Both have been restored to look—as much as possible—as they did the day they opened.

But the road to restoration was a long one and the resulting DVDs and new 35mm prints are the result of years of hard work and the passionate enthusiasm of each member of the restoration team.

The problems were considerable. To begin, neither of these films has a surviving original camera negative. Further, there are no first generation master positives from those negatives. These films don't exist in their original form. We are three generations downstream from the negative that was in the camera.

In the case of ROMAN HOLIDAY, we had a duplicate negative that seems to have been the source for almost all the prints made in 1953 and in 1960. However, in addition to some problems that were in the camera negative from day one, we had to contend with the accumulation of 50 years of wear and tear. Even more perplexing, was a scratch down the right side of the picture for the first 2000 feet of the best dupe negative. You can still see some of it in the "newsreel" sequence—which we did not restore in order to keep the newsreel look. In fact you can see the type of negative dirt that was removed from the rest of the film. Look for the white spots—that's dirt embedded in the emulsion of the dupe negative.

SUNSET BLVD. was equally, if not more, challenging because in addition to decades of physical wear the best surviving element had small but very visible digs in every frame of the negative, rendering it useless—until now.

Our mission was to protect and restore both of these works of art.

In the electronic world, it is complex but quite common to visually restore a film. But, true preservation must be on film because we know if we do all the right things, it will last! We know that modern film stocks properly stored will last hundreds of years.

However, for years, we did not have the photochemical means to truly restore these films.

In early 2001, we began looking at the digital restoration processes being offered by a number of vendors. Our reactions were variations on a theme of "No way—not in our lifetime!"

That was until early 2002.

Then, for the first time, we saw a sample of what the future could be. Lowry Digital—the winner of the digital marathon—scanned the negatives for both films and using his proprietary software, John Lowry was able to remove the visible damage. Over six months, John continually reinvented his software to make what you see possible. John's high-resolution digital file was then scanned back out to film to create a new negative for each film. The same file was output to a high definition master tape from which the standard definition master for the DVD was created.

All the surviving audio for both films was in the form of positive and negative optical sound tracks. The negative tracks were printed to positive and DJ Audio then recorded all the best optical tracks to digital 24 bit tapes.

An additional challenge confronted us. From the raw recordings of the optical tracks, John Polito of Audio Mechanics performed the digital restoration. This is a very labor-intensive process where every second of sound is evaluated and flaws such as hiss, crackles, pops and thuds are eliminated one by one. Distortion was eliminated or greatly reduced. Great care is taken to retain the full range of the sound. Often this means that greater fidelity is possible because qualities in the sound can be revealed that the sound systems of fifty years ago could not reproduce.

ROMAN HOLIDAY held an additional challenge. The story treatment for Roman Holiday had been written by Dalton Trumbo some years before the film went into production. In the intervening years, Trumbo was blacklisted. His story credit was given to the writer of the screenplay, Ian McLellan Hunter. In the '90s the Writers Guild recognized his work and that of other blacklisted writers. Their work became part of the official record for the films they worked on.

However, putting the credit on the film was not easy. The text of the main titles for Roman Holiday was against action footage of Rome. Further, no textless background existed. Even with computers it would not be easy to place Trumbo's credit where it belonged. However, since the title backgrounds were second unit work, it seemed likely that some of the footage would have been kept for stock, and so it was. The original footage was located in the stock library, and it was now possible to create a textless background over which to place the corrected credit for Trumbo.

Technical Notes:

All surviving film elements were gathered in Los Angeles for evaluation and the ones with the best image quality regardless of the physical condition were selected.

Test scans at both 2,000 and 4,000 line resolution were performed. Because the elements were several generations downstream of the original negatives, the 2,000 line scans revealed all the information that could be retrieved from the film image. Each frame of each film was scanned and the raw data was stored in 300 computers. After processing the images were scanned back onto film, taking 13 seconds per frame of film. The high-resolution files were also output to high definition master tapes to create video for the DVD masters.

The members of the restoration team at Paramount were Barry Allen, Steve Elkin, Phil Murphy and Ron Smith. At Lowry Digital they were John Lowry, Patrick Cooper and Ryan Gomez.

NOTE: For more about the Roman Holiday restoration, read this interview with Phil Murphy and Barry Allen, originally given for the Japanese press.