Turner Classic Movies is bringing back the dead -- in film terms, at least -- by resurrecting the granddaddy of Hollywood's silent vampire movies, LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT.
TCM has commissioned veteran film doctor Rick Schmidlin, who restored the silent film classic GREED, which aired on TCM in 1999.
MIDNIGHT is MGM's 1927 silent film starring Lon Chaney and directed by Tod Browning, who went on to direct Hollywood's first DRACULA, starring Bela Lugosi, in 1931. The film's original negative and all prints were destroyed in a studio fire in the early 1950s.
"LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT has been, next to GREED and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, probably the most famous of the lost films," said Schmidlin, who has also earned kudos for restoring Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL for Universal Pictures.
Schmidlin will re-create a facsimile of MIDNIGHT by using 200 original photograph stills of the film that were discovered along with the film's original continuity script in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' archives. Schmidlin will reshoot those black-and-white still photographs by employing motion control technology to create a replica of the film.
"After reading the script and the continuity, I realized that this could be told totally in photo stills and still be a very complex, compelling, articulate story," Schmidlin said.
The MIDNIGHT re-creation is being rescored by Robert Israel, who also rescored GREED.
TCM will premiere the movie Oct. 31. (Story courtesy of THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER)
SHOOT-BACK HERE!
