Juggernauting, Part 6

Juggernating
Part 6

I said there’d be no more Juggernauting posts until the video(s) were released, but I’m a filthy liar.

I finished the rough cut of the five-reel premier version reconstruction a few days ago, and not to toot my own horn, but I’m very pleased with it. It clocks in at 58 minutes and 33 seconds, not including credits or whatever introductory text might be prepended, but it may gain or lose a couple minutes in tweaking the animation speed and title length. It will take several times going over until the flow is right. 30 minutes and 40 seconds are actual moving pictures, the remainder is a photo reconstruction.

Of the lost reels, reel one was the easiest to recreate. I had seven separate stills to work with from it, not to mention a lot of easily repurposed footage from later in the film. I only had to resort to footage from other films for the poker game scene. It’s such a major part of the story that it has to be represented, but I’ve no stills of it nor any material elsewhere in the film that could be made to resemble it even through the most creative use of cropping and matting. I took a shot from the poker game in The Girl in the Arm-Chair and composited William R. Dunn’s head onto Mace Greenleaf’s body. I would have much preferred to use only Juggernaut material, but failing that, it works nicely. (I should clarify, I don’t have any stills of the game itself. I do have two stills of the fight that follows when Philip discovers he’s being cheated.) The long happy ending’s hospital scenes in reel five also requires some outside footage. Just like in the 2012 reconstruction, it comes from Wanted:- A Nurse, with Anita Stewart and Earle Williams filling in for Sidney Drew and Ethel Lee.

Biggest trouble is reel four. For reel four, I only have two production stills, and they’re actually from the same part of the same scene from different angles. (More accurately, only one of them is a production still, the other is a frame enlargement. The still photographer stood about six or eight feet to the right of the cameraman, evidently.) That’s actually the main reason I sat on the footage so long — I was hoping another reel four still or two would turn up, and I didn’t want to go ahead with what I had until it became clear nothing else was going to surface. As I said before, that happens really quite often. The original Everette True video was scrapped at about 90% completion when I found a better quality print. More recently, The Sawdust Ring had been out about week when I acquired a print that’s largely identical and of inferior quality to the one I used, but it does have some footage that my Argentine print doesn’t. It does help, though, that the surviving last reel of Juggernaut is actually from the four reel abridgment and as such it contains a bit of footage from both the original fifth reel and the fourth — about 80-20 — so while I struggled with scrounging up images to use, reel four is actually the longest of the reconstructed reels thanks to the three minutes of surviving footage towards the end.

The five-reel premier version will be tinted. I know it would have been tinted originally, but I’ve found no record describing just how it was. The tinting scheme I used is based on the two Vitagraph films I have on nitrate, Her Faith in the Flag and a brief fragment of an unidentified circa-1915 Maurice Costello drama. It’s a very ordinary scheme, nothing unusual in what color is used for what situation. The only thing of note is the intertitles, which are tinted purple. The main title, being a Blue Ribbon release, should obviously be blue. The amalgamated or “watchable” version I’ve spoken of before, with the short happy ending and all the abridgments left as-is, will be black and white.

Speaking of the titles, while the watchable version will retain the original titles (excepting those in the reconstructed reels, of course), the premier version’s will all be replacements, for this reason: The picture quality takes a hit with each generation removed from the camera negative. It will get grainier, which can be corrected to a degree with judicious temporal and/or spacial smoothing. It will get fuzzier, which sharpening filters of various sorts can address. It will get more flickery, which — provided your image has got enough depth to start with — can be nearly eliminated in all but extreme cases. But the most difficult thing to undo is cropping. For the picture, you can build up something of a background if the camera tilts or pans, but that’s often unsatisfactory and very little else is possible. Titles, though, those can be un-cropped simply by redoing them. Example, we want to take this title:

…which is cropped to such a degree that some of the text is missing, and make it look like this:

…which is closer to how it would have originally appeared. And there’s no trick or magic to that — it’s just loading the original image in Photoshop and having the patience to paint in what’s missing. All the premier version’s titles have been brought back to something close to their correct framing.

The reconstruction dialogue titles are all exact reproductions of the original text with one exception, that being Louise’s first line, which I changed from “Why are the papers so antagonistic?” to “Father, why are the papers so antagonistic?” to make it more obvious who she is. It’s just after the time jump and we haven’t been introduced to Louise yet or filled-in on what Philip has done since Viola’s death. Without making it clear, it’s too easy to mistake her for his second wife. The descriptive titles are less exacting but hew as close to the synopsis text in the exhibitor’s handbook as possible.

It will take a while to score The Juggernaut. For one, it’s a feature-length film and I’m rather out of practice with those. With a short, if you like a piece and it fits the scene, you use it, because it’s probably the only scene of that type in the film. With a feature, there are a lot of similar scenes that that piece might fit, and you want to make sure it’s used to best effect because you can only use it once. Unless you’re doing character themes, of course. Like, in The Soilers, all of Clarence’s scenes are scored with Milady Dainty, but each is snipped from a different part of the tune — you can’t just endlessly repeat it. Themes are a good way to handle a film without a lot of action or films where the action is one-note (like The Soilers). Two, in photo reconstructions, there’s implied motion but no actual movement for the music to follow. It falls on the music itself to suggest action.

Finally, for the next video, I went with my first inclination and threaded-up Doll-House Mystery in the scanner. I was also considering Broken China, since I really wasn’t aware until recently how rare my print of the film is. The one-reel abridgment is reasonably common, but mine is the original two-reel version, which is considerably less so. But I’m just not in the mood to work on a film I despise. Dancer is all right but I like Doll-House quite a bit. I usually process the film as it’s being scanned — saves time that way — but I’ve been entirely focused on the The Juggernaut and haven’t done anything but let 604 gigabytes of raw image data build up on the capture drives. I’m not looking forward to tackling that.

In fact, let’s not. Let’s start scoring Juggernaut. Doll-House can wait.