I started working on getting that restored in 1978, when the
lorimar cxut was released. Got Joel Silver involved, was told the
neg had disappeared, found it with a little help from Lieth
Adams. Joe Hyams took it on and got it ok'd by Bob Daley, with a
production number, then it stopped dead. Joe never said why.
Christa asked me and Tony Bozanich (post-production
coordinator on It's All True, my partner on the restoration project)
to hand off to Michael Friend, then head of the Academy Archives,
where he had done a lot of important work just barely inside his
brief of restoring Oscar winners (e.g. all of Satyajit Ray!) and
some outside it. We gladly did so. No sooner had Michael
started doing a budget with Curtis Hanson than I got a call from
Rick Schmidlin, of Touch of Evil remix fame, wanting in. I asked
Michael, who had the misfortune to know Schmidlin before
anyone and said "Over my dead body." I told Schmidlin he
wasn't needed. Someone who should have known better gave
him Christa's number, and in one afternoon he talked her into
dumping Michael, without telling him or consulting me. When I
heard about it, I told her the guy was just interested in scoring
and would forget her as soon as he had. She went ahead;
Michael, outraged, bailed out, and subsequently lost his job
(he's now at Sony), and Schmidlin didn't return Christa's calls for
3 years. Lately Richard Schickel has gotten interested in
pursuing it through his Warner Video connection, with Schmidlin
and the ever-faithful Curtis, but I hear from Christa that they may
only restore a couple of scenes for the DVD - not what Michael
or, before him, Tony and I had planned at all. A tragedy. But I
adore Christa, who made a mistake because Schmidlin came in
with a recommendation from someone she trusted.

Another tragedy is what became of Street of No Return. The
alcoholic French producer took Sam's cut and spent a year with
TEN EDITORS (look at the credits!) recutting it, turning what
would have been a beautiful swan song into chopped liver. As
Fred has pointed out, Sam had great editing ideas, and the
obvious rhythmic flaws in Street, Red One and Shark, which was
also taken away from him, are not his style. So the swan song
turns out to be The Madonna and the Dragon (aka Tlinginlit), a
down-and-dirty political noir shot in the Phillipines just before the
overthrow of Marcos, while the Street producer was "saving"
Sam's cut. I love Madonna and also, for the record, Thieves After
Dark, a beautiful film that caught many critics off guard because
they hadn't noticed that White Dog was the work of a man who
had recently become a father, and had finally gotten WWII off his
chest with Red One. His last film, a 30-minute Patricia
Highsmith adaptation called The Day and Hour of Reckoning
made for French tv, is quite insane. I think Jaime would like it.
Maybe someone will have a French Fuller retro some day and
kick it off with his first Eurofilm, Dead Pigeon. Fred, I think we
both saw it at the First Avenue Screening Room.