Amateur Film Restorers Spent a Decade Building Their Own Cut of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A pair of Vancouver-based amateur restorers dedicated a decade to crafting their own cut of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, since the official version had been altered beyond recognition. The work was finished by 2019, according to a recent interview with Spencer Draper, known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader, who analyzes digital releases with scholarly rigor on YouTube.

In 2011, the restoration started when Willa Ross and her then-roommate patched together three illegally ripped copies of Leone’s 1966 western. The film had been altered by MGM in the early 2000s, adding scenes Leone cut, inflating the English-language runtime from 161 to 179 minutes, and dubbing dialogue for Eastwood and Wallach while a soundalike stood in for the late Lee Van Cleef. A mono soundtrack was remixed into a surround mix with modern gunshot effects.

The Restoration’s Early Failure

The aim was plain: undo this butchery. They meant to join sound from a 1998 DVD, a close copy of the 1967 international release, to video drawn from a newly arrived Blu-ray of the Italian cut. Navigating the hazards of late-2000s home video ripping brought on a ruinous discovery. The Italian cut proved even more unlike the international cut than the extended cut, with the torture scene entirely reworked and several shots missing their openings and endings. They gave up for nearly a decade.

What Studio Alterations Actually Do

Versions of major works of cinema that the public can access are frequently far from adequate. The home video division of a major studio may add content, mix a monaural soundtrack, erase digital grain, overstate the color saturation, over-sharpen the picture, or alter the shape for a label advertising a new-and-improved edition. Insufficient funding and indifference within a corporation also cause corners to be left unattended.

In the interview, Draper described negligent studios with harsh words. He noted that studios do not care that any given audio file is 30 years old and the channels are reversed. Sometimes this lasts for decades. Every copy of Once Upon a Time in the West released since its 1984 reconstruction has included a major soundtrack error during the end credits, caused by a botched attempt to fix an earlier error introduced in 1970. That specific mistake particularly bothers Draper.

Small labels come in to cover the shortfall. Companies like Arrow, Kino, and Eureka license and release old titles, presenting films as close to a filmmaker’s original vision as possible, using the best technical condition available. What any given label actually restores compared to what it merely takes over varies widely. Here’s how:

1. Sometimes a label gets a fully mastered digital file and is contractually required to put it out as-is.
2. Other times, they get raw digital scans with partial or no cleanup.
3. At still other times, they are required to source, scan, and restore a film on their own.

Living Filmmakers as Culprits

Filmmakers who are still living have spent years making changes to their older work. This includes Charlie Chaplin updating his silent films from earlier times, and Wong Kar-wai significantly changing the color grading, aspect ratios, and soundtracks of his past films for a 2021 Criterion box set. The desire to revise is almost as old as cinema itself. In his note accompanying that set, Wong Kar-wai explained his approach with a straightforward statement: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Historians and audiences frequently find that exact versions of films are missing from the record. James Flower, who runs production at Arrow Films, remembers a director who loved the look of digital work “wanting his films to look sleek and modern and degrained, with oversaturated colors that would not have been achievable photochemically.”. Flower proposed keeping both the altered cut and an accurate version faithful to history. The director rejected the idea outright. Because of a tight deadline, Arrow gave in “For me, he was vandalizing his own work,” according to Flower.

The Finish Line in 2019

In Vancouver, on July 2019, Willa and her former roommate returned to work on their cobbled-together cut after watching the official MGM masters of Leone’s Dollars trilogy at a local cinematheque. The screening had left both of them disheartened, and they now possessed better raw materials: a new Blu-ray with far superior picture quality, and an old LaserDisc with an uncompromised mono track. Ten years of experience — she became a colorist and he an editor — combined with a decade of technical progress in editing tools for independent filmmakers, allowed them to properly process their work.

When word got back to a local repertory cinema programmer about this, they acted on it. They arranged for an official Digital Cinema Package from MGM to be booked, then replaced it with their own homemade version for a public showing.

This tale functions as a spirited uprising against studio ineptitude, demonstrating what transpires when amateurs decline to submit to a spoiled rendition of a cherished film.

Source material: “Pirating the Pirates,” mubi.com.

cinema preservation · film restoration · homebrew cinema · movie piracy · western movies