American Cinematographer - June 2011 - 58

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A Classic Reborn

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estoring a film can lead to surprises both great and small, and when the Sony Pictures team began preparing for an all-4K digital restoration of Taxi Driver (1976), they discovered that the film’s now-iconic “You talkin’ to me?” scene had been presented incorrectly on home screens for years. “Previous home-video transfers of the film were unsupervised, and we found the framing of a number of scenes, including Travis’ dialogue into the mirror, to be incorrect when we compared them to the correct framing based on the film’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio,” says ASC associate member Grover Crisp, senior vice president of asset management, film restoration and digital mastering at Sony Pictures Entertainment. “In the mirror scene, in the letterboxed 1.85:1 video releases, several shots look like Travis is talking directly into the camera when, in fact, he’s talking into the mirror — the shots were zoomed in to cut out the mirror’s frame. This was a surprise to us because there was really no reason to do it.” Because Crisp was involved in Sony Pictures’ previous restoration of Taxi Driver, a photochemical undertaking in 1995, he was familiar with the challenges the original camera negative presented. “When the film was made, a number of prints were struck off the OCN, which has extensive scratches and tears as a result,” says Crisp. “By 1976 there was less and less printing like that being done, but prior to that it was a common practice. “Taxi Driver’s original neg was our source for 99.9 percent of this restoration,” he adds. “There were just a couple of shots where we scanned a 35mm interpositive.” The negative (six spliced AB rolls, complete with the original Columbia Pictures logo and dupe-neg opticals) was scanned at 4K on a wetgate scanner at Cineric in New York. The files were then sent to MTI Film in Los Angeles for a frame-by-frame

Bickle takes aim at an imagined enemy in this frame from the 4K digital restoration of Taxi Driver.

digital cleanup, which included removing dirt and scratches and repairing torn frames. The picture was then graded at Sony Pictures’ Colorworks, where colorist Scott Ostrowsky worked with a FilmLight Baselight Eight, referencing printsthat had been approved by Martin Scorsese and Michael Chapman, ASC following the film’s 1995 restoration. Both Chapman and Scorsese offered notes and signed off on the final 4K picture, but Crisp notes that the overall mandate was fairly straightforward: make the film look as good as possible while staying true to the era in which it was made. “The filmmakers didn’t have any inclination to modernize anything, and neither did we, so our approach was to be as true as possible to their original vision,” he says. This included maintaining the desaturated look of the film’s climactic shootout, which takes place in an East Village flophouse. Concerned that the sequence’s extensive bloodletting might earn the film an X rating, Scorsese decided during the film’s postproduction phase to desaturate that portion of the negative using the Chem-Tone process, which had been developed by TVC Laboratories to enhance the
American Cinematographer

speed of Eastman Color 5247 ( AC Sept. ’75). In this case, the process gave the blood a sepia-like tone. “For previous home-video transfers, they tried to enhance that scene by adding a lot of red to the image in an effort to create brighter-looking blood, and when you try to pump a color that’s not really there into an image, you risk contaminating the whole frame, which is what happened,” says Crisp. “As a result, you see red not just in the blood, but also in Travis’ hair and in his jacket, for instance.” The digital restoration, which includes a director-approved multichannel sound mix created from the original stereo tracks, premiered to great acclaim at this year’s Berlinale. A Blu-ray release followed, and 4K and 35mm theatrical exhibition will be ongoing throughout the year, according to Crisp. “With every restoration, there are usually little things you can’t totally fix that nag at you — it comes with the territory,” he notes. “But I’m very happy with the way this one turned out, and by all accounts the filmmakers are happy with it, too.” — Iain Stasukevich

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June 2011
American Cinematographer - June 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2011
