Paramount Exec Todd Sokolove (left) and the archival Charlotte Barker discussed the restoration before screening.
August 8, 2025
Paramount pictures 7 August celebrated the 75TH Anniversary of the classic 1950 Sunset Boulevard With a demonstration on the studio in Los Angeles and the new restoration of the film.
Todd Sokolove, Executive of Paramount, who organized a Q&A with the archivist Charlotte Barker before the demonstration, pointed out that the scenes in the film were shot on the Paramount. He also noticed the highly cited lines of the film like “I am ready for my close -up” and his influence on contemporary films such as May DecemberPresent The substancePresent pearl And paramount is Babylon.
Barker remembered that Gloria Swanson was nominated for an Oscar, as well as Betty Davis for Everything about Eva In the same year, both exhibited “career -making performance”. But Judy Holiday won for Born yesterday“What shocked everyone,” she told the audience.
The dark view of the film on Hollywood rubbed some wrong way when he premiered, said Sokolove. At that time Louis B. Mayer told director Billy Wilder: “You should go out of Hollywood.”
The restoration of such a pioneering piece in film history had its difficulties, not least the improvement in the previous efforts, said Barker.
“This is one of the challenges; it has already been restored,” she said. “You have to see what we could not do again when it was restored in 2012. What could you not do what we can do now?”
Sunset Boulevard In fact, two recently restored restorations, including one in 2002, used 300 computers, as they found.
“At DVD it looked really good, but when you got into the HD world, you could see that they took out too much film grain, so it didn't look really good for HD,” said Barker.
So the restoration of Blu-ray 2012. This restoration was “annoying good,” she said, but the restorers found things that they could repair with recent technology for the current restoration like film jitter. They also found that they were able to restore 14 missing frames that are not available in the best source. (The original negative for the film has currently been lost.)
“We replaced 14 frames,” she said. “We have already used the frame, the frame afterwards. Before they had to go down a [source] Generation for an entire scene. “
Nevertheless, the 5.1 -Surround -Sound -udio is “what really strikes this restoration,” said Barker.
The best element that the studio had was a mono route with “a very high noise,” she said. Previous restorations “brought hunting, but also reduced the quality of some audio times, so that they lost some of the nuances, maybe some of the dynamics that could have been there.”
At first they were amazed at how the audio can be improved, but then they saw the special features on the Beatles: go back The documentary that described an audio program from Wingnut films, Peter Jackson's company, “which would separate the mono recordings of the Beatles, The Music and Dialog.”
They asked the company whether this program could be used Sunset Boulevard.
“We sent them the file and a few weeks later they sent it back and she sounded perfectly,” said Barker. “It was flawless. But that was the problem. It sounded too good.”
After a little back and forth they arrived to a happy medium.
“You dialed it down and delivered a track that was perfect,” said Barker. “What you did was that you shared the track. You have put the music on a track, the dialogue on another and the effects on another track and the noise swarms removed.”
This separation of tracks opened another option.
“Because we had the split tracks, we had the opportunity to do 5.1,” she said.
The 4K recovery of the film, which returned to cinemas in August, is available at home on Digital and CD.
You can find more photos of the screening here.
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