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Abel Gance and Kevin Brownlow in 1967
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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 told
me that over four decades ago 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 I talked with my counterparts at
repertory cinemas/art houses in other cities, usually it was about
shipping prints of films back and forth, etc. The Orson Welles (1969-86) was
known then as quite a trend-setter.
Cutler also said he was working in the booth at Radio City Music Hall when I saw Abel Gance‘s “Napoleon” on
October 24, 1981.
He told me 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 it in a fashion that was
faithful to what Gance had called “polyvision,” which entailed split
screen images and other effects, including some splashes of color. All pretty edgy stuff in 1927.
The restoration of the film is a great story, itself. In a nutshell, it had been a 20-year project supervised by film historian
Kevin Brownlow.
Then the film, which had been released over the years at various
lengths, 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, father of Francis the Zoetrope boss.
Throughout the 1920s Abel Gance had been seen as a great innovator, a
visionary, even a genius. Then came the mammoth production, “Napoleon,”
and its abysmal failure at the box office. In 1927 it cost a theater a
lot of money to install all the equipment it took to present it
properly, with three projectors working in unison. Because few theaters
opted to install such a system for one film the first run engagements
were limited. Talkies soon came along, which meant silent movies, no matter how
avant-garde, were shelved.
Although Gance kept working on film-making projects, he sometimes
spiraled into dark periods of despair. There was a point when he was
said to have burned some of the footage from his original cut of
“Napoleon.” So, today, nobody knows what its true running time ought to be.
Hey, I’ve read
accounts that suggest Gance wanted it to run nine hours ... maybe he
even wanted to make sequels.
Eventually, Gance became obsessed with re-editing “Napoleon,”
perpetually, trying to transform some version of it into an important
film that would be seen and appreciated by a wide audience. Some
observers considered him to be a washed up crackpot and anything but a
good risk.
To get to Manhattan I drove to D.C. and took the train to New York.
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.” It
had been purchased at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco eight
months earlier that year, but I hadn't read much of it since the flight
home.
Reading several of Bukowski’s tight, briefly-told tales back-to-back on a
fast-moving train really knocked me out. The feeling I had about the
story called “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,” is still easy to
conjure up.
To top it off, the whole trip was part of a business project. My
Biograph bosses in Georgetown wanted me to assess the commercial
potential for “Napoleon” for smaller markets in the mid-Atlantic region,
because they were considering a bold move to become a sub-distributor
of the film. So I was traveling on other people’s money!
Then, during my walk from the hotel to the theater, bad luck flung a
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 felt like a sharp-edged
boulder. Since my mission was to WATCH the movie I had to do something,
so I went out to the lobby.
Corny as it sounds I asked the first Radio City Music Hall employee I encountered 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 take
care of medical emergencies and yes, to flush blinding cinders out of
the patrons’ eyes; although the cinder had packed quite a punch, the
thing actually weighed less than a pound. Back in the auditorium, the
movie was spectacular.
The power that music played live by an orchestra added to
the overall experience would be difficult to overstate.
I
left the theater overwhelmed and 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 with orchestra pits in the region.
Unfortunately, the notion of playing Gance’s greatest film in cities all
over the country, accompanied by live orchestras, 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.
So the ambitious deal my bosses had in mind never materialized. Still, the new
four-hour version of “Napoleon” did run at the Biograph in February of
1983, to mark the theater’s 11th anniversary. It was still impressive, but not at all what it had been like at my
viewing in Manhattan. At least I got to see the part at the beginning I had missed
before.
Abel Gance died at the age of 92. He lived just long enough to see his
reputation as a great filmmaker totally rehabilitated. His death came
just three weeks after I saw “Napoleon,” during the run promoted in the
1-sheet seen to the right.
At the time of his death in the fall of 1981, once again, critics
were calling Gance a genius.
Which provides a rather happy ending to this meandering story.
