GreatHiero Phantom 1925 Reconstruction

The 1925 classic silent film The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney survives in two prints, representing different versions of the film.  The most well-known print, the Eastman House Print, corresponds to a 1929/1930 version of the film containing a mix of footage from the 1925 General Release Version and the 1929 Talkie Re-release Version.  The other print, the Hampton Print, represents almost the entirety of the 1925 General Release Version with a few titles added in from 1929 when 1925 titles were not available.  The Eastman House Print survives in 35mm while the Hampton Print was compiled from 16mm sources, so the Eastman House Print is the "main feature" and, if included, the Hampton Print is the "extra version" on all commercial releases of The Phantom of the Opera of any quality.

The Hampton Print is significantly longer than the Eastman House Print and has scenes not found in the Eastman House Print, rearranged continuity and mostly different intertitles.  I grew up with the Eastman House Print and was introduced to the Hampton print with the 2003 Image/Milestone DVD release.  As a lifelong fan of Phantom, this was a revelation not unlike Frodo being told he had been given the One Ring.  If you want a fuller explanation of the various versions and prints of the 1925 Phantom, I might suggest reviewing my blog article here : https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/12/versions-and-sources-of-phantom-of-opera.html

Quality releases of Phantom which included the Hampton Print had no accompanying soundtrack prior to the 2003 Milestone DVD. The 2003 Milestone release of the Hampton Print has not been the only release of that Print on disc with music.  It has been released on by quality labels on no less than four subsequent occasions, in 2009 by Reelclassics on DVD, in 2011 by Image on Blu-ray, in 2013 by the BFI on Blu-ray/DVD and 2015 by Kino-Lorber on Blu-ray and DVD.  The picture quality of the Hampton Print is in my opinion worse on the Reelclassics DVD than the Milestone DVD.   The 2015 Kino disc's Hampton Print is a 480i upscale to 1080i with tinting.

The 2013 BFI release scanned the Hampton Print in high definition 1080p without interlacing, so the picture quality of that Print is significantly greater than anything released before or since.  While it cannot compete with a scan of the Eastman House Print it is a far superior presentation of the Hampton Print.  But the BFI's release is not without its flaws.  The most glaring flaw is that it eliminates "The Man with a Lantern" scene which is found on other releases of the Hampton Print.  The disc contains the Eastman House Print version of "The Man with a Lantern" sequence as an extra feature, but the Hampton Print version has a unique shot of that man not found in the Eastman House Print and is nowhere on the BFI's disc.

The second issue is a bit picky but a little annoying.  During a few instances in the BFI version, they seemed to have "freezed" the frame, eliminating most of the artifacts but also the fluidity of motion during those portions of the film.  Fortunately this freezing is almost entirely confined to intertitles, but there was one instance where it spilled into live action and motion was unnaturally frozen.  That is the shot of the title card "Directed by Rupert Julian" where the phantom is moving throughout the frame.  I can tolerate "freezing" because other releases do it as well (if less often) for intertitles but I draw the line at live action.

So in order to fix these video issues I had to add or replace footage from other sources.  The next best source, in terms of picture quality, is the version found on the Image/Kino Blu-ray.  I took the Man with a Lantern sequence from the Kino Blu-ray, applied a grayscale filter to eliminate the tint and tried to deinterlace it as best I could.  Silent film interlacing does not always follow the standard 3:2 pulldown method because one may not be trying to convert 24fps to 29.97fps but 20fps, 22fps, 18fps, 16fps and so on.

Originally I was going to replace the three titles "Directed by Rupert Julian", "Produced in its entirety at Universal City, California" and "The Cast" because these titles do not freeze on the Image/Kino Blu-ray.  I did not like the significant drop in quality for the latter two intertitles, so I abandoned that idea.  The BFI print had both frozen and non-frozen clusters of frames for the cast title, so I cut out all the frozen clusters and looped the non-frozen clusters as many times as I needed to make up the time.  As for Rupert Julian's credit, that clip was seemingly taken from a copy of the Eastman House Print or derived from it, it is cropped in a similar way unlike the title credits which preceeded it.  Not willing to go down on quality, I took Julian's credit from the Kino version of the Eastman House Print, cropped it and lowered the contrast a bit so it would not stick out quite so much to the rest of the footage. While another version went further to incorporate all the higher quality footage from the Eastman House Print which matched the Hampton Print, I wanted my version to remain as true to the Hampton Print as possible.

So, once I cobbled together my "Fixed Best Quality Hampton Print", I needed a soundtrack to go with it.  Having already taken inspiration from another individual's work on Phantom, I knew I could not stop with just video.  Most Phantom soundtracks are synced to the 20-minute shorter Eastman House Print (and certain soundtracks are synced to it running at a true 24fps), so they just will not work without significant addition or repetition.

