Will Krupp
Senior HTF Member
The 1954 re-release WAS made from the original Technicolor negatives. The idea was to present GWTW as a widescreen movie (GWTW-Greater with the Wide Screen) by projecting it through a 1.66:1 mask with all of the soft matting at the bottom of the frame. The prevailing wisdom was that there was more negligible space at the frame bottom than there was extra headroom.
ONLY those shots which would appreciably "suffer" from the bottom masking (ie; Scarlett at the bottom of the hill at Tara, the wounded soldiers at the cowshed, etc.) were reformatted for the new release. The sections in question were re-photographed onto Anscocolor single strip negative and cropped accordingly (all information taken from the top of the frame, a mixture of top and bottom, etc.) They were then printed with a hard 1.66:1 matte on the bottom of the frame (the black bar would never show through the projection masks).
These new sections were actually CUT INTO the original negatives when the 1954 printing masters were made and the original snips were either discarded or neglected, but are not known to have survived.
The major difference between the 1939 and 1954 prints are not the negatives, but the color timing and density. Technicolor's dye transfer system had incredible latitude in its printing process, and conventional wisdom held that 1939 audiences, unused to color motion pictures, would have "tired eyes" at the end of nearly four hours of Technicolor at its most vivid, so the hues were purposely muted.
By 1954, audiences were more used to vivid color; hence the reason for the re-timing. While its TRUE that Selznick himself liked the richer color palette of the 1954 re-release, he was NOT at ALL happy about the Anscocolor sections cut into the Technicolor original. He thought that the difference in quality was very noticeable and distracting in those sections.
So, that's why only a few shots were re-composed for the new release and why the original snips may never surface.
ONLY those shots which would appreciably "suffer" from the bottom masking (ie; Scarlett at the bottom of the hill at Tara, the wounded soldiers at the cowshed, etc.) were reformatted for the new release. The sections in question were re-photographed onto Anscocolor single strip negative and cropped accordingly (all information taken from the top of the frame, a mixture of top and bottom, etc.) They were then printed with a hard 1.66:1 matte on the bottom of the frame (the black bar would never show through the projection masks).
These new sections were actually CUT INTO the original negatives when the 1954 printing masters were made and the original snips were either discarded or neglected, but are not known to have survived.
The major difference between the 1939 and 1954 prints are not the negatives, but the color timing and density. Technicolor's dye transfer system had incredible latitude in its printing process, and conventional wisdom held that 1939 audiences, unused to color motion pictures, would have "tired eyes" at the end of nearly four hours of Technicolor at its most vivid, so the hues were purposely muted.
By 1954, audiences were more used to vivid color; hence the reason for the re-timing. While its TRUE that Selznick himself liked the richer color palette of the 1954 re-release, he was NOT at ALL happy about the Anscocolor sections cut into the Technicolor original. He thought that the difference in quality was very noticeable and distracting in those sections.
So, that's why only a few shots were re-composed for the new release and why the original snips may never surface.
