Hello there everybody, and welcome back to the Disconnected. I am here with Craig and Dennis from Deaf Crocodile. Thank you guys for coming on today. I've gotten many many requests to hear some stories from you guys, because you have such a wild past in terms of the industry this hobby as a whole restoration and suddenly coming on as many people's newfound favorite boutique, Blu Ray label. So thank you for fulfilling all of those requests today. Appreciate it.
Oh, thank you for having us. For those that don't know, could you possibly share one of the time some of your your varied magical backgrounds that both of you have had. Maybe Craig go first. Sure. I moved to Los Angeles in nineteen ninety four to go to film school and I found I couldn't afford USC and so I found actually a film trade school called Columbia College Hollywood, and they used to be on Le Brea Avenue in Hollywood,
and they've now moved to the old Panavision building in Tarzana. They're much bigger and nicer place than when I was going there. Then kind of got disillusioned, worked in travel that industry imploded with the everything going on to the Internet, so reached out to a friend I had met when I was in film school and got a job at Imax back in two thousand, so I've worked in film since two thousand. I was at Imax for a little over a
decade. One of the things I liked most about working at Imax was when I was doing digital. It wasn't really restoration so much. It was because it was like usually new films, but being Imax, the screens are so large. Things had to be very clean or it looked very dirty. And then that combined with my love of history and just sit them in general, I thought, you know what I'd really like to do is restore movies. And I was also kind of inspired by Martin Scorsese's passion for film preservation.
So when I left Imax, I was like, well, I'm going to just try doing this on my own, and I started a one man operation and reached out to some people I knew and started. The first work was restoring some old sixty surfing films for mcgilery Freeman, who he got his start making surfing films in the sixties, and then he was doing aerial photography.
He actually shot the aerial opening of the Shining Oh Wow. And then when Imax debuted in the seventies, he was one of the first people to make an Imax film and then that's that's his whole career that he's known for now is with Imax films, but it started with his surfing films. So I was working on those. That led to I needed a place that could scan sixteen millimeter reversal, and so Delicious in Holly would could do that, and they did that job for me, but then convinced me I should work for
them, being the head of their restoration. So that's where I met Dennis This and Delicious was it was kind of amazing. It was like every everybody was doing what they really loved doing, and then just internally that company kind of imploded, and a group of us just decided, well, well, this is silly, you know, the the company imploded not because of business, and we're all doing what we love. We should just keep doing it on our own. So then we formed Barbelows and then Dennis and I just
kind of we just had different ideas of what we wanted to do. So Dennis and I were like, well, we can do what we want to do, and we started deaf guys out and already making some waves obviously with that name. So thank you guys for that specifically, what about yourself there, Dennis, So, I would say NYU Film School back in the eighties New York City when it was still kind of Lou Reed's New York and you know, there were guys selling bootlegs tapes of Springsteen concerts on Saint Mark's place.
And then when I got out, I worked for a little while for Tribeca Productions, Robert de Niro's production company when they first opened the Tribeca Film Center town, and through connection with Scorsese's office, I got an interview out here in ninety two with the American Cinema Tech and they hired me as they're head of programming, and I was involved with them on and off for almost their years. Versus head of programming. I left for a while and then
came back on the executive management side. And then parallel to that, I had sold some scripts to the studios to Fox and New Line, and I wound up writing and producing an anthology horror film called Trap Dashes that Lionsgate put up in two thousand and seven with episodes directed by Monte Hellman and Joe Dante and Ken Russell and Sean Cunningham, and then continued working free lance until I partnered with the guy named Paul Korver, who was the president of Sinalicious as
a parent company, and we started a distribution division, which is how I got to work with Craig, and we wound up licensing, and Craig wound up restoring Belladonna Sadness and Funeral Parade of Roses and Leslie Stevens private property, a bunch of great projects. So we've continued to work together since. And I'm also now the executive director for a long running nonprofit in LA called the Philosophical Research Society, So we've got a bunch of different while projects going interesting.
We have a current project we're going to talk about a little bit for Solomon King, but first just to share some of the philosophies. Speaking of for this channel, I really highlight archival on this channel quite a bit and making sure that we're saving things, and that's why we talk about physical media so much, and having these restorations be something that we value as important in
society. And then the other thing is I tend to really try to focus on transparency because there's a lot of entitlement in this hobby nowadays, and there's a lot of people that don't understand the behind the scenes stuff. So as much as you can share we talked through this would be absolutely wonderful. And speaking of those, we've got a couple of questions that were given to me from my patrons of the channel, and the first one talking about restoration.
They want to know, can you speak to both of your collective pathways into the restoration business and how maybe collecting any physical media sort of got there for you than first, well, the incident that comes to mind is many years ago. This would have been in the mid nineteen nineties, when I was programming at the Cinema Tech. We organized a retrospective tribute to the Monty Python
group and we were really fortunate. We had Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle join us, and Neil Lennis and Carol Cleveland and Graham Chapman's longtime
companion husband. And when we were prepping, we got a box from Terry Gilliam that had been in his basement for decades, and it was all these amazing reels, original thirty five millimeters reels of pre python animations that he had done for various British TV programs, and there were little notes on it that said, treat this as if it's the only copy, because it is.
And when the time came to do the actual screenings, Terry Gillium actually came up to the booth and noticed that we were projecting off of digital instead of the film prints, and he said, why aren't you running the film prints
that I sent you? And I said, you know, if I were responsible for damaging in any way the only existing copy of this incredibly rare and beautiful animation that you did in the late sixties, like, I couldn't forgive my So that was probably the first thing in the back of my mind. One Opening that box was kind of like peering into King Hut's tomb and just seeing all of these wonderful treasures. But then the second part of it is
like film is a very fragile medium. I wound up spending five years researching and writing a book about obsessive film collectors and film dealers that University of Mississippi Press put out in twenty sixteen called a Thousand Cuts, and everyone I spoke
to had found some rare and unique element. One of the collectors, West Shank, was responsible for finding the four minutes of missing footage that had been cut out of the original nineteen thirty three King Kong, and that's footage of Kong playing erotically with Fay raised dress and kind of stomping and chewing on some of the natives on Skull Island. And it had been cut out in the late thirties during the Hayes production code when they thought it was too graphic and
disturbing and some so they'd actually cut it out of the negative and it was lost. And what had happened was clearly back in the thirties, when the order came down to remove the footage, some projectionists cut it out of a
release print, spliced it together and just kept it. And then many decades later this reel found its way to west Shank, and I asked him what he did with it, because eventually he turned it over to RKO so that they could include it and have the full length version of the film again. And I said that you charge the money, and he said, no, I really he said, it didn't belong to me, It belonged to everyone who loved King Kong. And I said, well, you know, that's
an amazing kind of altruistic attitude to take. This isn't mine, and that's I think our attitude as well. Is our job is really to shine the best possible light on the films and the filmmakers and hopefully present the movies the way they would want them to be seen. And it's not about us.
