by r/TrueFilm
This project funds the transfer, touch-up, and proper DVD release of Frank Borzage’s all but lost 1922 The Pride of Palomar.
We no longer have these excuses. Of the hundreds of silent films that have (thus far) managed to survive, many sit in archive shelves collecting dust, inaccessible to the outside world. Finding resources for the preservation of these films is a constant struggle.
/r/TrueFilm, an online community dedicated to the art of filmmaking with over 90,000 subscribers, has decided it is their duty as cinephiles to try to save some of these endangered films for the film scholars of future generations.
This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of campaigns to choose one endangered film of aesthetic importance and draw upon our community resources to transfer, touch up, score and release it for the world to see.
We have built a core team, volunteering their time talents, dedicated to seeing this project through. All of the design, research, writing, and digital clean-up work is being done by members of our community – professionals in these fields, donating their abilities as a labor of love to the medium of film. The things this core group has the ability to accomplish is astounding. But we want and need the rest of /r/TrueFilm and the broader online film community to be a part of this effort. No matter how much of our time we donate, there are costs associated with making this film available that can’t be avoided, and while it might be difficult for any one entity to take on this obstacle, together we can do it.
Frank Borzage’s 1922 film The Pride of Palomar
Experienced cinephiles everywhere know that Frank Borzage is a director who doesn’t get anywhere near the credit he deserves. Simply put, he was a master of the silent cinema (and a darn good sound director, too!). Films like Lazybones (1925), 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel(1928) and Lucky Star (1929) have long been recognized – by critics like Andrew Sarris, Dave Kehr, and Kent Jones – as some of the great triumphs of the American silent screen, yet Borzage has always existed somewhere outside of mainstream consciousness. His films are monuments for cinephiles, treasures yet to be discovered for the general public.
/r/TrueFilm has been presented with the opportunity to touch up and release The Pride of Palomar, Borzage’s 26th feature film, a film that is commercially unavailable and has been very, very rarely seen since its general release in 1922.
Most of what we know about this film comes from trade journals and surviving documents from its shooting. It’s an adaptation of a popular novel by Peter Kyne. It stars Forrest Stanley, Marjorie Daw and Warner Oland. It was photographed by Chester Lyons, a frequent collaborator with Borzage (including work on Lucky Star) as well as directors like John Ford (Mother Machree) , William Wellman (Robin Hood of El Dorado) and even Karl Freund (Lyons photographed the Peter Lorre horror vehicle Mad Love). It’s a western melodrama that received generally favorable reviews at the time of it’s release, and surviving production stills suggest that Borzage’s immaculate sense of composition and romantic lighting were fully in place at this point in his career.
/r/TrueFilm wants to draw upon our community talents to transfer, digitally clean, score and release Frank Borzage’s The Pride of Palomar. As mentioned before, we have a dedicated core team volunteering their talents on behalf of film preservation (none of us are making so much as a penny’s profit off of this), but we need the help of the broader community to see it through. Once we’re done, this film will be off of the shelves and available for purchase and online viewing, a gap in our knowledge about one of the American cinema’s great directors will have been filled. We will release a DVD edition of the film, limited to 1,000 copies, and the very first ones to ship will be those going to the contributors of this project. Furthermore, any money we make over the amount necessary release our film will be put toward making our next film rescue project even bigger and better. This is about film preservation and availability, not profit. We’re in a unique position to make a difference for film history, let’s pitch in and do our part.
Every contributor to this project will also have their reddit user name (or if you’re old fashioned, real life user name) placed in the DVD credits of our release. A sign of our eternal thanks and a nod to everyone who helped save the film.
The only risk involved in this project is hitting the financial goal here; as long as we have the funds to give to the Library of Congress, the transfer is ours to do with what we please. It’s in the public domain.
The chain of events is fairly quick after that: once we have the funds, we have the video. Once we have the video, we clean it up (elongating titlecards, removing junk from the corners of frames, standardizing frame-per-second rates, attaching the new credits, i.e. your name, to it…). We send it to the composer who scores it, and to the artist who can create the cover art. Once they complete their work, we send the files to a DVD printer, and use the funds to get the copies and ship them. Same with the T-Shirts.
We get the copies in about a week, and ship them upon order.
But none of this can happen without meeting our target. That’s the single risk.