`My Fair Lady' Shines Again After Major Film-Restoration Efforts

In 1964, "My Fair Lady" was the pride and joy of Jack L. Warner, who produced the film. It won that year's Academy Award for best picture and became the highest-grossing movie in Warner Bros. history.

But the Lerner and Loewe movie musical never really belonged to him or the studio. Although they had paid an unprecedented $5.5 million for the privilege of filming "My Fair Lady," all rights reverted to the original owner, CBS, seven years later.

No longer protected in the Warner vaults, the Super Panavision 70mm negative physically disintegrated in a CBS warehouse that was not climate-controlled. More than 3,000 cans of original film and tape were delivered to CBS in 1971, and much of the material was simply thrown out.

All the remaining theatrical prints began to fade and turn pink, and a laserdisc version was so ugly it was voted the worst laser release of 1992. A "restored" disc, which had essentially the same problems, was then voted worst laser release of 1993.

CBS couldn't find a decent copy of the movie anywhere. The original negative had been run so many times it was nearly useless, while the black-and-white separations that are made to protect color films turned out to be optically flawed. CBS was finally embarrassed enough to finance a true 70mm, six-track-stereo restoration that ended up costing about $700,000.

The result opened yesterday at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York and is scheduled to play a one-week engagement beginning tomorrow at the Cinerama. Pieced together by Bob Harris and Jim Katz, who were responsible for a similar 70mm restoration of "Spartacus" three years ago, it will be given a heavily promoted videocassette/laserdisc release next month.

`There's more at stake here'

"The nice thing is we're able to do these video-driven projects not just to make a great video version," said Harris by phone from New York. "The companies begin to see that there's more at stake here. It's like having a child who's ill. You don't spare any expense to see that everything be done that can be done."

Several 70mm prints, which cost about $23,000 apiece, have been made for the reissue.

"The incredible thing is the audience," said Katz after watching it with a packed house at the Ziegfeld. "Bob and I work in a vacuum on these restorations, but it becomes a group experience when you see it in 70mm with surround sound on a big screen."

Katz pointed out that the movie no longer carries the baggage it did during the early 1960s, when Warner was criticized for passing over Julie Andrews, who created the role of Eliza Dolittle in the original Broadway version, and choosing Audrey Hepburn, whose songs had to be dubbed by Marni Nixon.

"Now you don't care whether it's Audrey or Julie, or whether Marni did the singing," Katz said.

"It doesn't play like an old picture," said Harris, who also created the 1989 restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia."

"This was in worse shape," he said. "In the 1960s, all 70mm prints were made directly from the negative. `My Fair Lady' was the most popular of the 70mm films, and they wore the hell out of it. We had to dissect the negative and put it back together again."

Some shots digitized

One sequence, in which the impoverished flower girl, Eliza, throws her slippers at her arrogant speech teacher, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), appeared to be ruined because of a light dot that kept showing up on Higgins' sweater and Eliza's face.

"We couldn't do anything with it," said Katz. "Finally we had to digitize certain shots, at $1,000 a second, to remove it."

Worst of all was the stylish Ascot sequence, a racetrack episode in which Eliza tries out her new accent and manners.

"It was a mess," said Harris. "It was all over the place. The colors ranged from purple to blue to green. We had to digitize entire shots and then get them to look like film again."

When he did "Lawrence" and "Spartacus," Harris was able to get advice from the original directors. But George Cukor, who won his only directing Oscar for "My Fair Lady," had died in 1983, and Harris and Katz both feel uncomfortable about adding anything without a director's approval.

But they considered reshooting one sequence - the opening credits - when they found the original title cards at Pacific Title Co.

"The title sequence was totally gone," said Katz. "The negative was destroyed. But when you're restoring something, you don't reshoot it. We finally picked one frame out of each credit card, the best frame we could find, cleaned up all the dirt on it, and digitized it."

The soundtrack was another hurdle. Nixon's dubbing was recorded, while Harrison's songs were performed live on the set.

"Reproduction equipment is so much better today," said Harris. "You take a 30-year-old track and all the warts are going to show. We found that in the original recordings you hear flies buzzing around the set in stereo. We left them there."

Next month's laserdisc release will include Hepburn's versions of a couple of songs, "Show Me" and "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?," which were discovered in a Warner vault. It will also feature an hour-long documentary about the restoration and the making of the film.

Other films as well

Katz and Harris are currently working on a restoration of "The Lion in Winter," which has the backing of the original director (Anthony Harvey) and star (Katharine Hepburn), and they're negotiating with one studio about restoring a classic movie that's never been shown in 70mm before.

They'd like to work on several MGM films, including "Doctor Zhivago," "Ben-Hur," "Ryan's Daughter" and "2001: A Space Odyssey," but they're owned by Ted Turner, who has his own restoration team.

"They don't really want to have anyone messing with their pictures," he said. "We're out of the loop."

Harris is extremely critical of what he calls "pseudo-restorations," including Paramount's grainy wide-screen blowup of "The Ten Commandments," MGM's 70mm reissue of "Ben-Hur" (which was cropped at the sides) and even Miramax's widely praised 1993 restoration of "El Cid."

"It was a shadow of what it could be," said Harris. "We're literally going crazy for a year, battling the fates, trying to save a picture. Then someone will come out with a `Ten Commandments.' If you're dealing with 70mm, be accurate, do it properly."

"There's a lot of work to do out there," said Katz. "We try to let people know what the problems are. These films are classics in their own genre. Otherwise nobody would be working on them."