because that means that the lab's busy. But most of our stuff we'll create a DCP and then that's what can be shown around at festivals afterwards. So we'll we'll create those for full restorations and sometimes for our, you know, not quite full restorations that have been cleaned up and maybe still have some imperfections in there. But ones that we want to play festivals or that somebody's requested to play a festival. So yeah, it's all DCP usually. so you know, for myself as much as anybody else, you know, I I've never worked on a film restoration. So let's just t take us through each process. So can lands on your desk, right? What happens? So that's it's funny because sometimes the can actually does land on my desk. It did yesterday. I was thinking that never happens, but I've got they're Ha ha ha. Hahaha over there. So yeah, I mean it's it's a multi step process. It's selecting the film and then it's research into the film. It's looking for elements, and then it's scanning and getting the the content, going to the vendor and looking at stuff. So that's really how it starts. Research is something that a lot of people don't realize that we do. Before we start a project, but it's really important. You research the history of the title, the production. This can come in handy because what if it's you're trying to figure out the aspect ratio of the film? A lot of our films from the 50s, it's kind of hard to tell what the intended aspect ratio is. This wasn't something that was documented. Films were shot in a loose aspect ratio so they could be projected on various types of film screens, because in the 50s. People were still converting from the old postage stamp 137 Academy radio ratio to cinemascope or to just wider screens. So studios, at least Paramount, was trying to accommodate this and say, you know, we're gonna shoot our movies in a way that they can be shown anywhere. That doesn't always, you know, but when we're working on something, we have to pick an aspect ratio. So we have to figure out what looks best, what we think the DP was probably shooting for. So we'll do a lot of tests. So, anyways, this is part of the research step. Sometimes you'll find this in a contract that they were contracted to deliver all the films in 185. So that's when it makes things a little bit easier. Then we'll look at the 185 and we'll make sure does this look correct? So, research into that or the audio formats was this a perspective audio title. So Perspective was a three-channel mono sound that came out in the 50s that Paramount used a lot of it on a Some of the VistaVision titles. This was their way of competing with CinemaScope's stereophonic sound. But it wasn't true stereo. It didn't have separate channels. You didn't have music and effects that could play in the right speaker, but not in the left. So Perspecta, it was all or nothing. So they use three channels, but they just increased the levels. So this is only something you could really use when there's no dialogue. So if there's dialogue, all the music or you know, all the audio had to come from them. The front speaker. But if there's maybe, let's say, a train that's passing by, they could increase the level on the right and then increase it here and increase it here to make it feel like it was stereo. But you can do that if Ha ha ha. there's dialogue. So they could only use it in select scenes. But, anyways, you research to find out: was this a title that had a perspective track? Because then you know this is something you need to look for. There's ways of finding it. It doesn't always say perspective on the can. So there's a lot of stuff that we find in research. So that's the first step. And then it's finding the elements. Do we have the original negative? Maybe we don't. Maybe that's over at Disney because it's a title that we share rights on. Or maybe we find paperwork and it last scene it was at Technicolor, but now that vault closed. Okay, who got that material? Where did it go? So a lot of it's trying to track down where the best elements might be. Also, sometimes they're at other archives. So UCLA might have it in another collection, the BFI. holds a lot of stuff that we use every year, especially for the Republic Pictures titles, because the Roy Rogers films that we have, a lot of them were cut down for television. So we have all these original negatives for these amazing Roy Rogers films, but they cut them for television. A lot of time what they did is they removed the songs. It Mm-mm. was a way for them to get around having to clear the songs with musicians. It was also a way for them to shorten them so that they would have time for commercials. But it's you know, the songs. That's that's the things you really want to hear. Yeah. So the BFI will often have the uncut original version and they let us borrow these elements and then we'll use those to fill in the sections that maybe we're missing. So finding the elements sometimes can be a bit of a, you know, it can be a journey. so yeah. So once we get the elements, we scan them, either 4K or 6K for the picture, we transfer the audio. And then those all come back to the lot and all the work starts here. So we have people that work on cleanup or maybe stabilizing the film if it's shaking. And we'll go in and check in on various points of the process. So again, if we're looking at the aspect ratio, they'll do a few tests and say, come over and look at this and see what you think. Or if there's problems with color breathing where the color is has broken down in the film essentially. So the chemicals that you know that are in the film They're breaking down. So the color is kind of moving all over the place. So we'll have to figure out do we have the budget