There are four known scores of any merit which sync to the Hampton Print.  The 2003 Milestone DVD used an orchestral score by Jon C. Mirsalis played from  synthesizers.  The 2009 Reelclassics DVD uses an organ score by Ben Model.  The Image and Kino Blu-rays from 2011 and 2015 use a piano score by Frederick Hodges and the 2013 BFI a piano score by Ed Bussey.  I do not like the piano scores (especially Hodges) and as another individual already did a such great job marrying Model's score to his version, I decided to use the Mirsalis score for my version.  Plus I personally like Mirsalis' score the best of the four.

Syncing a silent film score made for one release to another is no trivial task.  My cut and pasted video is approximately 4 minutes shorter than the audio I ripped from the Milestone DVD.  I had two choices, I could go and edit out portions of the soundtrack to make it fit, but I doubt I would do a good job.  My second alternative was to reduce the speed of the music (by 4%) to make it fit into the video's runtime. With pitch shifting applied (1/2 of a semitone) I figured that would do the least amount of violence to the score, so that is what I ended up doing.

Even with the audio matching the video in length and more-or-less in tone, I still had to deal with syncing the music to the film.  The original Milestone DVD was my guide to how Mirsalis timed his music to change according to what was happening on the screen.  Sync tended to drift by several seconds as the film progressed, so without any further changes you'd hear somber music bleeding into a lighter scene and epic moments like the falling of the chandelier or the Phantom's unmasking not corresponding to the performance at those times.  I had to manually shave off a second here and there from the instances of silence on the soundtrack to try and get the sync close to the Milestone DVD.  All audio work was done with the isolated track in Audacity and the video work with VirtualDub2.  To give credit where credit is due and because the score continues playing past the end cast credit title, I took Mirsalis' credit from the Milestone DVD and stuck it onto the end of this video.  I hope I did a decent job, the sync does not seem too far off except for one instance late in the film after Rauol and Ledoux fall into the torture chamber due to missing frames in the BFI transfer.  Fortunately it seems to straighten itself out after a while.

Regarding the tint, the Hampton Print as it comes on the BFI, Reelclassics and Milestone discs is in black and white.  The Kino and Image Blu-rays tint their version, but I don't think their tint is very good and it does not come off well in upscaled 480i.  So I decided to put my newfound talents to use by trying to tint the picture.  Silent films were often tinted according to the scene or the mood.

In Phantom's case, the tinting issue is complex.  There were color sequences originally in the 1925 version which used either the Prizma or 2-strip Technicolor processes.  Except for the Masked Ball sequence and the opening shot of the ballet, none of these color sequences are known to survive.  They shot black and white versions of color sequences.

From the surviving shooting script, we have some indications of what tints were supposed to be applied.  "Amber" is frequently used, perhaps too frequently.  The Opera staircase, Christine's dressing room, offices, work areas, even the Phantom's lair are designated to use Amber as the tint.  Evening outdoors uses "Blue" and there is the occasional call for "Red" in the torture chamber.  "Faint green" is used for cellars.  Sometimes it calls for "Prizma", it designation of color footage regardless of process.  The script gets a little inconsistent toward the end.

Taking inspiration from not only the script but multiple tinted versions of the Eastman House Print, I have come up with the following color scheme.  Light green is used for cellars, rafters and other places where people don't want to be, amber for living and working areas, yellow for outside daytime, blue for outside nightime, purple for opera, ballet and revelry, red for the titles with curtains and for "heat." In my scheme, the area dictates the tint with almost no exceptions for the characters or action taking place in it.

Some people may not like their silent movies tinted, some may not like the tinting choices I made, and some may think that my tinting technique is an abomination.  For those folks, I have offered the same version in black and white.

Changes for v2:

For v2, after much reflection I took a purer approach to the Hampton Print.  So instead of taking the Eastman HD scan for director Rupert Julian's title card, I took an SD-quality version from an Eastman House scan.  The quality of that shot came closest to matching the BFI print and was better quality than the alternative of taking the same card from the Kino Blu-ray's Hampton scan.  I took the Universal City card which comes immediately thereafter from the Kino Blu-ray because it did not suffer from the unnatural "frozen frame effect" that the BFI's scan has for this card.  Frozen title card frames occurs twice just before Christine walks through the mirror, so I repeated what I did for the cast credits in v1, delete the frozen frames and repeat the unique frames until the amount of frames is more or less made up.

Christine's introductory title card and her first shots are oddly placed in the middle of the ballet sequence in the BFI version.  The Milestone version has the ballet play fully before we are introduced to Christine, so does the Kino and Reelclassics versions.  I rearranged the BFI's shots so that the ballet plays fully, which fixed the music cue at this point in the Mirsalis score.

