From Film To High Def

Bijou Bob recently paid a visit to Flying Spot Film Transfer in Seattle, Washington to visit with the crew there and see first hand how the process works for getting vintage original films transferred to the High Definition (HD) realm.
Obviously, this process is one of the key elements in bringing Matinee at the Bijou hosted by Debbie Reynolds to your TV set. After doing considerable research and speaking with a number of transfer facilities, the Bijou team has settled on Flying Spot as the film transfer house for the show.

Jeff Tillotson is a co-founder and senior colorist at Flying Spot, having started FSFT with partner Eric Rosen in 1998. He went to the University of Washington and started his career in Seattle, but quickly migrated to Hollywood, where he immersed himself in the world of film. What better place to do so than the film capitol of the world? But he came back to the Pacific Northwest and decided there was enough demand for high quality film transfer and color correction to keep him busy closer to family.

The films chosen for the Bijou series, already in excellent to pristine condition at the outset, won’t be going directly to FSFT’s facility. First they make a stop at a lab, where they go through a three-step process that starts with evaluation of the film itself. Then they attach a proper amount of “leader” as over the years a fair amount of it has been torn or cut off. The final step at the lab is to clean the film in a heated chemical bath that’s agitated by ultrasound. This is critical as older films, no matter how good they look to the naked eye, have collected a variety of oils, dirt, projector grease and other adherents. The film is mounted on a “core” and sent to FSFT for the next step in the journey.

Once a film arrives at FSFT, things shift into high-tech mode. The film is scanned on a Philips Grass Valley Thomson Shadow machine. The scanned image is captured by the real jewel of the facility, known as the Da Vinci, a very expensive and elaborate real-time color processing tool. This piece of gear has been the industry standard for many years and actually exceeds HD video standards. And the process is much more digital than film transfer techniques of yesteryear.

“Color correction,” says Tillotson, “has become a random access data management process.” Much of the work he does at FSFT involves extensive color manipulation to achieve desired affects. However, color changes will be kept to a minimum on the Bijou films, because the intent will be to present these films with high quality standards and as close as possible to how they were actually shown in the first place. “The fewer knobs I turn,” says Tillotson, “the more accurate and true these films will be to how they looked when they were made.”

Members of the Bijou production team will be physically at FSFT for the initial film transfers to make sure quality standards are set and also to determine how best to present the films in the program in terms of aspect ratio. Film-to-tape aspect ratios are a controversial aspect of 21st century film preservation and distribution. The option is to convert old movies to 16:9 or leave it in its purest aspect of 1:33 or 4:3. The current trend with classic films is a balance between the two aspect ratios - allowing for very narrow bars on the left and right side of the TV screen.

The final film images are stored on HDCAM tape and eventually transported to Bijou’s post-production facility for editing and finishing of the shows for broadcast. And the journey that started many decades ago on film ends up in the HD world of the 21st century.

The Bijou team looks forward to taking an active part in this fascinating process, and will be providing more production updates soon.

Remembering Rudy

Rich Mendoza, who wrote the theme song for the original Matinee at the Bijou series, still has some very distinct memories of his experiences with Rudy Vallee, the crooner of the tune. Here are some of his thoughts, more than a quarter-century later:

“When I first phoned Rudy to introduce myself, he’d recently been invited OFF a mid-day talk show on WGBH/Boston. He was touring the provinces with his one-man show and the TV appearance was part of his P.R. efforts. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the first singing telegram, which had been sent to him from Boston to New York. The talk show producers outdid themselves to welcome him. Before bringing him out as a guest they had a small group of dancers and singers perform a medley of some of the songs he made famous, decked out in Yale letter sweaters and carrying megaphones. No doubt Rudy should have been honored, but apparently he was not in a sunny mood. As soon as he was seated the hostess asked “So... how did you come to be identified with the megaphone?” Rudy scowled, then snapped “How come EVERYONE ALWAYS asks me the same STUPID question?” The hostess looked at the camera and ad libbed “We’ll be right back.” After the commercial break, Rudy was gone.

This may have been a lucky break for me and the rest of the Bijou gang, as Rudy was feeling quite sheepish about the whole thing and was as eager and cooperative as I could have ever hoped. A few weeks later, the tracks to “At the Bijou” recorded, I was ready to fly to LA to meet him and record his vocals. In our conversations he’d mentioned that the thing he missed most about NYC was the cheesecake. When I pulled in to Silvertip, high atop Rue De Vallee (known to the hoi polloi as Pyramid Place) to introduce myself in person, I had with me a pineapple cheesecake from Balducci’s that I’d brought across the country with me. He was enormously pleased and thus began a thoroughly enjoyable relationship which lasted until his death in 1986.

He was a world of fun, a gracious host and extremely professional in the recording studio. That’s not to say that I never got to see the legendary Rudy Vallee temper, but his explosions were hardly worth taking personally as they were as short-lived and empty of intent as they were colorful.