for this title to fix this? Can it be fixed? What do we do here? So we go over and we check that stuff out quite a bit. Same with the audio. If there's just it's got a really high hiss to it, maybe do we have another element that we can look at? So all that work happens here on the lot, and then we go in and we'll have a final audio review to listen, to point out, to To be very nitpicky with the with the engineer. You know, can you get rid of that little thing? Can you get rid of that? They always like to remind you, you should have heard what it sounded like before I worked on it. So so you do that with Yeah. Hahaha both the audio and with the picture too. And with the picture, you take away, you know, a big scratch or a lot of big pieces of dirt, and then all of a sudden the other pieces of dirt that didn't look so bad. Now those stand out. So so it's this game of when you're working on something trying to figure out. What things to clean up, what things to leave in. I mean, the idea is not to change the film, it's just sort of remove the effects of time. So dirt, scratches and stuff like that that shouldn't be there. Those are the kinds of things that we tackle just from a picture sense or trying to fix the color if the color's, you know, breathing or Can I ask, can I ask Charlotte, how many people is involved in one restoration title? Cause it sounds like quite a big team that would actually do all the different elements, you know? Yeah, I we you've got the project manager who oversees everything. Then you have the people in the vaults that pull the film. You have the film inspectors, which I always say are the silent heroes of the project, because they're really looking at the elements and giving you breakdowns of exactly what's going on with it. Sometimes multiple elements, because if we don't have original negative, we'll send over a reel or two of almost everything we have and say, Can you look at all of this? 'Cause we really want to know. You know, is is one element longer than the other? Do we have more in this than this one? So the film inspectors are really important. And then we have the the scanning text. So people scan it. And then you have someone that sits down and looks at those scans and makes sure they're okay, but then sends the scans digitally to to us. And then you have people here that download those scans. There's a lot of people that work on a restoration, and oftentimes it's the project manager or me that gets the credit, but there's so many people it takes a whole it's a whole collaboration of a lot of people that work work on these things. And some some people end up working a lot more on one title than another. You know, maybe it just passes through somebody's hands, but then another person works on it for days looking at different elements. So but it's it's a lot of people that come together. And and D do you ever feel like you finished a title and you'll go I'm just gonna keep messing with it until I get it say you're like a perfectionist and you just keep touching it keep touching it it's us that have Yes, I I heard all every time. Every time. And then you're watching it, you go to the premiere or you know, film festival and you're sitting back watching and you're thinking, How did I miss that? The color That's always what Ha ha ha You you're thinking. But you know, there was someone that said that art is never finished, it's just abandoned. And that's sort of how this feels too. And You always think too, if you couldn't fix something because of technology constraints or again, you're watching it and you realize, no, I missed this. I just like to think, you know what? That's the person that comes in after me and they get to fix that thing and then they get to feel so happy that they've, you know, righted my wrong if it were. Yeah. Ha ha ha. So be because I've done the same. So, you know, you just realize you've done the best that you can. This is where you're at. You've protected the film. It's it's been scanned, the elements are protected. So yeah, that's that's what you have to try to focus on and not nitpick and drive yourself crazy. Okay. I mean it's almost like making a movie, the kind of collaborative effort that's involved in the different departments. Yeah It's incredibly in depth. you know, you talked previously about Sunset Boulevard and and that there were actually kind of fourteen frames missing, completely missing from that restoration. And I know that's kind of one of your more high profile ones, but can you just talk us through what the hell do you do when you've just got stuff missing? Yeah, with Sunset Boulevard, we don't have the original negative. So what we were working from was a third generation element. That element had, like you said, 14 missing frames or jump cuts. So in the middle of a shot, there's one frame that's missing. Sometimes you can notice that easily, sometimes you can't. If someone's walking across the screen, all of a sudden they sort of jump in a way that isn't natural. So in earlier restorations for this title, what they did was they went to a fourth generation element. which had the frame that was missing. And you can't just take that one frame and insert it because the quality kind of dips. Trust me, we have tried. You Right. Hahaha know, you always hear you can't do it, but then you say, well, let me see if I can do it. But Yeah, yeah, yeah. so you can't do that. So what you have to do then is just take that whole shot and insert that shot. So for one shot, you're going down a generation. Now in a photochemical world on a print, if Something like that had been done, you may not have noticed it as well. But in 4K and HDR, you absolutely noticed that stuff when all of a sudden it