There are differences between the Bal Masque sequence between the Eastman Print and the Hampton Print, with shots missing and out of order.  A "pure" Eastman Print uses the B&W Bal Masque sequence, not the color sequence.  As these sequences and shots are identical in all copies of the Hampton Print, I have elected to keep them uncorrected.

As the BFI scan of the Hampton print has some frames missing after the Phantom leaves his lair to investigate callers, I used the Kino version of the next few shots to make up the difference.  Then after the Phantom turns up the "HEAT", there were two shots which were repeated and two versions of a third shot.  The version of the shot where the phantom throws down his mask was identical to the Eastman print, all other Hampton print versions only show a different take which starts after the mask has been removed.  The BFI shows both, but the shot derived from the Eastman print was far worse in quality, so out it went.  When these sequences were removed, this helped better sync the remainder of the Mirsalis score, which suffered significantly after these points in the film in v1.

I redid the tinting scheme, turning the blue more cyan because blue removed too much detail and used red for for the scenes where the mob carries torches in the Opera cellars.  The shooting script calls for "amber" in these scenes, so my approach here is closer an expression of original intent.  I also made the Phantom's lair faint green instead of amber after the Phantom's unmasking.  I figured that as "faint green" is associated with the Phantom generally, something which the Killiam Classics version of the Eastman House Print used consistently.  I thought faint green was more appropriate than amber in his lair when he no longer was trying to hide his nature from Christine.  The Image/Kino Hampton print did this and I liked it, probably the only thing I liked about their tint of the Hampton Print.  Finally, for the rooftop scenes, I tinted any shots where the Phantom's cape is visible in red to evoke the original version which had the cape colored red in these sequences.  All errors in tinting should be fixed, the tinting should be totally consistent this time.

Finally, after I completed v1 I listened to it and found that a lot of stuttering that was not in the original track, so I tried to fix it.  I reduced the audio to 16-bit/48K, which should be friendlier than 32-bit/48K.  I also encoded this into H.264 so it could easily be turned into a Blu-ray if so desired.  I reduced the speed from 24fps to to 23.976fps because that almost perfectly matched the sync of the Mirsalis score for the first 2/3rds of the film without manual editing required.  I inserted two seconds of silence before the Bal Masque scene followed by one second of silence before the Viroflay scene to help fix the sync in the last third of the film.

List of Edits :

1.  Main title to Rupert Julian's director credit - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, no changes
2.  Rupert Julian's director credit - Taken from Youtube Upload of the Killiam Classic version of the Eastman House Print
3.  Universal City title - Taken from Kino Blu-ray, tint removed and deinterlaced
4.  Cast credit to Man with a Lantern - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, frozen frames removed and unique frames repeated
5.  Man with a Lantern - Taken from Kino Blu-ray, tint removed and deinterlaced
6.  Stanging a Ballet intertitle to end of Ballet - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, cut Christine's introductory intertitle and shot from middle of ballet and pasted them after the ballet ends.
7.  Christine's introduction until Christine enters dressing room after Chandelier fall - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, no changes
8.  Christine sequence where she is commanded to walk through the mirror - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, title cards "Christine, it is I, your master" and "Walk through the mirror, have no fear", frozen frames removed and unique frames repeated
9.  Christine meets the Phantom until after Raoul title "Christine! Christine! Can you hear me?" - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, no changes
10. Christine searches for Raoul and Phillipe pushes off boat - Taken from Kino Blu-ray due to significant amount of missing frames from BFI Blu-ray in these scenes except for the last second or so of Phillipe pushing the gondola.
11. Phantom attacks boat to end cast credits - Taken from BFI Blu-ray, removed repeated shots of Raoul and Ledoux in the torture chamber and the mob outside the Opera.  Also eliminated a shot of the Phantom throwing off his mask because it is not present in other versions of the Hampton Print, another shot repeats the action following just after the Phantom has removed his mask and is present in the other versions.
12. Mirasalis credit - Taken from Milestone DVD, upscaled and deinterlaced

I decided not to do a B&W version of v2, the tinted version is "my" version for better or worse.  Anyone is free to remove the tint and recolor this as they please.

With iguanaclerk's help, I intend to do another version of this running at 59.94fps.  Silent films did not typically run at sound speeds, they could be run at anything from 16fps to 26fps and speeds could change per reel.  The accepted frame rate for Phantom is 20fps.  "Speed corrected" VHS and DVDs will interlace frames in various unusual ways to get the field rate to 29.97 fields per second.  Some Blu-rays use this method, but others use progressive scanned film frames and repeat frames to get to a number that the Blu-ray format can support.  In order to get to 24fps for Blu-ray, each 4th frame is repeated once, leading to some stutter.  By supporting a high refresh rate, every frame is repeated three times, making for fluid motion.  Unfortunately 1080p/59.94fps is not officially supported by Blu-ray, so this file will use H.265 compression as well as a higher frame rate for hopefully perfect quality.