It's about the movies, whether it's Unknown Man of Shandigo or Delta Space Mission, or Helia Murrimetz and Sampo and upcoming Solomon King, or the new films that we've been doing, like The Shepherdess and The Seven Songs in the Village House and others. We're really here to kind of support and assist the filmmakers and make sure that we don't destroy Terry Gilliam's only copy of its super rare pre python animations. Did anything ever happen with all those originally the film reels?
You know, that's a good question. I mean, we returned all of the materials, of course to Terry afterwards, and I don't know if anyone has put them out as a like Jerry Gilliam pre Python Rarities collection, because it was all these little interstitial bits and opening and closing credits and different things. As far as I know, it has not come out as a
single package, and it was really wonderful stuff. I mean, if you love the pythons and and I don't want to talk to you if you don't love money Python it you know, it was so much like his later work. It's just fantastic to see. So it sounds like you need to make some phone calls that I need, I need to get to be a wonderful companion release to this. Yes, well we actually we have a companion released to that upcoming which we haven't announced, but you know, Craig can tell
you about that as well. When other people are looking to get into restoration, do you guys have any suggestions for people that work in sort of an adjacent field, maybe editing or videography of some sort, because it seems like more and more people are doing that on their own nowadays. But when you are in this hobby, the passion, if you really have it for these
films, it will tend to lead you toward that path. Eventually. It feels like yeah, I mean this secret to getting into restoration is loving it a whole lot because you're not going to make any money. But yeah, it's it's I don't know how to explain it. It's like, yeah, you, I mean there are some very specific, you know, technical software you kind of need, and then there's not a whole lot of you. I mean, you get a little bit of training from the company, but
you kind of just have to do it. It's there's no I don't know. Most most film schools don't have a specific restoration course. You know, some places will have they have some stuff about archiving and preservation, which is a very related but not the same because yeah, preservation is usually we're talking like photochemical and making sure that it's in a vault for posterity. That's not
the same as you know, digital restoration, which is for access. Like they're two one but both sides need each other, but they're not the same thing, right, Because you know, there's lots of archives that do amazing work and have saved a lot of films that still no one has seen because they're just sitting in their archives. They're safe. But what's the point if no one knows they exist? Exactly. Some of the stuff that you guys
put out seems to have been on that path for a long time. Like your first release was The Unknown Man of Shandigor and this was gone for just decades, right, Yeah, that was The Unknown Movie of Shandigor. You know, we were really lucky. We got in touch with the Michael and Christian Roy, who were the sons of Jean Louis Roy. It was the late filmmaker who sadly died just before we were able to get in touch with his estates, but his sons and his wife were incredibly cooperative and supportive.
We licensed the rights from them, and then the Cinematech Suisse had done a four K scan of the camera negative and transfer of the audio materials, and Craig was able to work his magic and wizardry on those materials to improve it
even more. And that was just a movie that had been kind of on my radar for decades, and I just loved the title and the few images that I had seen from it. But I don't think, at least I wasn't prepared for how visually beautiful and striking the film turned out in the end. Both the direction and the cinematography by Roger Bimpaj was the director of photography on Kids. A really stunning film. Really is just he's on the screen
beautifully, the black and white cinematography. Dennis had told me about it and his I don't know, he undertold it to me. And so I mean between Sin Delicious and Arbelos and and and now Deaf Crocodile. My my background was always old studio in the American studio films. That's those are the films I know. I don't we can't work on those because they're studio films. So so I've relied on Dennis and our old partners at Arbelos and Sin Delicious
to unearth these films that I've never heard of before. And so he told me, He's like, oh, this is this the Swiss film you know, No man is Shander Gore. And I was like, okay. Uh So then I we got the film and the first time I watched it, I immediately called Dennis and I'm just like, dude, do you really undersold this? Like this thing is spectacular. It's it's it's hard to describe too.
It is like it is a it's a spy film of its own, but it's also kind of a send up of spy films, but it's it's the fine line between you know, its own thing and a send up of it. It plays it right down the middle. And then, like Dennis had said, the cinematography and the and the location shooting, and it's it's the most beautiful. I mean it's it's visually it's better than any spy film I've ever seen, you know, know, like it's just absolutely stunning.
So yeah, when I when I got the the scans and I was going through it, I was just like, scene after scene, I was like, this is just stunning. Really. When I first popped that in, that was the first thing that caught me is this is not just your average film restoration. This looks incredible. And then the first couple acts were good and beautiful as usual, But then that third act comes and it just flies and everything on that it like jumps off the screen at you. Is something
that you just know is special. Is there something that originally got you guys into film that maybe maybe enhanced your passion for sharing some of these just very lost films with people, because that's just such a very specific, you know, niche that a lot of people will never even hear about very specific titles.