doesn't quite look as good. So we didn't want to do that if we didn't have to. And we thought, what can we do? And something that's been done for years now is recreating frames. So this wasn't anything new that we pioneered. I mean, it's been done for a decade or more. So we would take the frame before and after, and then a digital artist would recreate that frame. So sometimes it was easy. Sometimes it wasn't. We had one shot where there's a tree that's moving like that and they had to recreate this frame. Now imagine just having to recreate leaves blowing in the wind and making it look right. It was not easy. So there were fourteen frames that we recreated. We put those into the film for the final and We've also identified those in the digital sense that these are where the frames are. These are not original to this element. We don't we documentation is a huge part of what we do because we want the people that work on the next restoration to know exactly what happened. So that's what we did. And I mean, again, it doesn't sound like much, but when there's 14 jump cuts in a film to us, they really stand out. So that was something that we were really proud to have fixed in this restoration. I think that kind of gets onto the point of, you know, loyalty to the original director and loyalty to the film because obviously you're passionate and knowledgeable about film and you you're a film buff in that sense and you love it and you know I can feel the energy is amazing. So but how do you do you work with estates, do you work with directors, like how do you maintain that integrity to the original director's vision? If we can, we work with the talent. Unfortunately, a lot of the films I work on are so old the talent is not around anymore. Sometimes you do have estates that are really involved in their family's work. And when that happens, we will bring them in. For Dragon Slayer, which you mentioned, we were able to get the director, Matthew Robbins, to join us. He was a little hesitant at first whenever I reached out to him to say, Hey, we're gonna restore Dragon Slayer. This is the movie that I'm passionate about. The last transfer, I you know. There were rumors you weren't happy with it. Because a lot of these transfers that were done in the nineteen nineties, they they were sort of done in bulk. So the and talent wasn't necessarily contacted. So, you know, maybe something looks the way they wanted it to, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's a little darker than they wanted. So anyhow, so we got him to come in and he was highly involved in just going through audio, picture, anything that he had opinions on. He let us know and we made it To his liking, and he's so proud of it now. And that's that's one of my proudest moments, just seeing someone who was not happy with the film and sort of embarrassed to go to QA's about it. This is his words, not mine. Yeah. and now he's so proud of it and loves it. And he would send emails, I just introduced it here, or they just saw it, or you know, so th that was really great. But we don't often get to work with the with the talent like that. It's again, it could be an estate for someone like Jerry Lewis's son, Chris Lewis. likes to be highly involved with his father's films when he can and when he's around and when he feels he has something to to to contribute. George Stevens Jr. is another. So if we have a George Stevens film like we just restored Shane, he was there the entire time in the Bay. So he's heavily involved and his, you know, he's I think he's in his nineties, but his memory and recollection of this or that is incredible. So he it's very valuable to have him in there to guide us Yeah. and tell us this should have been darker, this sh this shouldn't or this this sound. He he didn't my father didn't like the sound of this, so, you know, what can we do? So it's it's great. And do you get Can I, Go ahead, Sandra. sorry, can I just ask, so you know you mentioned sometimes that you'll go through, you have to do all the research. What happens if there's no paperwork with the film so you can't have any information left? Because sometimes I know that when I've worked in other archives and they've basically, the can just has no information. It's just no labels, nothing in there. How do you cope with that? Well, that happens with a lot of the Republic Pictures titles. So we don't have a lot of the documentation from some of those, not like we'll have with Paramount's films. Yeah. So you just you try to research where you can. You go on maybe lantern media history site and look there. Cause maybe there was some article or interview in the trades when the film came out that will then have a key to something. look, they did have a high frame rate camera that they use. Isn't that interesting? No wonder. Blah, blah, blah. So you never know what you might find. So if we can't find it in our own archive, sometimes we'll also go to the Herrick Library, the Margaret Herrick Library here at the the Academy. So we'll go there and we'll research and see if we can find anything on the title. So, you know, it's not uncommon that we don't find a lot of stuff, but we still put our best efforts into trying to find information. so we got you know, I guess one of the things that I wanna ask is just a personal thing is like, you know, how do you handle the pressure when you're working with people's favorite movies and like, you know, as we I think we mentioned last time, everybody's got a favorite movie and you put every single one you work on. How how do you and your team manage that pressure? It's can be a bit terrifying sometimes, especially when you have a film like White Christmas. Everyone loves White Hmm. Christmas, but