Film Historian, Preservationist Lectures at BMFI

Robert Harris is a conservationist.

He conserves movies.

"I grew up with film," Harris told Patch Thursday afternoon in the lobby of the , where he was preparing to deliver an evening lecture on the method and impetus behind the film-restoration techniques he has perfected. "And we're losing them."

This loss, he said, is two-pronged. First, conventional film projectors, the format movie houses used to play the pictures of his youth, are fast being replaced by cheaper but less visually articulate digital projection systems.

"In 18 months there will be no more film projectors," he lamented. "It will all be DCP [Digital Cinema Package]."

Second, there are the films themselves. Harris says the epic 65-millimeter films of yesteryear are starting to show their age. Over time, "splices open up and perforations tear" in the negatives, the master copies of these films, and the studios have them replaced with "dupes"—patchwork copies that degrade the quality of the picture.

"The dupes look dupey," Harris said. "They look contrasty, you lose focus. Older dupes get grainy, new dupes get soft. You have problems with color. You have problems with restoration because you go to black and white. It's a long discussion."

Not long ago, the dupe problem became so pervasive—"In some pictures you had more dupe than original," Harris said, shaking his head, "and in some pictures you had all dupe"—that the cinephile decided to do something about it.

Using a handful of techniques he developed or perfected, Harris began ironing out the kinks in these damaged films and returning them to something like their original quality. He has restored Lawrence of Arabia, Godfather I and II, Spartacus, My Fair Lady, Vertigo, and Rear Window, among others.

His work caught the attention of the studios—"They realized that if you lose Lawrence of Arabia, you're in trouble," he joked—and prompted each of them to hire a full-time archivist to tend their negatives.

Restoration is a tricky business, though. Sometimes you just have to fix damaged footage, but sometimes, you have to find it first. When Lawrence of Arabia was released in December 1962, it had a run time of 222 minutes. By the third week of January, 20 of those minutes had gone missing from the master copy. How exactly they went missing is unclear. Harris was hired by Columbia pictures to find them.

"I got 2,800 pounds of film shipped to my office in New York," he said. "We pored through it until we found the missing clips."

Though he said he loves trying to find these missing pieces, he hasn't always had luck. Harris said both The Alamo and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World have significant amounts of missing footage. The search continues, he said: "If I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be an archaeologist."