Englewood – Robert David and Dan Clark dreamed of starting a business where they could restore old films, discovering forgotten classics and clips that should never be forgotten.
But after launching The Cinema- Lab two years ago, they never expected that one day, an older woman would walk in off the street with a film she directed during her days at New York University’s film school. The film’s cameraman: a young, intrepid film student and wannabe director named Martin Scorsese.
“I was floored when I saw Scor sese’s name in the credits,” David said. “There are all kinds of interesting home movies and student films out there that will be gems one day. A lot of times, films like these are … left in some closet for 30 years just waiting to be rediscovered.”
The CinemaLab earns most of its revenues by preserving and restoring feature films for movie studios and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But David and Clark also want to focus on rare home movies and documentaries.
Their lab is on the American Film Institute’s short list of U.S. facilities that deal with restoration of studio pictures, and it’s the only one on the list not on either coast.
While there has been a movement to restore aging 35mm motion pictures, only recently have filmmakers begun to see the value in preserving lesser-known 16mm films as well.
“If you’re preserving something like a student film … it can give us insight into a well-known director or actor,” said Patricia King Hanson, an executive editor at AFI.
One of The CinemaLab’s major projects is restoring actress Joan Crawford’s home movies, shot on 16mm film.
“In the films, she really comes across as a mean mom,” Clark said.
The lab also is restoring an early 1900s documentary of tribes in Angola and Nigeria for the Field Museum in Chicago.
“Some of that film from the Field Museum is of indigenous tribes in Africa that don’t even exist anymore,” said David, a freelance filmmaker, editor and former student of the University of Colorado’s film school.
The Scorsese-shot film – Anita Warren’s “Good Show! Good Show!” – focused on a typical bustling night in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during the 1960s. The NYU project barely had an audience when it was completed. It was decaying badly before Warren brought it to The CinemaLab.
As student projects go, the 16mm film was unremarkable, David said, except for its now-famous cameraman.
But the 10-minute film also had other future film luminaries contribute, such as Bruce Joel Rubin, who later would write major motion- picture screenplays such as “Ghost” and “Jacob’s Ladder.”
“Martin (Scorsese) helped out a lot with the film, and I’m very grateful and proud that he’s become one of the great directors of our time,” said Warren, who runs a video- production company with her husband.
Warren was 20 years old when she made the black-and-white documentary. And while it offers a snippet of history involving one of cinema’s best-known directors, it also is a part of Warren’s life that she can now share with others.
“Watching it today reminds me of my youth, and my kids saw it for the first time not too long ago, thanks to the guys at CinemaLab,” she said.
Staff writer Manny Gonzales can be reached at 303-820-1173 or mgonzales@denverpost.com.
