Drain of Thought

merlin:

Last night, I was reading some of the angry Amazon reviews of the “Coppola Restoration” of The Godfather trilogy. Hi-larious.

Essentially, there’s a lot of bleating and whining and high nerd drama over how the restored versions of I and II don’t look—what?—”Blu-ray” enough, I guess.

Too dark, too overexposed, too red, too yellow, and waaaaaaaaaay too grainy, waaaaaah!!! complain a phalanx of disappointed 1080p fetishists, whose gold standard for cinema seems to be the director’s cut of Speed Racer.

So, here’s the interesting part. Given that the first two Godfather films are two of the unarguably greatest achievements in American popular culture, the desire for a refresh is no particular surprise.

But if, like me, you didn’t know the real story behind this restoration, you’ll be interested to know there’s way more to this than just shitting out a slightly different version of a proven best-seller.

What might surprise and shock you as much as it did me was the reason why this restoration had to happen. Because, in truth, this was an unbelievable, almost miraculous, labor of love that took a couple years and a lot of excruciating, white-knuckle person-hours.

Why bother?

Because, basically, it’s now clear that for decades, Paramount had been treating the source media for the Godfather movies like the half-roll of toilet paper your two-dollar whore chucks at your johnson.

Indeed, without this restoration, there’s a pretty good chance that by this point, there wouldn’t be a single usable negative of the Godfather films left. Period. Gone. Forever.

How bad were they? Pretty bad:

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