most people. And when I worked on that, I was terrified because I also love it. It's one of my favorites, and you want to get it right. So you have to analyze everything. And maybe let's say you're reviewing the film, and we review these over and over and over again. And you remember, I need to look at this section of the screen because I had them fix this, so there was warping. But then you always think, did I miss something on the other side when I was focused on this other thing I wanted to fix? So for those kind of films, the higher profile ones, we try to get as many people at our review sessions as possible, because the more eyes, the better. So, but the the the pressure to get things right is it's large because we're also you Yeah. really big movie fans here. Everybody in my department, we live and breathe movies. talk about our we all use letterbox to log what movies we've seen and in the hallways it's nothing but arguments over why'd you rate this so poorly or why'd you love this film. So we're you Ha ha ha ha. all we love movies so much and we always say every movie is somebody's favorite movie. So you want to try to do the best that you can to make that movie shine again. So but it's it's very difficult. You have to stay off the forums and and not get too tied up at at how people are reviewing things. Cause also When we're working on something, we're looking at not just consumer monitors, but professional monitors sometimes. And so you just never know how somebody's set up at home is gonna be too. And you think you you know, when you do stumble along a bad review, which of course those are the only ones anybody ever wants to read, you know, you Yeah. Yeah. think you have to wonder, like, Well, was your T V set up right? 'Cause I swear that's not how it looked when I worked on it. So Yeah. Yeah. yeah, a lot a lot of pressure. But again, you do the best you can and like I said, I just Like to think if I if I did something that someone's super passionate about and they're young and maybe one day they'll be in this position and they can fix it or You you know, d do it to their to their liking or how they feel is more original to the source. So in terms of like the films that you choose to restore, obviously you're driven by quality of the film itself. So degradation, you're gonna chose to put access those first. You know, in today's world there's so many fan, there's so much fandom. Is any of the restorations driven by public demand? Or is it driven by commercial? Like how's how's your decision making process taken for what you're gonna have? What's the next 10 films you're gonna take? talk us through how that works. Well, we're at point now because Paramount has supported this preservation and restoration department for let's see, about 15 years now. So there's a lot of the big films that you would think are these are the restorations. They've been done already. So trying to find them sometimes gets harder and harder. But since then we've also had a technology change. So now we have Dolby D Dolby Vision and HDR. So some of those that were worked on don't have a Dolby Vision version. So we'll take those and we'll sort of redo them. we always leave ourselves with cleaned scans. So scans that have been cleaned but not color corrected and no no anything, no noise reduction or something applied. So that if there is new technology, we can use those and upgrade it, you know, to the new technology. So trying to find restoration titles can be a little difficult, but it's done by committee. So I'll come up with a list. I will send it to My upper management will talk to finance about it. And we also talk to marketing and our home media group just to see are any of these films ones that you're interested in. They also send us a list of things that these are the titles that we think would be great for next year. A lot of times it's an anniversary title. So it's they're selected that way. Those are the the really high profile ones are selected like that. For everything else, the smaller, the Republic films, things like that. There's Buckets, like I I said before, Yeah. that we fill. So something culturally significant, there's X amount of titles I want to put here. What's really in danger of being lost? What do we not have any copies of? This is a single source element that needs to be prioritized. So things like that, you know, will help me create a list that I then suggest to everybody and get feedback on. So And so you know, what's in the pipeline? What what are you excited about? What's the next releases looking like that you guys are are working on? What are you allowed to tell us? So our our we have three we have three big restorations going You have to kill us. right now. One is Funny Face. So and that's and that's brilliant. I love that film. one where there was an HD restoration probably ten years ago or so, but now HDR and that film is very colorful and the music is great. So it's gonna look really fantastic in Dolby Vision. We're also working on strategic air command. So that's a Jimmy Stewart film that ha just hasn't had a big restoration. And there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of that it that's a big one because of all the the stock footage that was used and things like that. So one thing on a film like this, they use a lot of stock footage. And what that means is it's not original negative pieces. So it's, you know, it's a a copy of what was gone out and shot in the field of a plane or something like that, or maybe a, you know, an Air Force base. So what we'll do, we have a stock footage library that's now part that's part of the archive. And sometimes we have the original negative for that shot that was, you know, that they