Obviously, you know, I used to, like I said before, be it a hit of programming for the American cinema tech out here, and so sometimes I would spend a ridiculous amount of time tracking down a film that was hard to see. I spent years trying to find a print of of Mario Bova's Twitch of the Death Nerve before it was widely available, and I had to say, you know, there was a commentator on NPR a couple of years ago made a great observation and said, you know, this is
a fantastic time to be a content consumer. It's a very difficult time to be a content creator in terms of getting a satisfying or sustainable revenue stream But if you were a fan of or you just discovered for the first time the movies of Kinji Fukusaku or Mario Bava or Argento or any of these great genre
filmmakers, you can access beautiful HD streaming copies of their films instantaneously. You can get gorgeous blu rays, and you know you can actually and we have from time to time as a backup, or if no other materials were available, you could project in a very large movie theater off of Blu ray, and it looks really good. And that's incredible that there is a that there is a consumer format that is that high resolution, that that is kind of
an incredible like paradigm shift. Well, yeah, it's not even talking about the four K Blu rays now, yeah, oh yeah, no, I mean, I mean four K is the cinema standard now, so we have that at home. Four K. If you if you scan, you know, or if you have a four K player, you are essentially seeing the resolution of a thirty five millimeter film frame. So that is equivalent to owning
a thirty five millimeter print. And so I knew. I talked with a lot of collectors that had, you know, some of them who were really obsessive collected thirty five millimeter and even had built beautiful miniature movie palaces with projection booth in their own home with thirty five milimeter changeover. But most of them collected sixteen millimeter. But Blu ray and especially you know, four K Ultra high death is way beyond that in terms of the resolution you're seeing, and
that is kind of mind blowing. So when I came out here in the nineties and I started getting interested in the work of Mario Bobbin and Luccio Fulci and Jess Franco. There was almost nothing available on any home video consumer format, and so so I would spend five seven years trying to find a print of Twitch of the Death Nerve, which we eventually found, I think with
the Cinematech Royale in Belgium and brought in for a one time show. So I would spend all of this time fly a print in and we would show it one time. I remember we did a tribute to Hammer Films in the UK and we brought in an original thirty five millimeters ibtechnicolored print of John Gillings The Reptile with Jacqueline Pierce, one of two great companion films he made, along with Plague of the Zombies or two of my favorite Hammer films. This
print was immaculate. It must have been the show print they probably used for the premiere, and I'm guessing it was struck off the camera negative because it looked like it had never run through a protector or maybe once and it came from the vaults. I think at Pinewood we showed it once and I knew Immediately I was like, this is one of the most beautiful technically prints I've ever seen. And then afterwards we boxed it up and we shipped it back
to England. Now, if you were there for that show, the hundred and twenty five people who saw it had this incredible experience like never to be repeated, literally because I don't know where that print is now or if it even still exists, but it occurred to me at some point this is like a lot of work for you know, a one time event, and that's
great if you're an exhibition. But from a an access preservation, consumer perspective, you know, maybe making these things available in a format that's more easily accessible is a better thing. And that's what we do now. If we don't we love film, almost everything we do starts in an analog film format but then is transferred to digital and you know, and Craig can talk about
the work he's doing in our colorist Tyler Fegerstrom on Solomon King. That is the you know, example a for why digital restoration is so important because everything they're doing could not be done photochemically. Absolutely not. As much as I love the film medium, I wrote a book about people who are obsessed with film, I also see what an incredible tool digital restoration is, and for me, they're not. Some people are like, ah, we're never going
to show digital. We're thirty five millimeters only and you know, and there is a purity to that, and there's a kind of a cool marketing book. But for me, it's it's the material itself and what is the best way to make it, you know, accessible and in the best format possible. And absolutely digital restoration is the way to go for almost everything we've done well. And it's sustainable too, obviously, with how fragile film can be
over time. So the problem that people have with the the idea of if I hate digital, I only want to see film is they've seen bad restorations. Yeah, because so many people, different companies, even large companies that should know better, will just scrub all the grain gone like, and then
they'll add a because that softens the image. So then they add a bunch of sharpening and so now you've got just sharp edged, you know, blobs with no texture running around, And people are like, see digital is off. It's like, well, no, Like, when you do it wrong, it's awful. But you know, if you shot a film and exposed it incorrectly, that would look bad too, because yeah, Dennis was saying about that that print being likely a show print struck from the negative. That's
always my bar. That's my goal for every restoration. If we've got access to the original negative. When I'm done, it should look like that show print, like no damage, all the grain is there. It just you know, it's just in immaculate. What people at the premiere saw is what
my goal is. And I'm always kind of fascinated. I appreciate it, but I'm always kind of surprised when people see my work and always comments on how it still looks like film and like you retain the grain, and I'm like, yeah, it's just it's weird to me that that's an anomally. This is an example of a film that another movie we've now been gently and
persistently trying to license rights on for four or five years now. I don't because we haven't closed a deal, but it is this amazing and almost completely unknown Eastern European full horror movie that's really incredible, and the studio that owns the rights to it overseas had done or or I think subcontracted with a private company to do a restoration, and unfortunately, what they what they did, which is what happens in a lot of cases, is they use scratch removal
and grain reduction software and they've taken out a lot of detail that the filmmaker intended to be in there. There's a scene in a cemetery where it's lightly raining, not anymore, not anymore, because it looks like the grain reduction software removed all the rain. And we know because we have an earlier version of the film and we're like, guys, you know, there's supposed to be light rain falling here and and now it's it's gone, even the fog.
Like yeah, it's like you're they just wiped away everything. There's an there's another movie, an incredible UH period epic that we've looked into UH re releasing for a while, and they did again. The studio Oversees Different One did a restoration and they removed all of the the texture from the skin,
so all of the characters look like slightly rubbery mannequins. And it's like, yes, the image is incredibly clean, but it's so clean that they look like artificial humans now, and like you've gone too far in the opposite direction. We actually see that happen quite a bit, where you know, there's there's studio level restoration, which is which is what we aim for, which is what Columbia, Warner Brothers or Disney or any of the major studios would
consider to be the studio grade. And that's that's our goal internally. And sometimes we have to delay, Like there's a film we were hoping to release later this year and it and we did a new four case scan from the original camera negative, and and it's a companion film by the same filmmakers who did Delta Space Mission and the similar animated sci fi style, even more obscure,
if that's possible than Delta Space Mission. And it's just going to require more time for Craig to to remove dirt and scratches and make it look the way it should. So sometimes we have to actually delay or push back our planned release dates because Craig, thank god, is a perfectionist, and he's like, this is going to be our shot, and who knows if anyone after us will take the time and expend the crazy resources to release this film.
