This is the rare awards season in which two contemporary movies — Golden Globe winners Hugo and The Artist— celebrate the silent era of filmmaking. Now it’s time to make way for a returning original.
The 1927 film Wings, winner of the first best-picture Academy Award and the only silent film to achieve the honor, has been restored to its original glory. Paramount Pictures is unveiling the refurbished movie at a special Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screening this week and will release it next Tuesday on Blu-ray and DVD.
“This is an incredibly important film and restoration,” says Randy Haberkamp, the academy’s director of educational projects. “Like Star Wars and Avatar later, Wings pushed the limits of filmmaking. It stands as an exciting film, not as a relic.”
The film starred one of the era’s biggest names in Clara Bow, along with Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen, who play pilots shipped off to fly fighter planes in World War I. It also features the breakout performance of Gary Cooper, who would go on to become a screen legend.
“Gary Cooper has a very small scene, but it’s incredibly effective,” Haberkamp says. “This was the film where people sat up and said, ‘Wow, who’s that?’ “
Wings features the use of real World War I planes in intricate aerial dogfights, many of which were shot with massive cameras attached to the flying planes. The U.S. military provided the planes, saving $16 million in costs, Haberkamp says. But Wings still racked up a $2 million budget, staggering for the time (and equivalent to about $24 million in today’s dollars).
“There are many flight sequences when you are going, ‘Holy cow,’ ” Haberkamp says. “And (it’s) more amazing knowing that these guys actually did these incredibly dangerous stunts. There just weren’t any special effects.”
Over the years, the film began to look its age. But advances in digital restoration made Wings a clear candidate to be restored as part of Paramount’s 100-year anniversary celebration. “The damage was pretty severe,” says Andrea Kalas, a Paramount archivist. “On the screen, things were starting to disappear in a cloudy way. We only wanted clouds in the sky.”
Her team researched the film for six months to determine how it looked at its peak and then spent four months restoring it.
Kalas declines to cite the budget for the process (“It didn’t cost as much as it took to make the film,” she says), but the results are spectacular. The new version includes an orchestral soundtrack mixed with actual airplane noises, much like the musical and sound accompaniment used in 1927 to compete with the growing popularity of “talking” films.
Another bonus: The original Wings prints had stenciled colors added, such as orange flames in planes being shot down and the orange turrets of firing machine guns. Those stenciled images disappeared in time, but they have been restored digitally. It’s another aspect that Haberkamp believes will surprise modern audiences.
“It’s one of those things from the silent era that was so artistically cool and yet was just sort of pushed aside,” he says. “People are going to see it and say, ‘That’s not what I thought silent films were about.’ “
