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Maltin: In 1923,
Georges Méliès, cinema's first magician,
inventor of the first-ever special effects,
destroyed all his work in a fit of desperation.
The original negatives
of the 520 films he directed between 1896 and 1913
went up in flames.
Were the dreams, the enchanting visions,
the masterpieces really lost forever?
Maybe not.
100 years later,
Méliès, the magician, is to perform
a final magic trick
and will reappear eternally youthful.
But this is another one of your tricks,
isn't it, Monsieur Méliès?
Maltin: Nothing predestined Georges Méliès
to become a master of fantasy and illusion.
Born in Paris in 1861,
he was the youngest of three sons
of the wealthy Jean-Louis-Stanislas Méliès,
a luxury shoemaker.
He enjoyed a privileged childhood
and received a good education
but dreamed of studying fine arts.
His father refused.
Georges had to join the family business.
At his father's factory,
he was mainly in charge of machine maintenance,
which meant he acquired excellent mechanical skills.
In 1885, upon his return from military service,
he married Eugénie Génin,
the daughter of another shoe salesman.
There's no escaping your destiny.
Maltin: Méliès quickly mastered the art of illusion
and started performing on stage.
He gave shows in Parisian salon,
at the Cabinet Fantastique, at the Grévin Museum,
and at the Theater of Magic in the Galerie Vivienne.
In 1888, when his father retired
and left the business to his sons,
Georges used his share of the inheritance
to buy the famous Robert-Houdin Theatre in Paris,
a shrine to modern magic on the grand boulevards.
Maltin: Méliès began by renovating the theater.
The place was well known but had fallen on hard times
since the death of Robert Houdin in 1871.
Méliès invented amazing illusions for his new shows
and quickly gained a reputation.
The more new stage shows he created,
the greater his popularity.
Méliès was soon a figurehead of his profession.
At the end of the 19th century, Paris was sparkling.
New attractions flourished all along the grand boulevards.
At the Grévin Museum,
right next to the Robert-Houdin Theatre,
Emile Reynaud presented his Pantomimes Lumineuses,
a precursor of animated films.
It was also on the boulevards that Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope
was first presented in Paris --
a peculiar apparatus allowing individual viewing
of short scenes recorded on film.
Among the spectators
was the photographer Antoine Lumière,
who was amazed by what he saw.
He subsequently gave his two sons, Auguste and Louis,
the assignment of building an apparatus
that would allow the projection of animated photographs.
Maltin: It was on December 28, 1895,
and Georges Méliès' destiny had changed forever.
Having built his own camera,
he began shooting his first film,
a card party,
reprising a theme previously used by the Lumière brothers.
Seated on the left is Lucien Reulos,
who was his associate for one year,
the only associate he ever had.
Together, they registered Méliès' trademark,
the Star Film's star, and invented the Kinetograph,
a projection machine that was difficult to sell
and quickly forgotten.
However, their film catalog rapidly expanded
with new titles presented every night
at the Robert-Houdin Theatre beginning in April 1896.
Although his first films were similar to the Lumières' work,
Méliès soon turned to more original subjects
inspired by performers who had made his theater's reputation,
such as the famous act of the vanishing lady.
On-stage, disappearance required
special accessories to hide the moment
when the base of the chair tilted.
This allowed the young woman to disappear through a trap door
hidden under a newspaper.
On film, Méliès could use a far simpler trick.
The idea came to him completely by chance.
Maltin: The first cinema special effect was born.
Méliès would use it and abuse it for years to come.
The Lumière brothers invented the Cinématographe,
Méliès created the cinematic spectacle.
Louis Lumière himself said so.
"In Georges' hands,
the camera didn't attempt to record reality
but presented a world
where fantasy and magic reigned supreme."
Maltin: In 1898, France faced
a serious political and social crisis.
The Dreyfus affair divided public opinion.
Unfairly convicted of spying for Germany,
Captain Dreyfus, of Jewish descent,
had been rotting in prison for four years.
Eventually, the real culprit was acquitted.
To defend Dreyfus was equal to attacking the army,
the pride of the nation.