So it's our kind of responsibility to make it look as as beautiful as possible, and thank god he does. I mean, obviously that's our that's our huge advantages. That set a bar that people are expecting. And so if if we put out something now that's you know, dirty and still flickers, and they'd be like what happened? And I'm like, and I don't want to put my name on that, but yeah, like the companies or the the do the you know, they just set all the dolls to eleven
and they're like, look, it's clean. Uh. I mean part of me gets it because it's you know, everyone wants it done. They want they want to feature restored, and they want it in a week or two and they've got five thousand dollars and that is literally the only way that that's going to happen. But it's I would I would rather, you you know, put it out with a bunch of dirt still in it, you know, like it just I don't I don't understand who would prefer it looks completely
robbed of all texture, But it seems to happen a lot. I saw someone on a Facebook group posting some work they did before and after, and I almost type a comment and I'm like, no, if you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, because the after was worse. And just for you know, just a rough estimate, just for your your your viewer, is a good four K restoration will cost at minimum about fifty to seventy five dollars on the low end, between scanning color grade
if you need audio restoration, and then the digital restoration. So that's what you're what you're looking at. And if someone says, oh, we did a fantastic four K restoration and only just fifteen thousand dollars, then either nobody was getting paid or it's not a really good four K restoration because it's just there's hard costs that you can't get around, and then then the sky's the limit, depending on, you know, the quality of the materials and the
rest. The four K restoration that we were involved with on Belladonna's Sadness at Some Delicious Picks cost close to two hundred thousand dollars when all was said and done, because they seven minutes of footage had been cut out of the film in the late seventies for an unsuccessful reissue, and they lost that footage, so we had to try and track down a complete original release print of the film, which we found also ironically with the Cinematech Royale in Belgium, the
two times in my life that I've dealt with him, and they've very kindly scanned the missing footage and four K which had Flemish and French subtitles. Fortunately, there's not a lot of dialogue in that film, and we were able to digitally remove the subtitles that were visible and then replace it. It's not the same resolution as the four K scan from the camera negative for the rest
of the movie. But if you don't know, like if you're if you're a specialist in a restoration like Craig, you can tell that it's from a different source. But if not, you won't even notice. And that's also a testament to Craig and colorists. I mean, color grade is one of you know, Craig, maybe you could talk to that. Color grade is
one of the unsung aspects of digital restoration. Everyone thinks it's it's just dustbusting, removing scratches, repairing damage, lost frames, torn sprockets, things like that, and that's incredibly important, but color grade is also essential, and honestly, it's one of the things that people screw up the most often. I'll look at new restorations and I'll go, especially technicolor films from the forties and fifties, I go, ah, this just doesn't look like an original
technicolor print. And it's and in some cases it because it's because I've actually shown original thirty five millimeters tech or even nitrate tech prints of those titles, and so I know that's what it looks like in an original print. The War of the World's restoration actually is a very good example of the where they I think they did a great job of matching the color grade of original IB
technicolor. Yeah. I mean you need someone involved in the restoration that has seen it but knows, you know, this is what it looks like,
because if they've never seen it, they don't know. You know, it's it's a yeah, it's it's important that that there's still like knowledge needs to get passed on right to from generation to generation, and people that actually saw film on a screen, especially the older stuff, it's not a lot of people that have that knowledge, and it's it's and it's kind of a knowledge that's difficult to pass on, Like what you know what something looked like,
like, how do you pass that on to the next generation? Like, so, yeah, it's it's definitely important that you know, different films from different periods have different looks. The speaking of color were as when we did the restoration for Assault on Precinct thirteen, there was well one one is that we were instructed and we didn't need to be, but we were instructed don't make it look like a modern film, which we would we would never have
done anyway. But as far as color restoration goes, there's the head of reel I think it was Real four, I don't know one of one of the the head of one of the reels. When that film first came out, they they were making prints from the original negative, which you don't generally do for a wide release. And the reason why is that the lab tore the head of Reel four and split it right down the middle the original negative, and they didn't have an IP or an I N and they didn't have
a backup. So every release of that film sense, the head of Real four looks kind of like a muddy kind of mess because all they could do is shoot an optical negative from a release print and then print from that negative, a negative that was made from a print, and yeah, so the
grain is huge and soft. It just doesn't look that great. So when we were doing the restoration, they discovered that Joe had the producer, had an original release print that was printed from the original negative before the damage, but it was completely faded red. So working with our colorists, he was working on it and then we so we had we had the dupe negative that had been cut in years ago but was really soft, but it was the
correct color. And then we had this print which had all the resolution but didn't have the color. So I asked Tyler. I was like, hey, can we digitally kind of use both elements, like use the resolution from one but then like steal the color from the other. And I was on the phone with him asking him about this and he's like, I'm actually trying that right now. Both had the same idea and it did. It did
work out. It was interesting because it it had to go through like three phases to get to a point where it looked right because then there was fringe because you know, you got two different elements comps on each other and it's not exactly the same, so you kind of got this ghosting effect that then we got rid of that, and then getting the timing right brought out this this big, chunky red noise in the image that we then had to remove that, but in the end it now looks the head of Real four looks
the same as the rest of Real four. So then our next one of our next projects was Solomon King, and so I called Tyler. I'm like, hey, Tyler, remember you did that little section that was all read. We've got an entire film that looks like that. So it was good that we had this practice of how to get color back. In the case of Solomon King, we weren't comping two different elements because we literally the faded
print we have is the only element that there isn't anything else. And so he did some tests and quite a while back we posted a video, you know, of this initial test when we kind of announced we were going to be doing it, and it looked amazing. And in the months since then, Tyler's been able to refine his process even more and it looks it looks better than that original video did. So it's just it's just kind of miraculous that this film that's been just gone and then the one element that was left
is just a faded you know, pink print. We're able to put it back out, you know now with its original you know, it looks it looks amazing. I'm I'm shocked. I'm like, I get the the real from Tyler and I'm going through and give him some you know, some notes for the color grade. But overall, I'm just like, this is amazing, Like this film that that really should be seen because you know, in
Dennis, you can you can talk more about the story behind it. But it's the more we got into this project with Solomon King, the more we realized this is about a lot more than this film. It's it's more about the people who made it in the time it was made in and ah, it shouldn't be h it shouldn't be lost because yeah, it it falls into the mean people are going to put it in the blaxploitation category, but it's not a blaxploitation film. It's an independent film made by a black filmmaker in
