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MillimeterVintage Co-Star
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
George Clooney's black-and-white film about journalist Edward R. Murrow's battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy incorporates about 20 minutes of archival footage of McCarthy and other newsmakers of that era. Clips of Murrow's old shows on CBS play on monitors and large screens in screening rooms, and a few archival sequences also run full-screen for short periods. Since it's highly unusual for a non-documentary, narrative piece to use this much archival news footage, incorporating it into the fictional footage (shot on Kodak Vision 2 5218 stock by DP Robert Elswit) was complicated.
George Clooney as Fred W. Friendly (left) and David Straithern (right) as Edward R. Murrow view one such clip on vintage monitors at CBS Studios.
Archival scene researcher Kenn Rabin was in charge of finding and licensing the footage. He took the project to the BBC Motion Gallery, which represents the CBS archives. (Some additional archival material came from other libraries.)
“The hardest part was when the actors were in screening rooms looking at clips playing through projectors or in edit rooms viewing them on Moviolas,” Rabin explains. “Those original clips were shot by Murrow's cameraman, Charlie Mack, in 35mm using Eymo cameras, so my initial idea was to find the original 35mm negatives of those clips in the CBS archives and make 35mm prints from those negatives. BBC Motion Gallery did a wonderful job helping us find boxes of 35mm reels from that era that had not been opened in decades. We then went looking for the original reels that were most likely to have the 35mm negatives we were looking for. [Film researcher] Andrew Noren located those reels, but we discovered that, although we had the right reels, the sequences we needed had previously been pulled out of them and never reconstituted.”
The archives were then scoured for the best possible kinescopes of those particular sequences as they appeared on Murrow's shows — material that mostly existed in the 16mm format, but sometimes as negative, sometimes as interpositive. One exception was McCarthy's famous rebuttal to Murrow, which existed on 35mm.
Vintage clips of Senator McCarthy were incorporated extensively into Good Luck, and Good Night’s narrative.
Technicolor Creative Services (TCS), New York, did an HD transfer using a Spirit 2k system, while Trackwise, New York, cleaned up the kinescopes' audio tracks. The footage then went on D5 and DAT to Technicolor Creative Services (formerly Complete Post), Hollywood. TCS performed additional cleanup and created HD masters for use in the DI process, done at Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI), Burbank, Calif.
“We used [Grass Valley's] Scream software to help with grain management on the 16mm material,” explains Christian Zak, executive producer at Technicolor New York and scanning producer on the project. “Instead of a final grade, we just put a flat grade on the images and let them plug that into what they were doing for the DI, giving them maximum flexibility to make density decisions during the DI's density grade, since this is a black-and-white film.”
TDI editor Mark Sahagun then used an Autodesk Fire system to conform the entire movie, including the archival clips, while colorist Stephen Nakamura performed the density grade on the black-and-white imagery using da Vinci 2k Plus technology.
“Because this was black-and-white footage, it was hard for [TCS' dirt reduction software] to discern what was dirt and what was a reflection off eyeglasses or a glare from a suit-coat button,” says postproduction supervisor Peter Phillips. “Therefore, most of the postproduction cleanup on the full-frame [portions of the vintage clips] had to be done frame-by-frame, by hand. Then, as part of the DI, they did additional cleanup.”
Read Clooney's insight on the project here.