Newsreels did not yet exist.
In his studio,
Méliès re-created the main events of the affair,
which would continue to unfold for another eight years.
He himself took the role of Labori, Dreyfus' attorney,
thus publicly exhibiting whose side he was on.
10 years earlier, when he had been contemplating a career
as an illustrator, he'd already, in his drawings,
fought General Boulanger's threats
against the recent fragile French democracy.
With "The Dreyfus Affair," the first-ever political film,
Méliès revealed new possibilities
for the brand-new cinema industry.
The Star Film company had now taken on all genres --
advertisements, dramas, comedies,
even historical reenactments.
But the verdict of audiences was clear.
They preferred extravaganzas -- trick films
filled with lavish and ingenious visual effects.
In a word...
Maltin: In 1902, Méliès presented his masterpiece,
"A Trip to the Moon" -- a truly spectacular film --
in 30 scenes, which required 3 months' work.
This was unprecedented.
Maltin: The success of "A Trip to the Moon"
was bound to attract competitors...
especially Charles Pathé,
who immediately made his own version of it.
Often copied but never equaled, Méliès' films combined magic
and cinema in an extremely clever combination
of theatrical machinery, optical and pyrotechnical effects,
cross-fades and superimpositions.
All of this was gleefully devised
by Méliès to render the imaginary
and the impossible clearly visible on film.
For several years, Star Film was successful
and renowned worldwide.
Everyone wanted more Méliès films.
At the time, elaborate, new special-effects scenes
would emerge from the Montreuil studio every month,
new fairy tales and fanciful journeys ever more spectacular.
Running at full capacity, the studio became cramped.
So Méliès built a second studio in 1907 on his vast property,
liening against his father's old house.
From then on, he was able to shoot two films at the same time
in an attempt to meet the demands
of an ever-changing market.
Maltin: In February 1909,
the Film Publishers Congress met in Paris
with Georges Méliès as chairman.
He was surrounded by Leon Gaumont, Georges Eastman,
Charles Pathé, and all the major international producers
ready to dictate the new rules of the game
because cinema had become an industry,
a serious business.
In big cities, more and more theaters
were being built solely dedicated to showing film.
These permanent structures generated an entirely different
economic model for film distribution.
Prints were no longer sold on fairgrounds
to traveling exhibitors as before,
but rented out in order to renew programs
more quickly and increase revenue.
This change required an organization,
an investment that Méliès could not provide.
He had never set up a company
and had always financed everything himself.
But his one-time fortune was now only a distant memory.
Moreover, the new system forced him to produce more product,
just as special effects and fairy tales
were going out of fashion.
He delegated the direction of some films to his assistant,
Manuel, but the results were unsatisfactory.
Maltin: From then on, the Pathé empire dominated world cinema.
Charles Pathé is seen here with Ferdinand Zecca,
the company's staff director,
who stole ideas from Méliès for years.
Paradoxically, in 1911,
even though Méliès hadn't shot anything for a whole year,
his long-standing rival offered to finance
some new Star Films --
one last chance, which may have been a pact with the devil.
Unfortunately, the last six films were all failures.
In 1913, Méliès was ruined,
and the Star Film Studios closed down.
He still had to earn a living, so during the war,
the Montreuil studio was turned into a theater.
The whole family was put to work.
Méliès naturally reserving for himself the tasks
of directing and stage design.
Meanwhile, in Paris, the Robert-Houdin Theatre
was serving as a cinema,
where soldiers on leave could discover Chaplin,
the new king of the big screen.
Cinema had entered a new era.
In January 1922,
Méliès was evicted from the Robert-Houdin Theatre,
which was to be demolished to allow
for the expansion of the Haussmann Boulevard.
The following year, he was forced to sell
his Montreuil property to pay his debts.
Méliès later said, "I didn't have anywhere to keep
the hundreds of film negatives.
In a moment of anger and exasperation,
I ordered for them to be destroyed
without realizing that I was doing something as imprudent
as it was irreversible."
Maltin: A few years later,
Georges Méliès could be found running a toy stand
at the Montparnasse train station with Jehanne d'Alcy.