Bob Campbell, one of the original Bijou producers, and I were invited to the Vallee manse that week for dinner. After dinner, Rudy honored us with a private performance of his one-man show, in which he reminisced about his fascinating life. This was an extraordinary production as Rudy, busy as a one-armed paperhanger, ran the slide projector, the video playback, the cassette player and the sound system, just as he did when performing the show in public.

Bob, thinking about a future TV project, inquired whether Rudy would be interested in having his life story produced for television. HBO and Showtime were very new networks at the time and did not have a lot of experience yet in creating original content. Perhaps they’d be open to the proposal. Well, the fuse was lit. Rudy, obviously annoyed and getting more so every second, had already given much thought to such a prospect and he made it clear that his life story wouldn’t be on cable, it would be on CBS and Robert Redford would play the lead. (Rudy, to my knowledge, was never accused of having a problem with self-esteem. In fact, his tennis court was on top of a building devoted entirely to a museum to himself. Reportedly, after seeing it, Frank Sinatra quipped: “Gee, I wonder who lives here.”) Bob, trying to dig his way out, but only getting in deeper, offered that the timing might be right for such a project as nostalgia seemed to be experiencing a surge of popularity. “F*** NOSTALGIA!” explained Rudy. “F*** NOSTALGIA!, F*** NOSTALGIA!,“ he continued, further clarifying his earlier point.

While Rudy may not have been particularly frightening when he was angry, he proved to be absolutely terrifying when in a good mood. The next night Bob and I, and Rudy and his wife Eleanor, were going to have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant before heading to the recording studio. Rudy was in high spirits and he insisted we take one of his two Connecticut police wagons to the restaurant, Rudy not only driving, but also being in charge of the lights and sirens. Somehow we survived a journey that at times made Space Mountain seem tame, but Bob remembers vividly drinking in every detail of Los Angeles as it flew by, thinking that he meant to experience life to the fullest if these were to be his last few minutes on earth.

To say that Rudy was the most colorful character I ever met would amount to damning him with faint praise."

Rich Mendoza is currently writing the theme song for the new Matinee at the Bijou, to be performed by Host Debbie Reynolds. Rich is founder of Amazing Tunes. Check back here for more updates as we get closer to hitting the airwaves.

Rudy Vallee-Bijou's Connection To The Golden Era

The legendary entertainer Rudy Vallee was in the final stages of a career that began in the 1920’s when he was approached about singing the theme song to the original Matinee at the Bijou. How did a multifaceted megastar with a six-decade-long career end up crooning a tune for a low budget show on PBS? And for union scale no less? Well, as you might imagine, it’s quite a story, and one which will be told here for the first time. But first, a little background on Rudy.

He was born in 1901 and developed a love of music very early in his childhood. While attending college at Yale, he formed a group called the Yale Collegians, and made his singing debut at the Heigh Ho Club in New York City. He made his first two records in 1921, and a star was born. But Rudy’s career took a number of different paths over the years. In fact, a pretty solid argument could be made that his trajectory came in three distinct phases:

He was enormous as a singer/radio personality/romantic figure in the 20s and early 30s. It’s hard to fathom the level of charisma or sex appeal he had in his early years. Apparently he had the girls screaming and lining up outside the Paramount Theatre, long before the same could be said of Frank Sinatra - or later Elvis and the Beatles.

Rudy began his film career in 1929 with a short subject and a key role in The Vagabond Lover, and would eventually shed his radio idol skin and establish himself as a great comic movie actor, with his role in the 1942 film The Palm Beach Story perhaps representing the pinnacle of this incarnation.

In the 1960s Broadway came calling. Rudy starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which at the time was the hottest ticket in Broadway. Then, in a true case of coming full circle, he appeared in the movie version of the play seven years later.

So it’s not hard to imagine that when he was approached by the folks from the original Bijou series back in 1979, he may have well thought he had one more performance manifestation still in him. Here’s how it actually happened:

When Rich Mendoza, the original show’s theme song author, wrote At The Bijou, he felt Rudy Vallee would be the perfect person to sing it. It seemed like a long shot to get Rudy to agree, however, as the show’s budget was long since spent, and there was very little left to offer in terms of financial inducement.

What gave Rich the idea that there might be a chance was the fact that he was (and is) good friends since college days with Bill Vallee, Rudy’s nephew. He approached Bill for Rudy’s phone number, and to see if Bill thought Rudy might be receptive. Bill said the timing and the situation were perfect, as Rudy had just created a one-man show that he was trying to get booked in small venues around the country, Rich was Associate Music Director of Grey Advertising and Rudy apparently was eager to get into commercials (he’d never done one), and most important, Rudy had just been kicked off a TV morning show for insulting the hostess and was suffering from a combination of remorse and fear that he’d never work again. So as it turns out, he was extremely receptive. And that’s the true story of how Rudy Vallee became the singer for the original Matinee at the Bijou.

Now Rich Mendoza is penning the theme song for the new Matinee at the Bijou. Stay tuned for updates on Rich’s progress as well as the show itself.