the seventies and that's not the same thing. So Dennis, yeah, why don't you. Yes. Sal Watts, who co directed, wrote Start In he plays Solomon King, produced the movie was this amazing entrepreneurial and creative figure. We kind of say he was like Oakland's equivalent of Barry Gordy because he had two record labels. In the mid seventies, he executive produced a local Oakland dance and music program called soul Is or The Jay Payton Show, hosted
by a famous MC impresario and Oakland Jay Payton. He had a string of fashion stores, mister Sal's fashions, He owned, restaurants, made movies. So he was working in all of these media and fashion and the restaurant fields. And you see all of that combined in Solomon King. Because the soundtrack with all of these amazing and virtually unknown Oakland artists was put out on his own sal Law label. A lot of the costumes in the film were from
mister Salle's fashions. They shot in his house. There's a scene there's a scene it's it's one of the kind of the funny scenes where he's he's being tended to after getting shots and he's laying in the bed and this woman's coming to to undress him and he puts his feet up on the bed and he's got these shoes on that I just paused it and I was like, oh my god, Like I wish I had the confidence in the fact to pull off of shoes the incredible black and white with like a four inch heel,
like they are the coolest look of shoes. No that the I mean really a book should be written about sal And and his wife Belinda, who we have been really blessed to become great friends with and and license the rights to us manages his estate, because I mean that the film is super fun. It was Sally was obviously trying to make a commercial, you know, crime film in the vein of of Shaft or like Rudy Raymore with with dolomite, and and it captures so much of of black music, fashion, culture,
businesses. You know what the neighborhoods looked like at that period in Oakland in nineteen seventy three seventy four, And just as a historical document of those scenes in that time, I think it's it's amazing because of course Oakland is radically transformed and it's being gentrified and changing as we speak, So it doesn't look like that doesn't sound like that. I wish we had photos of the interior or the interior of mister Salle's fashions or some of the clothes, and that's
a whole other avenue for research. I'm hoping that somebody will be able to do an article or a blog post about that. Apparently there was a designer, clothing designer named Jesse Strange who create aided many of the most incredible clothes for mister Salle's fashions. And I've tried digging. We've talked to the African American Museum in Oakland, which part of the public library system there, and they've searched their archives and we can't come up with it any images, ads,
or anything about Jesse Strange. So if somebody out there knows anything about Jesse Strange, who designed clothes for mister Salle's fashions in the seventies, please let us know because we would love to. I mean, we're including some of the photos, and of course the film showcases those clothes, and we have some incredible photos from the set of Soul Is aka The j Payton Show with Jesse Strange's designs, but we don't know anything else about him. He's
in the film in the end credits. This is Jay just says the commandos because there's a scene where they land on the beach and he's one of the commandos, but we don't know which one. So it was clearly it was one of those movies where and I know because I've directed, you know, independent genre films, and so at a certain point when you don't have any money left in your budget, it's crew members, friends, family, or even the filmmaker. You're like, okay, we need somebody put these clothes
on and get in front of the camera. So a lot of the people in the cast of Solomon King were friends or family of Salin. Belinda's Belinda's in the film at the very end on an airplane. They shot a number of scenes and Belinda's and Sal's house. The Maserati that Sal drives in the film was Belinda's car, and I said, do you still have that? She goes, oh, no, I wish, but she's she's fan.
I think she still has the painting though, right is that there's this this is recognize that that that first scene that we put out when they're sitting at the dinner table. Yeah, she was like, oh my god. She's like, I remember the rug because it was like the seventies thick it's a thick check parting and the painting on the wall. She was like, yeah, you know, she's like, that was our that was our house. Like, that's just amazing to see you. I think she may. I
think she may still have that painting, she said. But she had what she thought was the camera negative in her closet for over twenty five years since the lab that it was held at in La closed down. And this is unfortunately what happens with independent productions is the negative and sound materials will be held
at an independent lab. I mean, this is this is the one of the huge benefits of this having the studios as the guardians of film materials or archives like UCLA Film and TV Archive, who we you know, we're so grateful to be able to borrow the print from that is the image for Solomon King, because they have a central archive where they store and preserve these materials.
But so many independently produced films are with a lab here or a lab there, who may be in business for twenty years, but then if they close, all of those materials wind up being scattered, right, and if they can't find the original producers or filmmakers, whoever's on the paperwork. A
lot of that material gets junked. I mean it's I have heard horror stories about labs going out of business and dozens and dozens of orphan films sitting on racks that are then thrown in the dumpster because there is nobody to claim them and they can't legally sell them to somebody else. It's not it's not like storage Wars or something where it's like you don't pay your fee and now we can just sell it to anybody. So so we we talked to Belinda.
She pulled the cans of film out of her closet, which we thought was the negative, and it turned out to be the original thirty five millimeter soundtrack, which is I was suspicious because she sent us some fronto and they were in paper boxes which black. To me, I'm like, that's probably audio, and it was. It's I mean, it's great that we have that
though, because it's the thirty five you know, optical track. Yeah, so that's that's awesome, but it's left us with sound but no movie, Like, okay, we've got the sound, but we still don't have to don't have any more, we don't have any image. And then we found coming and reaching out to archives and private collectors. We found that you CLA had a single thirty five millimeter badly faded release print, and again they were
enormously generous in making it available to us. And then after we're done with the restoration, we're going to deposit a digital copy of that with UCLA so it will be preserved, and Belinda agreed to deposit the thirty five millimeter sound elements. That the pieces that were in her possession are now on deposit UCLA Archives, so they're all together, which means the film will now be preserved
and available for the future. And I'd say that's you know one. We love the film, we love the music, the portrait of Oakland at that time, absolutely love having become friends with Belinda, love being able to tell
Sal's story. But we're also really grateful that we had the opportunity to preserve this film before it disappeared forever, because there is a good chance that it had it not been scanned digitally restored now in five or ten years, if that print goes vinegar, if all the picture elements are lost, then it's gone. Because as far as we know that the camera negative, we don't know if any innernegative or IP elements were made, but as far as we
know, the camera negative was lost years ago and it's just gone. We tried numerous ways to track it. Yeah, we reached out all the different film marchives and laboratories because when I worked at Imax, when I first started there, the lab CFI was the lab we used, That is the lab that had the Solomon King elements, but it closed down, and so I reached out to some old Imax colleagues who I knew had actually worked at CFI, and then reached out to him, and so he got us in contact
with anyone that where CFI elements might have gone. And so we reached out to every every place that's conceivable that those elements may have ended up, and there's just nothing and we have even tried to track down I'm going to open my file here for a second and see if I can get the name, uh, the recording studio where they did let's see. So, yeah, so it was, it was recorded. The sound track was recorded at CBA
Studios here in La Well. CBA no longer exists under that name, but it later became a nonprofit kind of cultural music institute in the same building and we did reach out to them about six months ago and said, hey, do do you have any old boxes of audio tapes lying around and they said, yeah, no, we do. We're going to check. But unfortunately, if they've not managed to discover any any of the missing Solomon King audio masters, so as far as we know, those elements are gone as well.