went out and shot. So we can, if we can find that, we'll take that. And in the digital restoration, we'll use that higher, you know, we'll use the original negative piece. We'll pop that in. Only if it's the exact same match. So that one, that's Which- that's a bear that we're working on. And then the other one is war and peace. So this is a Wow. This is a big one just because of the runtime. So it's one that's been not worked on just because of that. But it's gonna look it's gonna look beautiful. And I that's one I really hope can play the festival rounds next year. Hopefully. But it's it's cannot what three and a half, four hours long or something. So that'll Yeah. It's a long one. be one that we have to split into. We're gonna review half of it today and half of it tomorrow, just because you want your eyes and ears fresh when you're yeah. Wow that's gonna be huge that'll be huge yeah that's interesting about so so you know, we're from stock footage kind of backgrounds. So are there many rushes and outtakes? Does that is that what's in the Paramount Stock Footage library or you know, do those elements exist from or is it mostly dealt with finished products and that's it? Yeah, it's mostly finished. We don't have a lot of outtakes or things like that. Occasionally we do, but a lot of that stuff was just tossed, probably for storage reasons. You know, you only had so much space or cost savings might have happened. There's not a lot of documentation on why we don't have all of that stuff. We can just sort Mm. of assume. So most of the stuff pre mid eighties or so we don't we don't have. anymore. At least the the outtakes are the little bits and pieces, unless it's a a special title like Ten Commandments, we have a ton of material for. So and that's one thing, there's all these effect shots in Ten Commandments. And for a lot of stuff we found that we have the background shot or little other pieces that were used to create this effect shot, but we're missing the main actor. So we could Right. create recreate except for so some of these shots that look really bad. If you're familiar with the film, it's like, that's you can see that's an effect shot, especially when he's Yeah, yeah, yeah. parting the C's. We have a lot of those original pieces. We're just missing the actors because huh. they didn't that would have been in the, you know, in another library, I guess. So it's it's unfortunate because, you know, we could essentially rebuild instead of optically, we could rebuild digitally these shots, but we don't have all Amazing. the pieces. So That's so fascinating. We work we work with Studio Canal and they they kept a huge amount. They had a sort of a stock footage library from within their archive. It's all sitting Mm-hmm. in Pinewood now. And they have these amazing kind of outtakes and and rushes from stuff like deer hunter and films like that. And it's kind of it's, you know, it's it's ne it's not accessed that often because it's not all digitized. But that's a shame it's not there. I mean, in terms of like, you know, we mentioned in the in the opening monologue about you, we we wanted to talk a little bit about VistaVision. because, you know, we understand that, you know, you're you're sort of building a a a book about that. you know, give us a breakdown of what VistaVision is, for just assume we know nothing and and explain why its importance, you know, why films like The Brutalists and things like that are being shot with it now. Well, it's funny because two years ago, nobody, most people did not know what VistaVision was. So I carried a little film strip around in my wallet so that I had an example if it came up in conversation, which with me somehow it often does. So so VistaVision essentially, instead of shooting vertically across a four-perf regular 35mm frame, what they did, they ran the the film sideways horizontally through the camera. And they shot across two frames, so it made it eight perf. So instead of the four perf image. They shot across too. So this gave them a higher or a larger negative essentially by using 35 millimeter film. Going up to 65 millimeter would have made the cost, I think, four times as much in the 50s. So this was just sort of a way for them to get a big format image that didn't have a lot of grain, that looked great, that they could then print down to a regular regular piece of film to. So that it can be shown in any kind of theater. So the idea was you don't need a special projector. They weren't gonna build horizontal projectors. This was not in the original scope for VistaVision. So we're gonna shoot large and then we're gonna print it normally. But by the time that's shown on a screen, the grain is not gonna be there. They were really obsessed about the graininess of early cinema scope films, which is kind of funny because I don't think anybody cared about the grain back then. I mean, where people saying that film's too grainy, I'm not going to the theater. But in all the documentation, that's what they're They're always talking about the grain. So there was someone who was an anti-grainer or Ha ha. something here. So that was hahahahah that was the idea. And you know, it was used for about seven years at Paramount as a production format before PanaVision lenses got better. So you could get a nice widescreen shot on regular four-per film. So you didn't need to use twice the amount of film. the so those lenses got better. And they just they just couldn't justify the additional cost because it wasn't just shooting twice as much film. It there were a lot of things down the line. The processing at Technicolor, creating these these IB inhibition prints that they were making cost a lot more to make those than it did to