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Can We Find the BBC2/PBS Version?
Allow me to provide a context here, and if I am misleading about this, it is not by intention.
Some quad tapes last for decades and still play back perfectly.
That is rather unusual.
Most quad tapes begin to degrade as soon as they come out of the factory.
A few years after they are broadcast, they are unplayable.
In essence, a quad tape keeps about as long as a lemon-meringue pie.
Further, a quad tape can withstand only about five full passes through a machine before too much oxide falls off.
What’s more, quad tapes were brutally expensive, between about $250 and $300 for a one-hour reel.
That is not 2020’s money. That is 1960’s and 1970’s money, and it was a fortune.
No station, no network, could afford to archive all its programming,
and many of the programs that were archived quickly became unplayable anyway.
Our local educational station in Albuquerque, KNME Channel 5, because of budget constraints,
was forced to re-record each reel of quad tape up to about 70 times.
That is why so many of the programs faded in and out,
and that is why the color would grow weaker and weaker and weaker and would sometimes go to black and white.
That is why there was so much interference in the image.
I suppose that also explains the massive amount of ghosting in some programs as well.
I remember constantly trying to adjust the antenna, trying to adjust the set, but then,
after years of that needless labor, I finally realized it was not our set that was at fault.
Invaluable, irreplaceable programming had to be wiped shortly after broadcast and is now lost forever.
George Fischbeck, Nancy Johnson, Erna Fergusson, all gone. My heart breaks.
PBS was not a network.
Each local educational station could choose to coöperate with PBS or with other local stations or not.
Each local educational station could purchase whichever PBS programs were up for offer, if it so wished.
Stations that purchased the “PBS Movie Theater” series would capture each feed from PBS onto quad for later broadcast.
The license allowed the local stations to repeat the movies
“until September 1979.”
My wager is that no local station anywhere kept any episode of “PBS Movie Theater” past September 1979.
Sooner or later, probably sooner, the tapes were wiped and re-used ,
or, if they were too worn out to be re-used , they were discarded.
The BBC has a policy I do not understand.
A program is pulled out of storage for a scheduled broadcast, and by the following noon it is back in storage.
It absolutely will not be retrieved under any circumstances unless it is scheduled for a repeat broadcast,
and once that repeat broadcast is finished, back into storage it goes.
That is why, if you wanted to submit a comment for broadcast the day after or the week after a program,
you had to supply your own VHS copy of the program in question,
because under no circumstances would the BBC personnel be permitted to pull the program out of storage.
Further, when funds ran low, the BBC would make a business decision to record over old quad tapes.
That is why so many Dr. Who and Cook and Moore programs, among countless others, no longer exist.
I seem to recall reading that when Cook and Moore learned that some of their programs were about to be wiped for re-use ,
they offered to purchase new tapes for the BBC instead,
but the BBC would not hear of such a ridiculous idea and wiped the tapes anyway.
(Here
we can see a BBC dub tape pulled from storage for an upcoming home-video release.
We get a nice close-up of the label and of the recording report and editing report.)
If BBC2 retained its master tapes, then they were locked away in storage where nothing short of an act of Parliament could get them loosed.
Chances are even stronger that BBC2, when its rights expired in August 1978, surrendered or wiped or discarded its master videotapes
and surrendered the time-coded Fitzwater/Davies accompaniment to the foreign-rights licensor,
namely, Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde (DIF) of Frankfurt.
That, in a nutshell, is why I am not at all sanguine that the BBC quads of the Fitzwater/Davies Metropolis exist any longer.
As for the NTSC conversion, the idea that PBS HQ would have archived quad tapes that were licensed only for a single transmission is patently absurd.
Programs such as “PBS Movie Theater” were either surrendered to their owners or were wiped for re-use .
So, there we go.
I strongly suspect that the video masters of the Fitzwater/Davies Metropolis no longer exist.
On the off-chance that the quad masters from 1975 were kept on file,
the likelihood is that they are unplayable and irrecoverable.
The NTSC quads that PBS transmitted in 1976 were surely wiped.
I don’t know how on earth we’ll ever find the Voyager VHS or the Brandon Films 16mm.
Now that there have been far superior restorations of Metropolis,
few people would have any interest in making the 1972 Eckart Jahnke edition available again.
If we could get hold of that 1972 Eckart Jahnke edition,
and if we could find either the Brandon 16mm or the Voyager VHS,
we would have all the ingredients to re-create perfectly
the BBC/PBS edition of the movie.