And we do have the you know, we have the thirty five millimeter soundtrack, the original, which is great, but of course that has dialogue and effects mixed in of course, and then we have original vinyl copies of the album which are pretty pristine. We haven't complete given up hope that the audio masters will pop up somewhere, but you know, unfortunately, again with independent productions and i know, produced films independently, you know, you move
around and elements will get split up between various producers. Although be again with the lab like CFI or whatever, and they get lost, they slip through the cracks. This is one of the great tragedies of you know, film preservation that even like as we're speaking right now, elements are being lost.
They are because you know, the studios don't preserve everything, and even when they do, you know, I talked with Joe Dante for my book and on film collectors, and he and others, I think Robert Rodriguez they had directed there. They did a series it was it Showtime. It was kind
of updated remakes of Roger Corman movies from the fifties. Yep. And they I think they shot on film but posted on digital, and they went back years later to try and find the elements to re release them on I think it was first DVD and found out that everything had been junked except for I think it might have been a D one or a D two master. It was all that existed, so it was still preserved, but not nearly in
the resolution that it would want. And that's apparently all that exists. Now we're talking about films that were shot within the past twenty five thirty years, and not just by small names, by bigger directors too. Oh yeah. So this was for like a major cable network with very well known filmmakers. So it's one of the reasons why I encourage filmmakers to always get a thirty
five millimeter print. If you know it's possible, that's that you probably need to be on a Christopher Nolan or Paul Thomas Anderson level now because everything's digital. But at the very least, see if you can get a pro res or a DCP or something that you know, you can sock away or put on deposit with an archive so that some high res file of your film will be preserved. So Solomon King is coming soon and we talked a lot about that. I'm sure you've got this question a few times from other people.
Why Kickstarter? Why does a company like def Crocodile need to raise funds for something like this? Well? Probably Well this is our first Kickstarter we've ever done, and a company like def Crocodile is just Dennis and I. You're not rolling in the dough here now. By the way, congratulations hit your first goal. And as I just checked, just cross seventeen thousand while we
were recording this. So hey yeah, so yeah, like we had said earlier, like you know, a restoration, the low end is going to be about fifty grand, right, and that's with me doing all of the restoration cleanup work by hand for free. So yeah, that's that's why we could use to kick started to raise some funds to make doing these type of
projects more often. You know, it's you know, we need to reach out to to archives and stuff, and we do hope sometimes that they do have, you know, something that's already been restored, right, But a lot of times, especially where you know, we're looking for the stuff that is amazing that people haven't heard of. A lot of the archives will have the elements, but they're just sitting in their vault. They haven't been scanned,
they haven't been you know, nothing that they've got them. So there's just a lot of cost involved in getting it scanned and getting it color grated and getting the audio transferred. And we want to keep doing those kind of films, but it costs a lot of cash upfront, cash we don't have.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's a companion film. It's sort of a semi squel to Delta Space Mission from the same directing team of Kiln Kazan and mercher Toya that was made in Romanian eighty five that's never been released here, and it's really wonderful. It's sort of a mashup of the Empire Strikes Back, Alien and Tarzan and just incredibly freakadelic. All right, I actually could more than Delta Space Missions. It's a fun film. I love them.
I love them both, and we've become really good friends with Kalin Kazan. Murchantoya sadly passed away in the nineties, but Kalin Kazan is still alive and has become a great friend. He lives in Bucharest, Romania, and we've interviewed him for both releases. But we were very lucky with Delta Space Mission in that the Romanian Film Archive had already done a four K scan, so there were these, you know, lovely raw scans from the negative,
but for the second film, there was nothing. They had the rights, they had the elements, they had the sound elements, and so they were like, Okay, you know, if you want to do this, you're going to have to pay for a new four K scan. And we were really fortunate in that they actually think because we were repeat customers and we're the only people that are asking for these movies, they were like, we'll give you a deal and we'll give you a four K scan from the negative for
the two K rate. They're like, ah, great, we'll take it. But we're also a little crazy because we're like, this is completely obscure Romanian animated sci fi film for eighty five. Clearly nobody else is come knocking on their door. They're like, all right, if it's not us,
who's it going to be. So so we paid for the four K scam and that's going to come out in twenty twenty three, and it's going to look gorgeous, and I think people, certainly people who love Delta Space Mission or who love eighties sci fi animation will be over the moon for it because it is supremely strange and surreal and psychedelic and amazing synthesizer score, kind of space froggy synthy score like Delta Space Mission, it's got all the things.
They up the bar a little bit with some of the animation I think on this one too, Like there's some long stretches of this really cool just floating
eyes and outer space and just crazy medieval space nights. And I mean clearly they loved Empire Strikes Back, so they were sort of important big chunks of it, but also Tarzan and then filtered through this incredible behind the Iron curtain sensibility in Japanese animation, kind of TV animation from the time, So it's it's one of these amazing like I'm a big music officionado and one of the things I love our sixties beat bands from behind the Iron Curtain, and clearly
they heard like Beatles, Stones, Kinks, you know, Animals records and they were like, we gotta get guitars and do our own version of this. So there's a fantastic Romanian sixties beat band I look called synchron Si n cro N do their own kind of deranged frat rock versions of like Western songs,
but filtered through this kind of crazy Romanian mid sixties sensibility. So that's kind of one of the things we really love about both Delta Space Mission and the second film is they you know, they are uniquely Romanian, but they also interact with Western narratives and media a little bit like Jean Pierre Melville.
