A few words with
George Feltenstein...
Occasionally, your beloved (one hopes) In The Balcony webmaster is invited to take part in discussions with the legendary George Feltenstein, truly beloved by all movie fans and the Head Honcho (or close to it) of Warner Classics. The company is growing, has had a 60% increase in revenue from last year at this time, and has added several new staffers whom we were pleased to meet. He is very, very happy with the work that Allied Vaughn is doing with distribution through MovieZyng, and encouraged us all to encourage you all to look for Warner Classics titles there (and I’ll just add that I get a small stipend if you use one of the links in this website, which helps me out greatly).
Mr. F. reviewed the history of the Warner Archives, and expressed his astonishment that some people still assume their releases are “burned” and not pressed after all these years. He promises that 2026 will be a year to make all film fans overjoyed; approximately 125 titles are currently in pre-production, and we can expect 4 to 6 new 4K UHD releases in the coming few months.
Opening the floor to questions, I was called on first, either because of my esteemed position as a physical media influencer or because at my advanced age they figured I might not be around for the end of the interview. Or maybe I just had my hand up first. Anyway, I wanted to know what goes into the licensing of Warner classics to other companies, from boutiques to Criterion. Turns out that’s George’s call, and he checked off a list of reasons, from budgetary constraints to the ability of other companies able to add bonus material and special not within the scope of Warner Classics. We mentioned the upcoming Shout! UHD releases of two much-loved Warners shockers, Them! and The Haunting, and Mr. F. added that Arrow is doing very fine work with Warners titles too, including contemporary classics.
A question about film stock resulted in a fascinating conversation about the various issues with restoring film from Eastman 5248 stock (Eastmancolor) from the 1950s, which has a tendency to fade and push up grain, and Ansco color, which was, to use technical jargon, “iffy” stock. He mentioned in particularly the problems restoring The Curse of Frankenstein, whose negative had so far faded that they had to use the original color separation.
The next topic was expert commentary that is either original or ported over from earlier DVD releases, and it turns out that there’s a major synching problem because DVDs and film elements do not match up frame-wise with HD releases and new masters with old commentaries are a problem. He also mentioned that, after 10 years of effort, they were finally able to restore and release Private Benjamin and were hell-bent on getting Goldie Hawn to do new commentary, but their efforts failed. He related the anecdote about how when Warners released The Americanization of Emily, they approached the representatives for both James Garner and Julie Andrews to do commentary, and were turned down. Mr. F. discovered much later that they would’ve LOVED to do commentary, but their agents had never told them about the opportunity.
Naturally, we all wanted to know about upcoming releases, but for the most part, that stuff is kept hush-hush and hoosh-hoosh (as Terry-Thomas once said). We DID learn that the much-requested Follow that Bird is not in the works; the only element for it was created as a TV master and is unusable. He was quite excited to share however that a TV classic is coming up, something everybody wants, and it’ll be announced soon for end of summer release. I started singing the theme from Maverick, to which he had no response. He also said that “much beloved” classic is being prepared for UHD release, and since it’s a childhood favorite of his, he’s actually getting together with a friend to record his first-ever commentary for it. He said that it’s a major restoration and added that a 4K release is four times the cost of a standard HD release. The success of The Searchers and High Society in UHD inspired, in his words, “a higher level” of quality in releases.
Mr. F. also discussed other elements of restoring these beloved films, including compromised film elements, missing footage, and poor vintage masters. The Big Sky, for example, was cut by 20 min. for re-release and the only existing footage for the missing material came from a 16mm copy of the film owned by Martin Scorsese. Allied Artists’ Last Summer (1969) has four separate cuts, but the negative was lost long ago, and it took 16 years to restore for theatrical re-release in 2026.
It was an interesting, informative afternoon and I hope we get to do it again soon and by the way, if you want to know George’s go-to cereal on Saturday mornings while he watches The Huckleberry Hound Show, it’s Cap’n Crunch. See, you don’t find info like this on other movie websites!