Vertigo

Harris has been a film collector, distributor, and producer (notably of The Grifters), while Katz has worked every angle of the business, from publicity and marketing in United Artists' '60s heyday to running Universal Classics and spearheading the release of five long-unavailable (but unrestored) Hitchcock films in the mid-'80s: Rear Window, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble With Harry, and Rope. (Katz has also produced diverse low-budget films, from Three Sisters to Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.) When I spent a workday with them on their final week restoring Vertigo, the first thing they told me is how eager they are to see how the film plays in San Francisco.

"When we brought a reel to the Castro for the San Francisco Film Festival," said Katz, "everyone laughed when Scottie tells Midge that he's calling Gavin Elster, and he says, `It's a Mission number, must be skid row.' The fun is to see how these things go over in every city. When we brought Spartacus to Washington, D.C., there's a scene when someone says to Charles Laughton, `Let's leave the money with you, you can disperse the money,' and Laughton says, `Don't be ridiculous, I'm a senator.' In D.C., that got a huge laugh.

"We never lose sight that we're doing these things for an audience and trying to make the most palatable and exciting presentation possible. That's where we get whatever clout we have with the people who own these movies, because we're in the position of selling someone else's trousers. We're saying, `Michael, we really like your jacket, but it's got a hole in the back, and we want to fix it, but it's gonna cost you 50 bucks.' And it's very hard to convince you of that. So we have to tell you what a great jacket it is, and how it's never going to go out of style." Harris adds, "And how a lot of other people want to see it on you." And, caps Katz, "You've got four others we think are just as good in the closet!"

Harris first contacted Katz about Vertigo more than a dozen years ago, when Katz was overseeing Universal's Hitchcock reissues. Harris had an ambitious vision of transporting it from city to city in VistaVision, its original format. VistaVision was an imposing but doomed big-screen option that doubled normal frame size, generating images of outstanding resolution -- and unfortunately requiring expensive projectors. (Few theaters bought them, so most movies using the process were reduced to standard wide-screen 35mm.) "We struck the first reel off the VistaVision negative," recalls Harris, "and it was faded." They called off the VistaVision tour; but this was the catalyst of their strategy to revive Vertigo.

Between then and now, Harris achieved pre-eminence in the field of restoration with his labor of love on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia; he and Katz teamed up on Kubrick's Spartacus and George Cukor's My Fair Lady. The pairing worked: Katz defers to Harris' technical mastery, Harris to Katz's instinctive navigation of film-world politics and bureaucracy, and they share a good-natured, goading sense of humor. (Katz insists that his greatest accomplishment since they partnered up was getting Harris to stop combing his hair over his bald pate.) While they were still refurbishing Cukor's lavish version of Lerner and Loewe's musical, they discovered that Vertigo's original music tracks were sitting at Paramount and deteriorating into vinegar. Harris and Katz sent them to the restoration-sound department at Warner Hollywood at their own expense. The movies were on death row. Katz told Universal Pictures head Tom Pollock, "The Hitchcocks we re-released in the mid-'80s are in bad shape, and if we don't do them right away, starting with Vertigo, there won't be anything to restore." Once Universal renegotiated terms with the Hitchcock estate, Pollock gave the go-ahead to Vertigo. It was probably the last project he signed off on before leaving the studio. (Katz and Harris are now preparing to rescue the rest of the Universal Classic Hitchcocks. Next up: Rear Window.)

Says Harris: "When you're working on a movie by a live director, everything is easier across the board, including dealing with the studio. On Lawrence, when we needed something, David Lean would pick up the phone and say, `Do it!' " With Pollock's departure, they lacked both director (Hitchcock died in 1980) and studio protector. "There wasn't a lot of interest here initially," says Katz, "but that's always the hardest part of selling a movie -- selling it internally." The restorers had to fight not only institutional inertia but also confusion: As Harris says, "The problem was to get someone to sign the order for certain things we wanted from Paramount when they weren't on anyone's inventories, so officially they didn't exist." But restoration crusader Martin Scorsese lent his support -- Katz calls him "the best layer-down of guilt trips in the business" -- and Harris and Katz were resourceful when it came to creative decisions. Doing anything to the work of a revered master craftsman like Hitchcock arouses the ire of idolaters. But Harris and Katz decided that there was no way to make use of the existing sound effect tracks -- they had to re-record what's called "the Foley." For guidance they relied on Hitchcock's voluminous notes and the recollections of his collaborators on the production. A key figure here was Herbert Coleman; he was listed as associate producer but, Katz says, "really did every kind of thing for [Hitchcock]. We tried to learn how Hitchcock conceptualized each reel, what he wanted the city sounds to be like -- basically he didn't want too many. Basically, he thought less was more."