Alternatively, if the Fitzwater or Davies families held onto the master audiotapes,
we could sync those tapes to a new video transfer of the Eckart Jahnke edition, and that would probably work even better.
I have no idea, no idea at all, how to find any relatives of Fitzwater or Davies.
I doubt that more than a handful of people on this planet would think it a worthwhile cause to rescue this obscure edition of Metropolis,
but, as far as I am concerned, the BBC/PBS edition is an important part of the historical record,
and I would hate to see it lost or forgotten just because there’s a newer and better restoration that’s so easily available.
Whether you enjoy the accompaniment or not, it was done in all sincerity by a pair of important musicians,
and that in itself is argument enough for its preservation and for its value.
Back in the days when alt.movies.silent was still a thing, I used to poke my head in once in a while.
Because I was not a regular participant, I missed
a message of earth-shattering significance:
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GregoryLA Feb 23, 1998, 12:00:00 AM
And how does the BBC version which was made available in 1977(?) compare with
the Munich print? Just curious.
I have a copy of it and it runs I believe just over 120 mins.
I do recall it contains the Pleasure Garden sequence where Freder is asked to
choose from among a variety of women. It also contains an alternate take of
the shot where Freder discovers Maria’s handkerchief in Rotwang’s house and
goes to grab it.
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I have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried without luck to reach GregoryLA.
Is he still amongst us? Does anybody know him? Help?
One more clip for good measure:
There you have it.
The soundtrack is a complete violation of everything silent films stand for, but it works.
If you have ever dabbled in theatre, you know the rule:
“If it works, it works.”
I would just hate to have this accompaniment lost simply because it’s now obsolete.
It is a work of art in its own right, and it should be made available to anybody who wants to witness it,
to anybody who wants to study it.
16mm, this HAS to be The Electronic Metropolis from Brandon/Janus/Films, Inc.
and I am KICKING MYSELF for having missed it!!!!!
How did I not notice that description?????
The above movie schedule I picked up 45 years ago.
I took it home and apparently I never studied it — until now.
Now that I finally take a careful look at it, I can discern more of what happened.
Somebody at Brandon understood that the Eckart Jahnke edition was longer than the regular release prints,
and quite probably chose to license it precisely because it was longer.
Now, at last, someone at Brandon Films, for the very first time, advertised that difference —
and, if I may be allowed to guess, was probably put on suspension or even fired for having done so.
Because of prior licensing, the Janus attorneys made it clear to Brandon Films that The Electronic Metropolis required a Janus license as well.
Nobody at Brandon realized that The Electronic Metropolis had already played on television.
Nobody at Brandon realized that The Electronic Metropolis had carried a Janus logo when it played on television.
Nobody at Janus realized that either.
Nobody at Janus realized that The Electronic Metropolis, which Brandon Films was now sublicensing to Janus,
had had any prior connection to Janus at all.
Interestingly, after “PBS Movie Theater” was discontinued,
it was given its last spark of life in the autumn of 1978
when it was spun off into a Saturday-morning series called
“Cinematic Eye,”
in which 13 of these Janus films were rebroadcast,
but this time with an explanatory intro and outro by
Benjamin Dunlap,
professor of English and film studies at the University of South Carolina.
I found him brilliant, just brilliant.
Once “Cinematic Eye” was over, that was the end of the Janus series,
but there was a new series to take its place, on Tuesday nights, 11:30pm,
featuring movies from the CINEMA 5 collection, cropped but uncensored,
and that just blew my mind.
Movies that were still at cinemas, some with nudity, were being shown on TV.
Puzzling. Totally puzzling.
The new series was called
“Cinema Showcase,” and it ran uncut copies of
Seven Beauties and Pumping Iron and Providence and whatnot.
Inexplicable.
I watched a few.
It was irritating to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail since the sides were lopped off ruinously.
Worse, I knew that, despite the promises of the films being shown uncut, I knew I knew I knew I knew I knew I knew that it would be cut.
At the end,
a cop smashes the camera lens, the film runs off the sprockets, and then there’s an organ solo.
On PBS (just like on CBS back in February 1977), the cop smashed the camera lens, and that was the end of that.
Even though I knew it would be cut like that, I was still all twisted up and furious about it.
I wanted to scream.
TV stations object to a blank image, you see.
Projectionists at cinemas also cut out that ending and threw it in the garbage, thinking it was waste.
Yet one more reason to despise projectionists.
Anyway, I wanted to watch the whole series, but I was drowning in homework.
There is little in the world I hate so much as homework.