make just a standard 35 millimeter film from a from a you know regularly shot film. So it was a cost savings thing for them to get rid of it. And so and why you know, why are you know why are films shooting, you know, Brutalists and those guys? I mean, why why is that being picked up Yes. now? Yes. That was the other part of your question. so You I think one of the things is I mean it's a unique format that not everybody has access to, right? So only your sort of auto a tier filmmakers are gonna actually be able to use it. It's kind of like IMAX in a way. So you can shoot a large negative. But also what it allows you to do because you have this large negative, you can go to seventy millimeter a lot easier and the quality is still gonna look really, really good. If you remember What was the film that Christopher Nolan shot? And he used IMAX for certain scenes and then regular for other scenes. And then when by the time they made an IMAX print, it was very clear which shots had been shot in IMAX and which shots had not been shot in IMAX because they were blown up. So this is sort of the idea that you can shoot on a larger negative, make it, you know, into a 70 millimeter print, and the quality's still there. You're not gonna have a loss in quality. Also, again, like I said, it's not something that everybody can do. And I think for a lot of filmmakers, it's, huh, I've never shot in that. And what a cool vintage format that was used not just in the 50s for some movies, but also by visual effects artists or people in the 70s for Star Wars. That's when VistaVision kind of made a comeback. And so I think it's just something that, that would be fun to shoot a film in this format and make it a little bit different. It also makes it unique because You know, hey, look, this was shot in VistaVision. This is why you need to come see it in the theater and not wait for it to be on HBO Max. So I think, you know, there's a there's a lot of reasons why people are interested in shooting. I mean, for me, I just I think it's a beautiful format. And of course, I think people should be shooting on it. Also, the cameras might be easier to find now than getting an IMAX camera, because I know those are extremely limited. Not that everybody's running around with VistaVision cameras in their office like this. That are gonna be used for production, but I think it is maybe a little bit easier to find more of them. And then the fact that you only need regular thirty five millimeter film to shoot is another plus. So Yeah, I mean it's it's you know it's it's certainly, you know, something where, you know, we're seeing this kind of interest in the younger generation in these physical formats. And you know, I think we're sort of one of the reasons why we found not found, but kind of come across you is a lot of the stuff that you've done about advo advocacy for for for your work. you know, how important is that to you? And you know, you you you you know, in in spreading the word and making sure people understand what's going on behind the scenes. It's incredibly important because what I find if you don't let people know that there are people here, you know, here in the archive that care about films that are working on them, that we have this incredible preservation program that's been going on for well over a decade. People just assume the worst. Go on forums and look up any film that hasn't had a release in a while, and people assume You know, maybe the studio doesn't care and nobody's working on this. And it'll be a film that we restored or worked on, you know, five, six years ago, but nobody knows it. So they just again they assume that nothing's happening with it. So my goal really is to get out and to just show people that, hey, there's regular people here that are huge film fans that love this stuff, and we're the ones caring for these films, and we're doing the the best that we can on each film that we work on. And also just people are really interested in what goes on behind the scenes. You know, we've all seen those restoration docs where it says, we scan it and we clean it up and look before or after. You know, I mean, we've all seen those, but there's a lot more that goes into it day by day. So, and there's nobody here that's hired that's just to, you know, to be our advocate out there. It really takes either us doing it or having champions outside, so people that are fans of the archive, getting them to spread the word that, Paramount just did this or come check out this restoration that That they did. So it's really important to me. And it's not something that I realized how much of it I was going to have to do whenever I took over this role, especially when the head of our archive, Andrea Callis, who I know you had on the show, incredible, Mm-hmm. but she she left for a you know different opportunity, still not over that, about a year and a half ago. She was an incredible mentor, but she was a huge advocate for the archive, always out there introducing films, talking, you know, giving presentations and then that all fell onto me. And it was a hu a huge responsibility to do that. But also I just I love doing it because I love my job. And I don't know the difference between, you know, working and not working because I feel it's it's always movie and especially old movie based. That's that's everything I do. So yeah, it's really important. But again, it's great when you have advocates off, you know, that that don't work here. And can spread the word 'cause that that really helps more than anything. Yeah, I mean, look, I certainly from from our audience perspective, I think everybody will have learned a huge amount from from chatting today about kind of how the the immense amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. you know, so that I mean that's massively important. I I was gonna say, well, I'm just trying to think of anything we haven't touched on. Yeah, come so one of the things that that I guess would be interesting to learn from you is just to talk about AI and technology for a minute. are you finding that technology is advancing to such a point where it's really helping you in streamlining restoration. or at the moment is it something that you just use in you know partially in your workflow? Well, in terms of AI, the only AI tool that we've used is whenever we worked on Sunset Boulevard and we partnered with Park Road Post in New Zealand, which is Peter Jackson's company. And they use this tool to essentially take a audio track that we sent them that was mono, which means the dialogue, music, and effects are all just one track. So you can't pull out little pieces to maybe make a five-one or to make fine-tuned adjustments. So they were able to Create separate tracks for us out of this one track. So they were able to pull the dialogue and put that all on one track, pull the music, put that on one track, and the effects. So they were able to do that with this AI tool they have called Mal. And that's the one that we mentioned the the award that we won. It was for Yeah. that work. That was a couple of years ago. And at the time, nobody was doing that for any kind of old film. They had used it for the Get Back Beatles documentary. And that's how we first heard of them. And I don't know who was the original person that said, hey, we should reach out and see if they're interested in working on Sunset Boulevard. And of course they were because it's a Sunset Boulevard. Who doesn't want to work on that? And Yeah, right. so that so we work with them on that. But as far as you know, other things, technology advancing makes it a little bit harder for us to work on things because People are now seeing way more than they ever saw before with high definition with HDR, our restoration of War of the Worlds. They're when you look at it in a print, you don't see the strings holding up the spaceships. When you scan the negative and you look at it in HDR, you see You do. the strings. Now, for us, we're always we wanna preserve the filmmaker's vision. We wanna preserve what we call opening day look. And so with something like this, we thought, well, this isn't really fair because you never would have been able to see those strings before. And they knew that in a photochemical world, there'd be some kind of softening by the time they shot the film and then it got to release prints. They knew that they wouldn't be able to see it. We were able to verify that by watching a print. So what the team here did, we watched a print. We wrote down every time we saw a wire. And with those notes, we went in and for a restoration, we tried to help, we helped. obscure the wires that we couldn't see in the print. And then we left some in that you could you could really clearly see. So technology in that sense makes it a little bit harder to be true to what audiences Yeah. experienced. Or again, they would have never wanted they would have changed the lighting or done something differently if they knew how much you could see those wires. So you know we're we're trying to use technology to make it still look like it did. But sometimes it's hard because again you're seeing more than you ever saw before. So that that makes your choices in the in the review session or in the bay a little bit difficult because you know we get into these conversations, you know, should we do this, should we not do this? What, you know, what are the implications here? What would the filmmaker have wanted? And you know, what did audiences see? So these are all the things that we discuss ad nauseum sometimes. Yeah. And that's craft, art, experience, and that's the human touch and that's the most vital thing. And and you know, I just don't see how a a tool can cope with colour No. and feeling and emotion, No, we say you know. AI archive intelligence. So are we using AI? Yeah. So that's what we say. I like that. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Can I ask what advice would you give young people that want to get into this industry into the restoration world? Well, it's funny because ten years ago that advice would have been different than now, because so many people are interested in film restoration these days. And I think a lot of that happened during COVID when a lot of catalog titles were being released as theaters reopened and they didn't have new films to put in there. They said, well, what what revivals can we do? So th there just became a huge interest that there wasn't there before. All of a sudden working in film restoration went from, you guys work with the dusty old you know, nobody cares about Judy Canova films to something that people thought was a really sexy career. So I think that for us, we can tell if we have a, you know, if we're interviewing people, even for an internship, passion goes a long way. We can tell when you live and breathe this stuff. And those are really the kind of people that thrive in this kind of role because you can be taught how to find this, see this, you know, research. your eyes can be trained to see things, but passion is something you either have or you don't. So I think that that goes a long way. And people can tell. as far as getting into the field in our group, everybody came from different backgrounds. I came through the studio system where I got experience here on the lot that would all be beneficial towards working in restoration. And at times people said, Well don't you want to work on the newer films? And I'd