I would go to the guys at Crest Digital (no longer in business) and say, “When you have down time and you don’t have a big customer coming in having big things done, would you do us a favour? This movie will no longer be preserved unless you can give us a break money-wise.” And they’d say “Come in at 3.00 in the morning on Saturday.” and I’d say “Okay!” (laughs). And they’d do it for 29 cents an hour or something.
If this was a studio restoration and they threw all kinds of money into it, they would take a different approach. An archivist would be striving for that perfect colour. Most archivists and Studios don’t have to deal with the faded prints like we do because there is no other source. The closest thing you can equate it to is the A Star is Born restoration years ago, in the 80s which I was actually involved in a little bit. They had to use stills because the negative was missing. So that was kind of cobbled together but historically it was as accurate as you can get with the materials they had. It was a similar story with Holiday in Spain, it was as accurate as we could get with the materials we had. We just had to come up with a final product that was usable.