Pirating the Pirates

“People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. ” —George Lucas, 1988 “To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” —George Lucas, 2004 Vancouver, 2011: My then-roommate Willa Ross and I are at our wit’s end in one of Simon Fraser University’s characteristically antiseptic editing suites, having just spent the weekend hacking together three distinct copies of Sergio Leone’s 1966 western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all illegally ripped. The film had fallen victim to an MGM “restoration” in the early 2000s: Scenes Leone cut were reinstated, inflating the English-language runtime from 161 to 179 minutes, with Eastwood and Wallach dubbing the missing dialogue and a soundalike standing in for the late Lee Van Cleef. The mono soundtrack, meanwhile, had been reworked into a surround mix with jarringly modern gunshot effects. This “extended” cut was the only version commercially available for nearly a decade, an all-too-common fate in an era of revisionist studio reworkings. Our goal was simple: undo this butchery. We planned to combine sound from an out-of-print 1998 DVD (an approximation of the 1967 international release) with video from a recently imported Blu-ray of the Italian cut. After successfully navigating the various pitfalls of late-2000s home video ripping, our hopes were dashed by a catastrophic realization: The Italian cut was even more dissimilar to the international cut than the extended cut, the infamous torture scene entirely restructured and various shots missing heads and tails. We gave up for nearly a decade. *** Publicly accessible versions of major works of cinema are often wholly inadequate for reasons as diverse as the resultant shortcomings. A major studio’s home video arm might “expand” a film, remix a monaural audio track, wipe away digital grain, oversaturate or oversharpen the image, or even change the aspect ratio for the sake of an attractive sticker promising a new-and-improved experience. At other points, low budgets and corporate apathy lead to corners being cut. Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review—characterized the attitudes of negligent studios harshly in my recent interview with him: “‘Oh, you got a problem? The Kino [an American boutique label] disc is defective? So what. So what if it uses a defective Paramount master with frozen grain and [has] problems throughout.’ [The studios] don’t care that any given audio file is 30 years old and the channels are reversed.” Sometimes, this persists for decades: Every copy of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)released since its 1984 reconstruction has featured a major soundtrack mistake during the end credits brought about by a botched attempt to fix another error introduced in 1970, one example that particularly rankles Draper. This is where boutique labels come in—companies that independently license and release archival titles, in something like the spirit of Criterion’s founding aim: to gather significant films from around the world and present them as close to a filmmaker’s intent as possible, in the best technical condition available. Outfits like Arrow, Kino, and Eureka operate on a version of that premise. What any given label actually restores versus what it merely receives is a separate question, running a wide spectrum. Sometimes a label might receive a fully mastered digital file and find themselves contractually obliged to release it as-is; at other times, they might receive raw digital scans with partial or no cleanup; or they might be required to source, scan, and restore a film by themselves. James Flower, director of production at Arrow Films, a British boutique label renowned for its rigorous approach to preservation, raises a different culprit for historical inaccuracies: living filmmakers. The revisionist impulse is nearly as old as cinema—from Charlie Chaplin modernizing his silent classics in later years to Wong Kar-wai radically altering the color grading, aspect ratios, and soundtracks of his back catalog for a 2021 Criterion box set. In his note accompanying this set, Wong Kar-wai justified his alterations with a simple philosophy: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” However, this revisionist approach often leaves release-accurate versions unavailable to historians and audiences alike. In our interview, Flower recalled a director enamored with a digital aesthetic “wanting his films to look sleek and modern and degrained, with oversaturated colors that would not have been achievable photochemically.” Flower suggested including both the revised cut and a historically accurate version, but the director vehemently refused. Facing a deadline, Arrow acquiesced. “For me, he was vandalizing his own work,” says Flower. *** Vancouver, July 2019. Radicalized by a disheartening screening of the official MGM masters of Leone’s Dollars trilogy at a local cinematheque, Willa and I resume work on our cobbled-together cut. We now have better raw materials: a new Blu-ray with far superior picture quality, and an old LaserDisc with an uncompromised mono track. A decade of expertise (I have become a colorist and Willa an editor), alongside a decade of technical progress in editing tools available for independent filmmakers, enables us to properly process them. A local repertory cinema programmer catches wind of this, and a plan is hatched: book an official Digital Cinema Package from MGM and swap it out with our homebrew copy for a public screening. A magical evening ensues: It was as if we were seeing the film for the first time, smuggled before a live audience. After the screening, I’m approached by a man with an attitude that screams “so you think you know a thing or two, huh?” It turns out his attitude is warranted: He enthusiastically informs me that he’s spent years on his own far superior