She was a former star of the Robert-Houdin Theatre,
where thanks to her tiny size and agility,
she had performed wonders in disappearing act.
She had been the star of Méliès first films,
the first movie vamp, and also his mistress.
She was now his second wife.
Maltin: Méliès worked 7 days a week, 15 hours a day.
In his rare moments of free time,
he made drawings of some of the great scenes
from his past masterpieces.
Even if they could no longer be shown on screen,
he never forgot them.
Gradually, a new generation of cinephiles began to visit him
and were deeply moved by his fate.
In December of 1929,
Jean Mauclaire, manager of Studio 28,
organized a gala in his honor at the Salle Pleyel.
For this tribute,
they could find just eight random films,
often incomplete, deformed, or scratched.
It must have been heartbreaking for the man
who had invested everything in the fabulous beauty of images.
In 1932, Méliès was taken in at the Château d'Orly,
the film industry's retirement home,
where he would finally be able to relax
with Jehanne d'Alcy and Madeleine,
the granddaughter he had been looking after since 1930.
He received numerous visits from young film enthusiasts
who would later create the Cinémathèque Francaise,
as well as old friends, movie people.
They discussed a comeback...
...but in the end, his final screen appearance
was in a simple cigarette advertisement.
One last film, one last trick...
...and Méliès died
on a gloomy day of January 1938.
His studio in ruins was left to the weeds and street children
and would eventually be destroyed in 1945.
Only when it came time for tributes
did the true quest for the lost works
and invisible films of the magician from Montreuil begin.
In 1948, the French Cinematheque and its director,
Henri Langlois, presented the first exhibition
entirely dedicated to him.
Maltin: In 1961, at the time of Méliès' centenary,
about 60 of his films had been found.
The search continued.
Thanks to discoveries in basements and attics,
old released prints
were regularly located around the world.
By the early 2000s,
around 200 of the 520 films he shot
had been located and were visible again.
But most of the prints were mediocre or damaged,
very often incomplete.
This was also a race against time
because old prints were made on chemically unstable film stock,
which inevitably decomposes.
The film becomes sticky, images disappear,
and the film roll ends up as dust.
While every new discovery added a piece to the puzzle,
some could turn out to be of particular importance.
In 2016, while trying to fill
in the missing parts of "The Wandering Jew,"
the Parisian preservationists at the company Lobster Films
learned that it had survived in the USA
at the Library of Congress.
In a spectacular turn of events,
what had survived was not a simple release print,
but the original camera negative with exceptional image quality.
As part of the preservation process,
the best source is always the original camera negative.
Now, this is the real film that was in the camera
on the set capturing those images.
It is incredibly sharp.
It has all the detail.
Maltin: By comparing the negative
with the print found in France,
it could easily be determined that it was the same movie,
even with the obvious difference in quality.
But in comparing the two,
another slight difference appeared.
A little shift in the camera angle,
giving a strange effect of parallax and depth.
-Wow! -Wow!
Could Méliès have been the first filmmaker
to shoot a film in 3D as early as 1903?
Who knows?
There were more surprises in store.
Upon investigation, instead of just one,
there were 80 original negatives sitting on the shelves
at the Library of Congress.
How is this possible
since Méliès had burned them all in his garden?
This was a mystery that simply had to be solved.
The investigation would yield one surprise after another,
eventually leading to a large rescue operation
to restore a previously unknown part of Georges Méliès' work.
To understand how those events unraveled,
let us rewind a little.
In August 1902,
Méliès finished the production of "A Trip to the Moon,"
on which he had spent 10,000 francs,
a huge amount of money at that time.
He naturally hoped to recoup his investment
by selling prints of the film around the world.
But in the United States,
some prints were not purchased to be screened at all.
Dishonest buyers sent them to laboratories to be copied.
This meant there were countless counterfeits
of inferior quality flooding the market.
Here was the first act of piracy in the history of cinema.
Despite the fact that Méliès
had embedded the Star Film logo in the picture,
this proved to be no problem for pirates
who simply scratched it off before the print's recopy.