His amazing noirs from the late fifties sixties bob La Flambourg and Le Samurai and Army of Shadows are clearly kind of in a dialogue with classic American film noir Kubrick's Killing and you know a lot of other great movies of that period. But they're also uniquely French, and that's one of the things that sort of syncretic intermixing of narratives, characters, symbolism and cultures that we really love. And it's one of the things we love most about the Delta space mission in
the second film as well. So we've got a bunch of wild stuff coming out in actually the end of the year and in twenty twenty three. We sort of have a backlog where we're in a unique position of kind of having too many movies to put out right now that all of course require Craig to spend. I saw hundreds of hours restoring Dennis the other day. I'm like, dude, you need to pump the brakes. We've got like five restorations
lined up and like this go take Oh wow. Well, I mean that's a great question to lead into for how much work these get on on average? How long does a decent restoration just for a single film take. For you, the actually the actual restoration part of it, probably that three months maybe jeez, But I would say the average and that it can I mean,
it's and that's if everything's going well. But you know, partly, you know again, like I said, like work, work, a two man operation, just the admin of running you know, deaf crocodile, like keeps you know, takes you away and it's like, oh, I need to deal with these invoices or you know, or even even just staying you know, somewhat active on social media. You know, it's like I enjoyed doing and I love interacting with people and talking to people, but you know,
it's like I need to be working on restoration. So yeah, it's a lot of a lot of it is the finding the materials and then working out a licensing agreement. There's another European incredibly gonzo sci fi film. It's kind of a cross between a seventies Italian kind of Jollo esque thriller and a
completely crazy kind of alien sci fi movie. And now it's years we're talking five six years that we've been going back and forth trying to secure the rights, and we're hoping at the end of this year we'll finally make a deal.
So a lot of it is waiting very patiently, and then there'll be long stretches where you don't hear anything and it completely it looks like it's disappeared, and then like a year and a half later, you'll send them an email hoping and they'll go, oh, yeah, yeah, let's talk about that again. So it does take a tremendous amount of patience and persistence.
I will say the quickest Delia ever made was for Sampo, which is a film I've loved for many years, and I organized a retrospective on Patrishko's work with Oliver Lonski's Seagull Films in the early two thousands at the Cinematack and toward the Country. So in some ways I'd spent twenty twenty five years thinking about
it. But when we actually from the time we got in touch with KAVE, the Finnish National Audio Visual Institute, to when we made the deal was I think it was like four or five weeks and I was like, we got a license every film we be with KAVE, because they were just like, okay, we have it. This is what we've got, bam bam, bam bam bam. Deal signed. We're sending you the materials that we were like, I mean, Craig and I were kind of shocked, really,
is this actually come together this quickly. We can usually be four or five weeks in between an email getting replied to yeah, we just I don't know if you saw that. We just got an email message for the the other unannounced the film that they've discovered more elements from that film. So I actually did not see that email yet. But they have to have scenes that that we didn't know existed. Wow, I have to apologize. I'm actually gonna have to jump off because I have to I have to get ready and
run to my my other job at p RS. So you guys are more than welcome to keep UH Gavin. I have enjoyed this so much. Thank you for having UH song. We love talking about these movies. Thank you by all means. I would love to have you back on someday once we get a couple more releases we can discuss. I just want to tell everybody all the links are in the description below for the kickstarter, for the website for everything, and just genuinely thank you guys so much for everything that you've
done so far. For saving these films. Yeah, we love doing it, so thanks for having us on and helping spread the good word and keep adding to the shelf of physical media. Yeah, there's there's a suspicious I could see behind the right part of your head. You have the down right, okay, but then if you turn them sideways and you can shove some more in on top of the ones that are standing up there. Yeah, all the ways that you try and fit more media into many many times.
Craig Dennis, thank you so much. Wonderful talking to you. We'll see you next time. Thank you. You got a couple more minutes, Is that all right with you? Yeah, if you've got more questions a couple. First of all, how did these come to you? And how did the restoration go? Because these have made a lot of waves this year.
Those are again, like Dennis had mentioned, he had programmed a bunch of Justco films for the American Cinema Tech back in the day, and so he'd always loved them and it was on his radar of like we should put these out on Blu ray. Gilia Murra Metz. We licensed through Muss Film and they had done a restoration already and gave us those files. I didn't have to do a lot to that. That was. That was a pretty good
restoration. And I just tweaked the color a bit because it was they had kind of given it that Cyan kind of tint to it, and that just I can't The Sampo film is from the Finnish Film Archive because the originally was a Finnish Russian co production with Moss Film. So when they and that one's interesting because when they shot it, they actually shot it both in Finish and in Russian, so they basically made the movie twice. So we we licensed
the Finnish version from the Finnish Film Archive. That did require quite a bit more cleanup and work, so I spent quite a while just there's there's I don't know, it's I mean, it's just like Dennis said, I'm kind of a perfectionist, and we probably could have put it out as was it was and people would have been like, oh, it's wonderful, and I would just been like, but it couldn't matter, right, So yeah, So I spent a good amount of time doing some extra work on top of
the work that the finished archive had already done. And that's similar to to Shandig or you know, I think I think they had done mostly a uh analogue, you know, photochemical restoration of Shandigor and I think they've done a
little bit of digital work, but not much. And it was gorgeous, so many it was it's for the original negative, so that black and white photography and the and the beautiful film Green that that's in that film was you know, it was all preserved, so when they gave us the files, it was just gorgeous. But there was a lot of things that only digital
could fix. So I went through Shannon Gore and did all of that kind of work, which was Yeah, it was a couple of months I probably spent because it was it was just one of those things where it's like this, the imagery is so beautiful. I don't want people to get distracted by like some stray dirt or some some spot stains and and whatnot, Like it's it's too beautiful, Like it should be as clean as possible because the images
are so clean. It's gorgeous. So yeah, that's the for those two films, one from Moscow, one from Cove, and hopefully we can add to the Patucco films. We'll see they are astonishing movies overall. And actually the the I know they've they've they've been a lot of people have been loving them and talking about them, which is fantastic. Got to give some credit
