A Century of Stock

Broadway: The American Musical Delves Into Stock Footage and Marries Old Technology With the New

"This is a huge subject, so the big challenge was deciding what to leave out, as we had such a wealth of material to draw on," reports director/producer Michael Kantor, who has worked on PBS long-form series such as Ken Burns’ The West and Ric Burns’ New York: A Documentary Film. "The series looks at 100 years of musical theater and combines a ton of different formats." Indeed, to bring the story to life, the series draws from a wide collection of archival footage, newsreels, private home movies, original cast recordings, still photos, diary excerpts, personal correspondences, rare television and audio archives, and autobiographical material. Kantor and his team also shot fresh interview segments, "mainly on Super 16," he reports. "I’d done a lot of MiniDV projects in the past, but I wanted to do this on film as I believe there’s nothing better for interviews than Super 16. We also shot some Super 8 and the [host] Julie Andrews segments in HD, and we finished in HD."

Finishing the project was easy — "Getting started was the hard part," he jokes. "It was back in 1996 when we did our first shot, and it took eight long years to pull together all the various sources and finally complete it."

As might be expected, the earlier shows make extensive use of archival photographs, many dating back to the early 1900s. "When I worked with Ken Burns, we’d send the photos out and they’d be shot on film," he recalls. "We’d shoot a static, a tilt up, a zoom-in, and we’d work with those. But now, thanks to Avid and Moving Picture software, we could go to an archive and capture a photo in two modes: we’d scan it once, hi-res, and then we’d create elements for the Avid and work with it from there, and finish in Adobe After Effects."

Other archival material came in a wide range of formats. "Sometimes we’d get film, sometimes digital video, regular video, and so on," he reports. "And all of this had to be cut in with our new interview segments." For these, Kantor and his DP Mills Clark shot Super 16 on an Aaton and assembled first-person accounts from dozens of theater luminaries, among them late greats such as Adolph Green, Brendan Gill, Peter Stone, "Ziegfeld Girl " Dana O’Connell, Al Hirschfeld, and Frances Gershwin Godowsky. Contemporary Broadway writers, lyricists, producers, performers, directors, and scholars are also represented, including Mel Brooks, Carol Channing, Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim, and Tommy Tune.

When the Source Is Missing

The team also shot reenactments of routines from the‘20s that lacked any source material. "For instance, we brought back to life a Gershwin musical, Tip Toes," he reports. "We shot in an old New York music hall that dated to 1879, and shot in both Super 16 and Super 8 — the latter on a Konica Super 8-6TL as well as this old Russian hand-cranked camera that our other DP, Bernard McWilliams, nicknamed The Kalishnikov. He bought it on the black market in Chernobyl, but no one could ever find out exactly what it was, hence the nickname."

The ancient hand-cranked camera gave the segment "exactly the right look," notes Kantor. "What’s interesting is that there are bootleg films of shows people shot dating back to the’20s and’30s, and these were often done with a hand-cranked Bolex." Other reenactments of important shows that lacked any surviving footage included Shuffle Along, with music by Eubie Blake, and Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing. "The reenactments were designed to capture the flavor of what they were like, if you were sneaking in a camera in the audience or the wings," adds Kantor. "In fact, Richard Rodgers shot a lot of home movies, many from backstage, and we’d try and copy that. So I was trying to approximate the same look and feel, and that kind of raw home-movie feel you get with Super 8 was the right way to go for me."

Super 8 Gets a Super Telecine

While the reenactments got the low-tech approach during the shoot, when it came down to post they were given the most sophisticated treatment on the market. "We did all the telecine at Technicolor Creative Servces in New York with top colorist John Dowdell," he reports. "We transferred all our Super 16 there, and it turned out he’s a big Super 8 fan and had bought this special $25,000 gate for the Spirit. So we ended up transferring all our Super 16 footage on a million-dollar set-up."

If pulling all the source material together was a daunting task, editing and then posting the six shows was even more daunting. "We spent six months editing each show using Avid Media Composers off line," says Kantor. "So we had three edit suites going round the clock, manned by three editors: Kris Liem, the supervising editor who also edited the first three shows, Adam Zucker, who did the next two shows and who worked with me on The West, and Nancy Novack who did the last one."

Once the mammoth editing sessions were completed, the shows were telecined at Technicolor with colorist Dowdell. "Then channel 13 [WNET] bought the new Avid nonlinear Nitris HD system," recalls Kantor. "It’s pretty new and very few people have the system yet, and right away we saw how valuable it’d be for this project. So we brought Dowdell over to look at its color-correction capabilities, and we all agreed that those are just awesome. In addition to blowing things up, we also went through a Juno converter to upconvert to HD and mixed the whole thing digitally."

Sprucing Up Archival Clips

Kantor reports that some of the important archival clips also needed additional restoration and clean up, and these were sent to DuArt Film and Video in New York, where a Teranex downconverter running Starfilm software further reduced dirt, grain and noise in real time. "And by the time we got them back, they looked beautiful," he reports. "They’re obviously archival, but they look of a piece with the rest of the show’s footage, so we were very pleased."

"One of the most interesting aspects of the whole project," Kantor says, "is the way it mixed the very old with the very new. So we have all these old photos and newsreels and so on, and then we shot our own footage using tried and true film stocks, and then married all that with the very latest post technology. And I think the result is pretty special and a real tribute to the American musical, which is still alive and well on Broadway today."