reconstruction—a 4K scan of a well-preserved IB Technicolor print of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. *** While digital tools have evolved, this pattern of unofficial preservation is by no means new. It’s the reason F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) survives: after Bram Stoker’s widow won a 1925 copyright suit, a German court ordered every print to be destroyed, but copies slipped past German jurisdiction and circulated for years as unauthorized bootlegs. Similarly, Kevin Brownlow’s reconstruction of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) began as an illicit teenage hobby. Starting in 1954, he spent decades tracking down fragments and duplicating fragile, rights-encumbered prints to keep them from disappearing—essentially a massive fan edit, eventually completed with Gance’s own participation. The most famous retrospective cinematic alteration was committed by George Lucas with massively controversial Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy—and the subsequent unavailability of unaltered versions in anything resembling acceptable quality. Both Draper and Flower cite the 2004 DVD release and emergence of communities such as the one found on OriginalTrilogy.com as key personal entrees into the world of fan preservation. Draper jokes that “I’ve learned more from George Lucas than anyone ever because he made certain choices that I didn’t agree with, so I started digging!” Starting in the mid-2000s, he took an active role on various forums, contributing wherever he could: “They eventually made a sub-thread about preservation efforts, which was everybody capturing VHS tapes and laserdiscs and trying to upscale LDs and sync other audio tracks. One thing led to another as the preservation scene grew out of one little thread.” Eventually, two distinct projects emerged. Petr “Harmy” Harmáček’s “Despecialized” edition, a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from various official releases, came first. Next was Team Negative1’s Project 4K77, which used homebrew 4K scans of 35mm theatrical prints to create accurate bootlegged digital copies. Both projects remain freely available to anyone willing to jump through some trivial internet hoops. When an informal network of amateurs questions the work of industry standard-bearers, it is rarely a matter of raw technical superiority but rather a fundamental difference in constraints. While restoration entities often operate on strict budgets and tight deadlines, preservationists can spend years cross-referencing decades of older releases. This is not to say fan efforts are infallible—debates in online forums about accurate color grades spurred by the recent influx of amateur 35mm scans of release prints demonstrate how certain elements remain moving targets—but for objective elements like editorial cuts, missing frames, or unaltered audio, historical reference materials generally leave little room for debate. Furthermore, fans operate entirely outside the structural limitations that thwart even skilled industry technicians. A professional lab might make all the right archival choices only to have those compromised by a revisionist director or a studio’s marketing needs. Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources and infrastructure haven’t: banding together to preserve and disseminate historically accurate versions of some of the most beloved films in history—an end-run around the rights and financial issues that hold legitimate enterprises back. Flower notes: “We don’t always have the time or budget, or even the legal right, to do multiple versions. Fans don’t have those restrictions. They can do as many variations as they want, and that’s fine.” As of this writing, Project 4K77 features dozens of audio tracks and a file size exceeding 100GB: both impossible on any commercial Blu-ray release, and unfeasible for online distribution via legitimate channels. Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation. Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality. Want a version of Stop Making Sense (1984) in which you can freely select every soundtrack mix ever released? You won’t find it on the official A24 disc; you have to turn to a remux circulating on a few highly exclusive private torrent websites. The original 5.1 mix of Master and Commander (2003) married to the new 4K transfer? Remux. Dr. No (1962) with audio that hasn’t been scrubbed of all its detail? Remux. Draper sees this pooling of resources as an incredible service: “Somebody’s already done a great job of the work you were going to do yourself.” His thoughts quickly turn, however: “We’re all worried about the crackdown coming at any point. Put your hood on, look over your shoulder, go to the back door video speakeasy and give the secret recognition code.” The elephant in the room: Legally, this is piracy. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, merely breaking a Blu-ray’s digital lock to rip the video files is a federal violation, regardless of intent. The law makes no distinction between mass-distributing a movie for profit and preserving the historical record. To take part in these preservation projects is to take on significant legal risk, with admonishments from rights holders and cease-and-desist letters being common. Flower sees copyright law as a double-edged sword for film preservation. Though intellectual property rights—and the resultant studio-mandated limitations—hold Arrow back from certain actions that would be theoretically possible otherwise, these same rights in many ways ensure their income: “We have to protect our interest as well as that of the rights holders that have entrusted their films to us. We spend a lot of money on licensing and restoring. I certainly don’t think that copyright is something that should be abolished, unless someone can think of another commercial