to Tony Stella who did those paintings for the for the covers. It's it's just it blows my mind that he he does not work digually, so those are those are actual oil paintings and uh yeah, so yeah, between the films themselves, and then you know, the incredible artwork from Tony, I think a lot of people are like, oh, we should check this out. Well, and one thing that I'm sure doesn't get a lot of pointed out compliments, I'd also like to say the booklets on those two releases really
wonderful as well. It's nice to see something like that get that sort of contextual supplement. I'm always pleased to see some actual writing on the film with it. All of I think all of our releases we've we've got you know, it's you know, it's it started with you know, So Delicious when we were there, the owner of So Delicious, you know, he had
done some scanning work and colligrading work and restoration work. It's a delicious that ended up you know, on Criterion discs, and he reached the point where he's just like, well, this is silly, Like we're doing all the work and they're getting all the credits. Right. So that's kind of how
So Delicious Picks was born. Was was like, well, we're already doing all this, why don't we take it to the next step and actually distribute it so you know, and criterion is you know, they're the standard everyone else is judged by. You know, some people might do you know, there might be some releases that are a little better than than their average, and most aren't as good, but they're the standard. And that's the standard
we've set for ourselves. Is you know, we want We've always going to have a commentary, there's always going to be an essay in the booklet. Any extras we can get our hands on, you know that with that that we can afford because yeah, that that the extras just add up. It's it's silly, like, you know, there's just licensing. I think when we did the last movie release at Arblows, you know, there's just a clip from God, what's the it was a TV talk show. I can't
I'm blanking on the name. But you know, short clip. He's not like it's expensive, it's like and it's just bonus material on the Blu ray. It's not it's not generating revenue on its own. So there's only so much you can kind of justify spending on bonus material when you don't have you know, a big company foot in the bill. That's true. I got a hot take question and then we'll end on one genuine question here. But
you brought up Criterion. A lot of people have complained because of directors coming in and wanting to change the color grip, eating of their original film. As somebody that works in restoration, how do you how do you feel about that? I mean, it's a difficult position to put the distributor in because they you know, I'm sure they know as soon as the director's like, oh I want to tweak this, they're probably like shit because they know the
internet is going to lose its mind. But you know, it's the director's film, and if they want to put it out, they kind of have to do what the director wants. Yep. I mean you can, you can try and persuade them, you know, but if they're dead set on it changing, there's not a lot you can do unless you just want to be like, all right, we're not going to release it. It's not
usually going to be the end result. So and by then you've probably sunk a lot of money into it already, so you're pretty much yeah, yeah, you know, so yeah, it's I mean, if it's a dramatic change. The thing is, it's like there's some minor changes that people lose their minds over, and I'm like, it's not that different, Like you know, it's not like you watch this film and all of a sudden, like you know, the ending is different. It's like, no, they
changed the color a little bit. It's okay, calm down. The last thing is more of a philosophical question for Deaf Crocodile because despite differences in genres, types of films, formats, even because we have animation, we didn't even talk about the fact that we genuinely have a box set here for a director. Despite all of those, something about the releases feels cohesive in a way because of the passion behind these, because of the lost film aspect.
Was that really what was going to be focused on with Deaf Crocodile when that came out, or is that sort of like a mission to make them all
feel cohesive in a way. I think the only reason they might feel cohesive is that they're all being kind of curated by you know, one person's tastes, right, you know, our goal has always been to find films, you know, excellent films that people aren't familiar with and that's partly out of we want to give them exposure that they deserve, but it's also financially we can't afford to license, you know, films everyone knows. It's like, you know, that's too expensive, that's not we can't. We can't do
that. So we have to find the gems, the films that are just as good. But you haven't heard of it. Sorry, uh and it was a spam call even so, of course, thank you so much for your time. I genuinely appreciate all of your work, not only just for the time spent here, but the restoration work. It appears to be tireless because some of these look better than you could possibly imagine. So well, thank you. I do I do. Like I said, it's always I
wanted to look like the show print. So we're not obviously not going to be able to No one would. Unfortunately, no one's gonna be able to see that again with Solomon King, because you know, we're working from a faded print, but it's going to look as good as it could possibly look. And I think people are going to really I hope they really appreciate the context of the film as much as the film itself, because the film itself
is really fun. It's not you know, Dennis had mentioned like in the Vein of dolam and it's not the film isn't in the Vein of Dolomite. The desire to make your own film, your own way, for your own community is the same. The Dolomite was comedic, I mean it was they were comedies. Uh. Solomon King is an action film. The opening scene is kind of hilariously bad, but you know it's a it's a first time filmmaker. You know, it's literally someone is like, grab a camera,
is like, let's do this. But honestly, the the I think the film keeps getting better as you both get through it. It almost feels like they shot it in chronological order and got better as it went because I was really surprised, like some of the just the camera work and the scenes and there's there's some you know, there's some stunt action with the explosions, and
you know, it's it's impressive film. Like like sal was an amazing person, Like it seems like his whole life he decided what he wanted and made it, so you know, like it's how he managed to do so much and his life is just absolutely incredible, and we've we've definitely wanted his story to be the story, and the film is just part of it. I can't wait to get it in and give it a watch. One of the
things that really sells these restorations. You posted a before and after video on Twitter of the restoration and what it looked like before and the cleaned up. I mean that alone has to be something that makes people want these films to
see the change because it's evident how much work gets put in. Again, just astonished and I and I selected the clip I posted I tweeted last night specifically because it's also uh just it's a cool shot of that that what you don't realize is an extreme telephoto shot and then pulls back to to reveal and it's just like I was like, that's that's cool filmmaking, Like you know,
that's not amateur filmmaking. That was very cool. So yeah, it's I'm very excited about Solomon King. It's it's definitely, I mean, there's been a bunch of films that that I've been excited about and felt were important, but this is another level nice. Uh well, I hope the Kickstarter
is insanely successful. Still got some time left. I will be directing people there every single time I go live and talk to fans, because it is it is important to to keep these companies going, to keep archiving art for the rest of our time. So again, thank you for your time here today. I know that you've got a lot of restoration work to do, so I'll let you back to your John have a good day, Craig.
Thank you for your time. Hopefully we'll talk you again soon. All right, Thanks, see you, sir, Thank you tell me no