'Napoleon' in Manhattan

Abel Gance and Kevin Brownlow in 1967

A few years ago, a chat with a master projection booth technician I met brought to mind a unique movie-watching experience. The conversation was with Chapin Cutler; we were talking about old movie houses when he mentioned that over four decades back he had worked in the booth at the old Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge. 

In my early days as manager at the Biograph I had a few telephone conversations with the manager of that famous movie theater (I don‘t recall his name). Occasionally, in those days, I talked with my counterparts at repertory cinemas/art houses in other cities. Usually it was a matter of shipping prints of films back and forth in buses, trains, planes and station wagons. The Orson Welles (1969-86) was known then as quite a trend-setter.

Cutler also said he was working in the projection booth at Radio City Music Hall when I saw Abel Gance‘s “Napoleon” on October 24, 1981. He said he had supervised the installation of the synchronized three-projector system it took to present Gance’s restored 1927 masterpiece. It was no easy task to present that film in a fashion faithful to what Gance had labeled “polyvision.” Which entailed split screen images, a quite mobile camera and other special effects, including some splashes of color. All pretty edgy stuff in 1927.

The restoration of the film is a pretty good story, itself. In a nutshell, it was a 20-year project that was supervised by film historian Kevin Brownlow. Then the film, which had been released over the years at various running times, was edited into to a four-hour version by Francis Ford Coppola, whose company, American Zoetrope, released it.

Just as the French filmmaker had originally envisioned, a live orchestra accompanied the silent film. The new score was written by Carmine Coppola, the father of Francis the Zoetrope boss. 

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As the reader may know, throughout the 1920s Abel Gance had been seen as a great filmmaking innovator. A visionary, maybe even a genius. Then came the mammoth production, “Napoleon,” and its abysmal failure at the box office. In 1927 (or any year), it cost a theater a lot of money to override all  of its systems and install the equipment it took to present it properly, with three projectors working in unison to fill three big screens. 

 

Because few theaters opted to install such a unprecedented, one-off system, the first-run engagements in all of Europe were quite limited. Then boom! "talkies" came along and silent films, in general, were shelved. 

 

Although Gance kept working on filmmaking projects, in the years to come he sometimes spiraled into dark periods of despair. There was a low point when he was said to have burned some of the footage from his original cut of “Napoleon.” So, today, nobody really knows what its true running time ought to be. Hey, I’ve read accounts that suggest some where along the line Gance thought he wanted it to run nine hours. 

 

Eventually, Gance became obsessed with re-editing “Napoleon,” perpetually, trying desperately to transform some new version of it into an important film. A film that would be seen and appreciated by a wide audience. All of which coaxed some observers into seeing him as a washed up crackpot. Thus, finding backing, or work, in the filmmaking industry became more and more difficult. 

 

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To get to Manhattan I drove to D.C. and then took the train to New York. On the road I got stoned and listened to Kraftwerk albums. During the Metroliner trip from Union Station to Penn Station I read several Charles Bukowski stories from a paperback edition of “Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.” 

 

That book had been purchased at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco eight months earlier the same year. But I hadn't read any more of it since the flight home. Now I have to say, it turned out that reading several of Bukowski’s briefly-told tales, back-to-back, on a fast-moving train was a gas. To top it off, the whole trip was part of a business project I had been brought in on. 

 

My Biograph bosses in Georgetown asked me to go see “Napoleon” -- with the orchestra -- to gauge the show's commercial potential in markets in the mid-Atlantic region. They were considering making a move to become a sub-distributor of the film and handle it like a road show. They were especially interested in hearing how I would promote it, if they took the plunge. 

 

So, I was traveling on other people’s money ... always the best way to travel. Then, during my walk from the hotel to the theater, bad luck flung a sharp-edged cinder into my eye. 

 

When the movie started I couldn’t watch it, because I couldn’t get the damn thing out of my eye. It was killing me! Since my mission was to WATCH the movie, I had to do something, pronto, so I went out to the lobby to find a men's room.

Long story short, my efforts in the men's room to solve the problem got nowhere. Corny as it sounds, my next move was to ask the first Radio City Music Hall employee I encountered in the lobby if there was a doctor in the house.

The answer was, “Yes.” Hey, this was Manhattan. 

 

Of course there was a doctor on duty to flush blinding cinders out of the patrons’ eyes. It was done quickly. Smoothly. Although the cinder had packed quite a punch, it turned out the thing actually weighed less than a pound. 

 

Back in the auditorium, the movie was spectacular. The power of that score, performed by a full orchestra, would be difficult to overstate. I left the theater overwhelmed. So I returned to Richmond more than a little enthusiastic about the possibility of being associated with screening the same movie at the Mosque in Richmond, and in other large theaters in the region with orchestra pits.

 

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A 1-sheet for the show I attended.

However, the notion of booking Abel Gance’s greatest filmmaking feat in selected cities, accompanied by live orchestras, eventually withered and died. I suppose it was considered a bad risk outside of the largest markets. A year or so later, when it went into general release, the sound was put on the film in a conventional way. CinemaScope was used to show the triptych effect. 

The ambitious deal my bosses had in mind never panned out. Still, the new four-hour version of “Napoleon” from Zoetrope did run at the Richmond Biograph in February of 1983, to mark the cinema's 11th anniversary. It was still impressive, but the experience was not at all what it had been like in Manhattan. However, at the Biograph, I did finally get to see the section of the movie at the beginning I had missed before.

By the way, three weeks after I saw Gance's "Napoleon" at Radio City Music Hall he died. However, at 92, the old boy had managed to live long enough to see his reputation as a great filmmaker rehabilitated. 

 

Well, maybe "restored" is the better word. At the time of his death, in the fall of 1981, critics were once again calling Abel Gance a "genius" in their praise for his "Napoleon." Which provides a satisfying ending to this meandering story.

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