In the early days of cinema before World War I,
the French were incredibly competitive
with American film producers.
So a lot of the film being seen in the United States
was from France.
The American film industry
was a pretty ruthless business.
There was a lot of competition, there was a lot of producers
who were pretty unscrupulous about the way
they went about making their films or even acquiring films.
There was no such thing
as copyright-protected motion pictures
until around 1911.
So kind of anything went.
Maltin: To counter the fraudulent competition,
Méliès decided to open a branch of Star Film
in the United States
and entrusted his brother Gaston with the task.
Nine years his senior,
Gaston had been in charge of the family's shoe business,
but it had closed in 1896 due to mismanagement.
He therefore had time on his hands
and was ready for adventure.
In March 1903, Gaston arrived in New York
and moved into premises at 204 East 38th Street.
Three months later, the American branch was opened
and ready to sell the Parisian productions of Star Films
and protect them from counterfeiters.
As customs fees for importing films from France
were high,
Gaston was also responsible for printing copies
of Georges' films directly on site.
But in order for them to maintain top quality,
he needed a second original negative.
For this, in Paris, Georges created a curious device
allowing him to obtain
two identical negatives simultaneously
when shooting a film.
Identical or nearly identical.
The lenses of both cameras were a few centimeters apart,
which explains the slight difference in angle
in the two prints.
Two continents, two negatives, two Méliès.
Here is the key to that mystery.
Maltin: For a short while at the American branch,
business thrived.
Georges, who had financed everything,
received a return on his investment in less than a year.
As for Gaston, he earns an important share of the profits.
But the American market was not France,
and the tide had started to turn.
Haberkamp: Gaston Méliès thought that by joining in
on Edison's patents companies that he would be licensed
and it would enable him to distribute
Georges' films coming in from Paris and being imported.
Unfortunately, Edison realized
that those films were very popular and profitable.
And so he basically said to Gaston, "I'm sorry.
You can make your own films,
but you can't distribute these films
because they violate U.S. patent."
It meant that Georges Méliès' negatives
were no longer of value
because he couldn't do anything with them.
So suddenly these really wonderful films
were basically old news and basically considered scrap.
Maltin: Since he could no longer distribute Georges' films,
Gaston started to produce his own in the U.S.
and proceeded to set up
the G. Méliès Manufacturing Company.
Georges, Gaston.
One G. Méliès replaced another,
but the style was quite different.
Gaston's films included Westerns, dramas, comedies --
in a word, modern stories.
Gaston could see that magic and trick films were finished.
While Georges was happy to receive royalties
from Gaston's films, he didn't appreciate them.
He especially didn't like that his American production company
carried his name and worried that mixing genres
would tarnish his own reputation.
This confusion probably fooled many people.
30 years later, Orson Welles, a great admirer of Méliès,
would pay a small tribute to him.
I'm going away tomorrow night...
indefinitely.
I hope you have ever so nice a time, George.
I don't expect to have...
unfortunately, the Méliès film poster he chose
was for a film made by Gaston.
In January 1911, Gaston left for California,
which was fast becoming the Eldorado of cinema.
But gradually, his actors and technicians left him
to go to work for other, more established
and prestigious companies.
Business was bad.
So Gaston left the United States for a 10-month trip
to the Far East.
Before his departure, he made sure to sell
50% of the G. Méliès company
to the Vitagraph company in Brooklyn,
which continued to distribute his films.
Meanwhile, as Georges' negatives no longer interested anyone
and were very costly to store, Gaston gave them to a friend
who would keep them in his basement.
His travels led him to Tahiti, New Zealand,
Australia, Singapore, Cambodia and finally to Japan.
Gaston shot about 60 films there that were not at all successful.
1913, the Méliès brothers had cranked their last camera.
They were now in complete disagreement
and would never see each other again.
The curtain closed on the American negatives
of Georges and Gaston.
Soon the war would wipe out French youth
and with them the memory of the Méliès name.
Yet the odyssey of the American negatives of Star Film
had only just begun.
In the 1930s, Méliès was once again celebrated
at his Orly retirement home.
Louis Lumière finally presented him
with the Legion of Honor.
