Charlotte Barker is the Director of Film Restoration at Paramount Pictures. She is an accomplished film archivist and restoration specialist. She has been with the studio since 2005 and has played a pivotal role within the studio’s film archive. Since 2019 she has focused exclusively on film restoration.
Paramount Pictures is one of the oldest and most beloved film studios with a library of iconic films including one of the greatest films of all time, Chinatown. It is a film that has everything going for it, arguably one of the finest scripts written by Robert Towne, impeccable direction by Roman Polanski, stunning cinematography by John A. Alonzo, a haunting score by Jerry Goldsmith, and Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway at the top of their game.
Chinatown was lovingly restored for its 50th Anniversary and was screened at this year’s TCM fest and it’s gorgeous, it was also recently issued with a special 4K Blu-Ray release. Barker recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get started on this path in the industry?
I’ve been obsessed with film ever since I can remember. The only jobs I’ve ever had have been with movies, video store clerk, movie theater. And then I moved out here and I’ve just always been obsessed with film. And when I was a teenager, I saw a restoration of Vertigo and I saw on the cassette tape, there was a documentary on the restoration. At the time, I didn’t even know that was a job or a thing.
Being someone who loved classic movies, that just really lit a fire under me and I wanted to be involved with restoration if I could. So, that was always one of my goals. I’ve worked at Paramount since 2005, and I did not start in the archive, but I found the person who was running restoration and I said, “How do I get into film restoration?” He gave me some advice. I took it. It took a long time, but I finally worked my way over into the archive. I’ve been the head of the restoration group since 2019.
So tell me a little bit about the actual process. What does your average day look like?
I have a mix of projects I’m doing on my own, and then I have a team of four restoration and preservation managers who are overseeing their projects, so I check in on those. I go to a lot of those review sessions to check out the audio or the picture. I also do a lot of research and look at our elements too, I try to find a lot of hidden gems, so titles that have not been accessed in 30, or 40 years. “What is this title? I’ve never heard of it.” We don’t have any digital copies of it, so I do a lot of that whenever I can. I also do a lot of research.
We always do new audio passes and we’ll remove ticks, bumps, that kind of thing. Or we could check out the picture and make improvements. So you’re going in, and based on whatever type of budget you have, you’re doing the best you can, the best corrections, the best fixes to dirt or scratches or if it’s a multi-strip, fixing the alignment if there’s issues with that or color breathing. It’s kind of a mix of that every week.
What are some of the gems that you came across? Is there anything notable that you came across like, wow, I hadn’t heard of this or didn’t know we had this?
We have the Republic Pictures library, which is great because we don’t have the Paramount Pictures library from the ’30s to the ’50s because it was sold to Universal. So there’s a lot of stuff in the Republic Pictures catalog that the negatives are in almost pristine shape, because they were shown once and then they’ve just been stored since then. You have things that never even made it to VHS that you’re discovering. I’m a big fan of Judy Canova. She’s one of Republic Pictures stars, a screwball comedian, and you either love her or you hate her. Discovering her for me was a big deal.
There’s a film I discovered recently called The Lady Wants Mink, that Cinecon is going to play over Labor Day weekend. I’ll be introducing it there. We also found a movie recently called Scalawag that Kirk Douglas directed and produced. A lot of his family members are in it. His dog is in the movie, and it’s got two lovely songs in it, and Danny DeVito’s in it. I think it’s his very first film role. I’m pretty sure that was his first role.
I saw the restoration of Chinatown at the TCM Fest this year, I absolutely loved it. I like it when a restoration preserves the movie, but it’s not trying to alter it. I know someone else there spearheaded the project, but can you tell me a little bit about your involvement?
Chinatown, like a lot of films of the ’70s, the negative was really beat up because sometimes they were even printing prints off of the negative. They did that with The Godfather, that negative was notorious for being in horrible shape. So Chinatown had a couple of issues with it.
It had sections that were cut into it, things that had been replaced in the ’90s to cover damage because that’s how you used to preserve or restore a movie. You’d have to cut in stuff, but they would cut replacement sections into the negative. They would get a copy from some other copy of it and then cut that in. So luckily for this one, we ended up finding a lot of the pieces that had been replaced.
One of the issues I remember with that one was the end credits. The whole last section was completely yellow. I’ve never seen a negative that looked yellow during the nighttime shots at the very end before the credits roll. Luckily, we were able to find the textless material that was the footage, but didn’t have the in-text scroll on it. We had the picture and the image quality was just so much better.
So we recreated the text from the negative. The difference is just night and day, because for some reason, the negative didn’t have the yellowing issue that we found on the other. After all, the other was an optical.
What projects are you working on now that maybe we could expect to see in the next months or years?
I just finished up White Christmas earlier this year, and I do think that they’re going to be releasing that later this year. Hopefully, it’s an anniversary year. I did a new HD transfer on that, and I oversaw that personally. I adore that movie. I just redid To Catch a Thief, which is one of my favorites. I’ve been working on it for seven years now. I think it’s always been thought of as a lesser Hitchcock film, but I disagree and it looks beautiful. I can’t wait.
What do you find are some of the challenges of this work? Whether it’s budget or logistics.
My boss, Andrea Kalas, has a great quote. She says, “Everyone loves an archive, but no one wants to pay for it.” I think that’s so true, depending on who’s running the studio and what their MO is. Sometimes they’re interested in a catalog, other times they’re not. I think right now a lot of people are very interested in the catalog because there’s a lot of interest from third-party companies, like Kino Lorber, Criterion, and Arrow.
They’re licensing a lot of stuff from us, which I’ve mixed feelings about because I would love for Paramount to release these. The film lover in me is just happy that these things are getting out there. Revival Houses are doing well right now too. I see that there’s still interest in things. I see a lot more interest since 2020 than I did before then.
The Chinatown Restoration is now available here.