say, No, no, no, I want to work on the you old films again. And There's other people that worked at a film lab. So they have photochemical backgrounds, which means that they really understand different kinds of films or problems, or hey, this is actually a photochemical problem during processing, or this was probably caused by an optical printer. So they they know that kind of stuff just because they worked with it for so long. We also have people that were in music, so that worked in music and now work in film restoration. And then other people that went through archival media library programs, we got UCLA. We have a couple of people here that That did that. So there's a lot of inroads here. So you have to stand out and, you know, show that this is really what you want to do. And really, I mean, I always say if you want to get into film restoration, just get any job you can at a place that does film restoration. Any job you can. It doesn't matter if you're running and getting coffee, because you know, then you can hang out and say, Hey, how how do you how do you do this? You know, when you have time to do that, of course. And people you will see that and then Because the most important thing at least in our industry here is not who you know. You can know a lot of people. It's who knows you when a job is available and thinks of you because that's how you're gonna get a job. So, you know, be memorable, be helpful and be passionate. But great advice. And you know, we so, you know, the commitment from Paramount is phenomenal. you know, for such a long period of time. Well, are the are the other studios, I mean I we've done I have we have some we d we screened something with Kevin Schaefer at Disney and they seem like they've got quite a prolific he's great by the way, always turns up to his premieres with like dressed in dressed Yes. in we we did Napoleon Dynamite and he came with a vote for Pedro t shirt on, which was fantastic. But You know, is there a commitment He's incredible. across all of all of the studios in that sense to to do what you guys are doing? There is and there, you know, it's different levels at different studios, but it's a very small community here. We all know each other, we all get along, we all try to help each other. So I mean I I I adore Kevin. He's great. I love going to those screenings. they also do that at Universal sometimes. I saw the head Cassandra, my you know, my twin. She Ha ha ha. she introduced Dracula's daughter and came out in like a full cape with some other people working with her. Love it. haha I just go out and introduce the movie. I'm I'm clearly not sure it's right. So yeah. I do. no. You're gonna you're gonna you're gonna up your game. Hahaha that's fantastic. Well listen, we you know it's been such a pleasure to to chat. We could chat forever, but I think we've got we're gonna do our little quickfire thing as Quick fire ad. well, which which we we'll do. and I'll let Sandra just jump in with that now. yeah so i've changed it a bit charlotte for you so you get some new questions in here but don't worry they're quite easy to be fair Ha ha. you ready um the one restoration title you're most proud of To catch a thief. And do I have to elaborate or just tell you? no, no, it's quick fire. Quick fire, right? You can do, yeah please do. Okay, the one thing you wish an audience knew before working on a restored program project? That hours and hours and hours of care has been put into here by a lot of people, and what you're seeing is not an accident. I mean, this is decades of people caring for this film is what made it get here. Not just people that still work there now, but people before. At one format you're glad that's disappeared. well it's not a format but pan and scan. I'm glad that's gone. Original mono or modern surround? I mean, for an old film I have to say mono. Okay, preservation or restoration. Restoration. Hitchcock or Wilder That's Yeah. a hard one. yeah. Yeah. I gotta say Hitchcock. See? You did well Charlotte! That was it! Well done! Way there you go. Fantastic. And Well hitchback shot in this division, so that's the only reason. So it's on brand. you... Yeah, there you go. And Charlotte, will you be attending Bologna this year? You'll be going, I will. I will. so anyone of our listeners that are going, come and say hello to Charlotte. Yeah, I'm introducing Money From Home, which is a three D Technicolor three strip, three D film. So six strips of film. I'm introducing that. Yeah. I'm also introducing a silent called Sick Sick A Bed, I think. Yeah. So and they haven't asked me they often start asking you when they know you're gonna be there, they're like, Well, since you're here, can you also introduce this or can you so I'm just waiting. It's I've never been it sounds my thing. like a huge amount of fun, is it? it's it's the best. It's the best festival. It's very the the ticket prices are low, so it's easy just to get tickets to a few things. It's not like a festival where you need a whole pass. And you see all ages there and from all over the world. It's my favorite festival. I've only been once, so this will be my second year, but it last year left such an impression on me that I had to go back. Fantastic. we'll check it out. Yeah. Amazing. well look, listen, I think that kind of comes sends us towards the end, but we want to say huge thank you for not only doing this once, but doing this twice with us, I which which I hopefully works in our favour. But we're immensely grateful. So thank you very much for joining us in the Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thrill. That was I'm gonna stop recording. Amazing. Thank you so much. Have That was really good. I stopped? There we Stopped. Cool.