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Restoring old gems to new glory: the Outfest Legacy Project is saving queer film one delicate print at a time
Advocate, The, July 3, 2007 by Mike Goodridge
Five years ago at a Los Angeles screening of seminal 1986 gay movie Parting Glances, actor Steve Buscemi--who got his big break in the film--was stunned by the poor quality of the original print being screened. Buscemi and Stephen Gutwillig, executive director of L.A.'s LGBT film festival Outfest, turned to each other and agreed that the print was on the verge of being unpresentable, meaning that one of the first films to address the AIDS crisis--and whose director, Bill Sherwood, died of AIDS complications in 1990--was in danger of being lost forever.
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That realization, says Gutwillig, spurred the founding of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation, an ambitious new initiative that seeks to preserve LGBT cinema by restoring individual films to glory--and by archiving them along with other classic works.
"The precarious state that these films are in goes largely unnoticed," says Gutwillig. 'These are independent movies that people think are easily accessible because they are on DVD, but just because they are available today doesn't mean they will be tomorrow. We need to raise millions to undo the damage."
In the case of Parting Glances, which tells the story of a New York gay couple and was the first film in the project to be restored, the cost was $100,000. Although it's available on DVD, "in the medium that Bill Sherwood wanted to show the film, there were no viable screening prints available," says Gutwillig. Film buff that he is, he compares the DVD version "to cutting a reproduction of an Ansel Adams photograph from Time and putting that in a frame."
After the film's rights-holder agreed to the restoration, then sent the existing negatives and soundtrack, the Legacy Project (under the aegis of the University of California, Los Angeles, Film and Television Archive) assembled a pristine-quality 35-millimeter print. The restoration will have its world premiere at Outfest on July 16.
Next on the docket? The landmark 1977 documentary Word Is Out, made by San Francisco film collective the Mariposa Group. No viable prints exist, and there's never been a DVD--although substandard VHS copies turn up from time to time--so the Legacy Project is piecing together a print from 36 dusty boxes' worth of outtakes, negatives, and other elements that represented three different versions of the film. Once finished, it will have a DVD release from New Yorker Films.
The two films will join the Outfest Legacy Collection at UCLA. With more than 5,000 LGBT titles in various formats, it's the world's largest public collection of LGBT films in any language.
"It's an impossible-to-complete task," says Gutwillig about the Legacy Project, "but it has profound significance in terms of keeping these images alive. No one is going to take responsibility for our movie heritage, apart from ourselves."
COPYRIGHT 2007 LPI Media
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