Compliments flowed.
People suggested he present his films
to bring in some money as he was now penniless,
but they were no longer in his possession
since he had destroyed them all.
Then Méliès remembered the American negatives,
but how could he get hold of them?
Gaston had died in 1915,
and the New York branch was long closed.
Méliès was not the only person
looking for his films.
In the United States,
Jean Le Roy, another film pioneer,
was trying to build a collection dedicated to early cinema.
Jean Le Roy, what a strange character.
He contacted Méliès and told him
an incredible story.
"A few years ago," he wrote,
"I had the Star Film negatives in my basement."
He was the friend to whom Gaston had entrusted
the precious treasure back in 1911.
Unfortunately, he no longer had those negatives.
In 1921, Gaston's son Paul
had taken them back and sold them all.
Méliès was flabbergasted.
To him, one thing was certain.
He was the sole owner of his movies.
This was nothing short of robbery.
He wanted this to become public knowledge,
so he requested that Le Roy publish ads in the press
to prevent any exploitation of his films.
The mysterious buyer was finally revealed
and wasn't a thief at all, but Leon Schlesinger.
Yes, indeed, Méliès' negatives were in the hands
of the future producer of Bugs Bunny.
He had 150 negatives legally purchased
and also had a contract to prove it.
Unfortunately, Schlesinger had failed
to put these antiquities back into circulation.
With the advent of talkies, he had moved on to other things.
At that time, he was, in fact,
trying to sell them to Paramount.
Schlesinger nevertheless agreed to make a deal with Méliès,
whom he admired, offering him a share of the profits
and the possibility of making copies for himself.
Unfortunately, in the end,
the advertisements about the film theft years ago
were harmful to all sides.
The sale did not go through and that's where things were left.
Méliès never got his films back
but had the satisfaction of knowing that,
tired of resisting,
Schlesinger had deposited them with a museum.
He later wrote, "A happy coincidence, much overdue,
meant that the extraordinary productions of Georges Méliès
would not be lost forever."
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
finally inherited the negatives in 1950
after the death of the Looney Tunes producer.
But at that time, there were only 53 cans left,
containing 80 films.
If we were to receive 53 cans
of original Méliès' negatives today,
it would be a miracle.
But at the time, in the 1950s,
I don't know whether or not it was known
what this was, the importance of these films.
Maltin: At the time, the academy didn't house its own archive.
Some films were saved in 1958,
but the machines then available were not designed
for fragile, shrunken, old prints,
and the originals that were in good condition
often ended up in pieces.
The others continued to decompose.
20 years later at the initiative
of film archivist David Shepard,
who wished to show the films,
the negatives were transferred to the Library of Congress,
which undertook a new restoration campaign.
But most still didn't fit correctly in the machines.
With every attempt to make a copy,
the negative was further damaged.
There were also unidentified and abandoned films.
Clearly, a new rescue operation was essential.
For that to happen,
after a century on American soil,
the precious 35-millimeter negatives
were returned to France.
It's really great that, in this particular case,
we've had the academy and the Library of Congress,
the CNC, and Lobster films, you know, to come together
and to have these films end up being restored
in a way that we can celebrate them once again
and basically share them with the world.
It's really fantastic.
This is the last opportunity to properly preserve
these films for future generations,
because these films may not survive
in 5, 10 years from now.
Maltin: The first step of the restoration
is to make the films more flexible
or to unstick the frames when they have started to decompose.
This requires a specific chemical treatment,
which is banned in the United States
for environmental reasons.
Next, the films are digitized frame by frame,
using a high-quality scanner which reveals their raw beauty.
Numerous defects, the rips and ravages of time still remain.
Some are really terrible.
That's when talented preservationists step in
and use image-editing programs
that didn't exist until recent times.
The project is only just beginning
and will take many years to complete,
but it is the end of a long journey
these miraculous negatives have taken.
It is also the promise of a new beginning
of making these treasured images available for eternity.
For film lovers, it is nothing short of a triumph.
Film history teaches us where we've gone before
and where we can go even further with our dreams
because it's the dream machine, right?