framework that would allow us to invest in the work we do.” Yet he maintains that there is a place for piracy-based preservation: “It comes down to who is financially benefiting from these things. In terms of using a physical copy and then manipulating it or finding another use for it beyond just watching it, that is a gray area that I’m personally more inclined to be generous towards.” A sort of “pirate’s code” has emerged among these communities: an attempt to create a parallel set of norms in a context in which the strict definition of “legal” can no longer operate as a guiding principle. “You have to own a physical copy of at least one version of any given film,” says Draper. “We’re not trying to make any money out of this. Don’t make your own bootleg copies and throw them on eBay, or throw them on Twitter of all places.” Nevertheless, the clandestine nature of these efforts weighs on Draper: “It would be nice if there was at least a little bit more recognition of unofficial preservation efforts. I feel like there’s a gigantic weight about to come crashing down on me at any second because, heaven forbid, I bought another twenty laserdiscs and captured audio tracks and bought VHS tapes on eBay to compare audio captures to fix the bad audio they didn’t care about the first time around.” *** Vancouver, December 2020. While cooking dinner in my apartment, I get a call from a California number. Must be a scam. Then an email: “Read your profile on National Post. I work in mastering and want to talk to you guys about The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” Apparently, word of our pseudo-legal screening had gotten around. So began my semi-official involvement in film preservation. I roped in Willa and, most importantly, Benji Heran—the man who had accosted me after our screening of the film the year prior—and Jordan Krug, the other party responsible for their remarkable bootleg restoration of the film which would prove to be the main editorial reference point of every subsequent release. What ensued was a months-long collaboration to turn the drastically underfunded 2021 Kino Lorber release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from a disaster-in-waiting to the best home video release of the film since the 1990s. Doing so involved much chicanery: Benji and Jordan supplied ripped LaserDisc audio that became the release’s main track, while Blake Blasingame—who deserves the lion’s share of credit for this release’s strengths—fulfilled his contractual obligation for a surround mix by simply placing that mono track into a 5.1 container with extremely mild panning effects. When a high-up Kino figure made a Blu-Ray.com thread to read the room on whether to include the international cut, Willa and I made dummy accounts and anonymously badgered him into making our preferred version the primary feature. The result was a release that—despite a highly compressed turnaround time, virtually nonexistent budget, and compromised source materials—was nonetheless a largely accurate approximation of the 1967 international cut of the film in reasonably high fidelity. At last. *** Flower had been leveraging the fan community’s knowledge to assist with various releases for some time prior to his work on Arrow’s release of Leone’s Dollars trilogy. “That ultimately winds up being a regular part of my research process; I go, ‘What have the fan restorers done? Can we pre-empt them from having to [fix the release] by bringing that fix into an official space if we’re allowed?’ Just recently with Mortal Kombat [1995], I happened upon a capture of an original DTS cinema mix that walloped the 5.1 audio on the prior Blu-Ray, so I was like, ‘Well, we’ll just use that!’ That’s me pirating the pirates, I guess.” Because labels like Arrow, Criterion, and Eureka release dozens of films a year, their researchers are by necessity generalists. “As much as I would love us to have intimate knowledge with every film that we work on, we’re usually not in that position,” says Flower. This is where he reaches out to amateur experts. “Brandon Bentley—who does a lot of stuff on the Hong Kong cinema side—started out literally as an amateur. His work is so good that I see him as a colleague; he’s the person we turn to when we want to digitally recreate photochemical credits.” Flower compares his process in an official capacity with Arrow to his early days trawling internet forums: “When I came to work for Arrow, I was bringing a lot of awareness of the methods of fan preservationists on the torrent sites. When it came time to officially create different versions of things—the big box set of the Gamera films—it’s the same methodology. It’s just in an official capacity by sheer dint of the fact that we have the license for the film and I’m not working with a DVD rip, I’m working with a ProRes [a professional video codec] master.” *** In May 2024, I met James—along with other key figures at Arrow—on a video call in which Benji, Jordan, Willa, myself, and eventually Spencer, were officially brought in as consultants on Arrow’s forthcoming release of the Dollars trilogy. The expertise of the amateur enthusiast community was, at long last, aligned with an officially sanctioned organization with the resources and patience to make a fully realized, historically rigorous release happen. No internet trolling of label heads or NDA-breaking was necessary. The process took a very leisurely and considered year. And we still used the LaserDisc audio. While drafting this article, I checked my usual private torrent site for the latest copy of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The 4K Arrow release is on there, in all its 89gb glory, with the Italian track that Arrow was unable to secure the rights to and every single commentary track ever released—including those not present on the Arrow disc—all muxed in. The cycle continues.