Captain Ahab and the Triffids
In Herman Melville’s magnificent Moby-Dick, still arguably the greatest and most profound novel in the English language, and one instantly familiar to generations of befuddled high school students (like me) who grappled with its ornate language and cosmic themes, the book’s ferocious antihero finds himself possessed by a singular, literally monstrous obsession. It’s an obsession that propels him and the crew of the Pequod on to their eventual fate. As Ahab says in one of the book’s most memorable passages, “Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush!” The mad purity of Ahab’s purpose is breathtaking. At the very end, as the white whale is destroying his ship, he fights on, crying, “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” If this passage is familiar, it’s probably not from Moby-Dick, though. More people know it today from the sci-fi movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), quoted by Ricardo Montalban’s dying, defiant Khan as he attempts to kill Captain Kirk.
Many collectors are associated with a certain type or genre of film, but mention restoration expert Mike Hyatt’s name, and you will almost invariably hear this: “The Day of the Triffids.” It’s his torment and his pleasure, a more-than-thirty-year odyssey that occupies roughly the same place in his life that the whale occupied in Ahab’s. This comparison may sound far-fetched, but it’s not. For over three decades Mike—who has worked for a number of now-vanished film labs in L.A. and assisted on the restorations of Spartacus and My Fair Lady—has waged a lonely one-man battle to preserve and restore this particular movie, at all costs. For those who aren’t familiar with it, The Day of the Triffids is a thoughtful and still-engrossing 1963 science-fiction film directed by Steve Sekely, based on the postapocalyptic novel by British author John Wyndham. Its plot (which was borrowed from heavily by Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie film 28 Days Later) revolves around a merchant sailor, played against type by American musical star Howard Keel, who’s recovering in a London hospital from eye surgery. He removes his bandages to find that most of the earth’s population has been blinded by a freak meteor shower that has also scattered seedlings for voracious, man-eating plants called triffids, which grow to terrifying height. Intercut with Keel’s struggle to escape the alien onslaught are scenes of an alcoholic scientist (Kieron Moore) and his long-suffering wife (Janette Scott) trapped in a lighthouse by the triffids; these scenes were directed by an uncredited Freddie Francis and added to the film at the last minute to give it a stronger ending. The triffids themselves may be a little crude by today’s visual effects standards, but there’s something weirdly beautiful and convincing about their strange, herky-jerky, shuffling movements. The film, like many of the great sci-fi and horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s, has the eerie, somnambulant quality of a waking nightmare. When I ask Mike what about it fascinates him so much, he pauses for a moment: “It has this profound effect on an audience, because it feels like everything is doomed. Everything they’ve gone through to find a solution has failed. The lovers, who you care about, are in their last moment alive, almost at the brink of suicide. And then there’s this unexpected and tremendously moving ending of hope. I’ve seen people crying in the audience. A lot of people love it, including Tim Burton. There’s talk of doing a remake right now.”51
That said, it may be a little hard to understand someone spending three decades on one movie. When I mention Mike’s odyssey to fellow collector Mark Haggard, he responds, “That takes my breath away. I can see doing that for a John Ford film or a Howard Hawks or a William Wyler. But Day of the Triffids with Howard Keel? If She Wore a Yellow Ribbon were in that state, I could see getting caught up for a decade or so. But Day of the Triffids? It’s just a movie!” Mark’s “it’s just a movie” may be pretty funny—but there’s no reason that The Day of the Triffids should be any less important or preservation-worthy than She Wore a Yellow Ribbon just because it’s a sci-fi film about man-eating plants from outer space. In fact Triffids might deserve preservation more, because it was made by an independent producer and doesn’t have the resources of a major studio to protect it. Would I spend thirty years of my life to save the film? Probably not—but then, I’m not Mike Hyatt.
Mike is medium height with a trim salt-and-pepper beard and red hair just starting to gray at the fringes. If I were casting a movie of Moby-Dick, he would not look out of place as a nineteenth-century Nantucket seaman. I’ve known Mike for a number of years through my former job programming for the American Cinematheque, where he frequently loaned rare sci-fi and horror prints for retrospectives. Like many collectors, he can be very friendly and eloquent, but also remarkably intense. Former film dealer Allan Scott, who hired Mike to work for him at a film rejuvenation facility, bluntly remembers that Mike “got on [his] nerves, he kept chanting all the time,” a reference to Mike’s passion for Nichiren Buddhism, which he’s practiced since the 1970s. Based on the teachings of a thirteenth-century Japanese monk, Nichiren Buddhists believe that, essentially, the Buddha is in all of us, and thus we can all achieve enlightenment in our lifetimes. Mike’s interest in Buddhism was inspired, in fact, by cinema. In 1975, to the despair of many film lovers at the time and since, Technicolor shut down its operation making dye-transfer prints. Mike visited the plant the week it shut down with his friend, famed science-fiction author Ray Bradbury. “Dye transfer to me was like being in heaven, the color was so pure,” Mike recalls of that bittersweet final visit. “Everybody felt so terrible. At that time, dye-transfer prints were the only prints where the color lasted, because Eastman prints faded. It was a wonderful day, but it was so sad. I was so depressed over it, and that’s partially why I started to practice Buddhism. All I could think about anywhere I went is, ‘Why are they letting this wonderful thing go away?’”
Mike was born and raised in Los Angeles and grew up just downhill from the famed Ennis House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and known for its use in Vincent Price’s The House on Haunted Hill (1959). His mother was a housewife, and his father a cocktail-lounge pianist, who can be seen performing briefly in the 1950 film noir Between Midnight and Dawn, with Edmond O’Brien. His first fateful encounter with the film that would change his life was in 1963 when he saw Triffids at a matinee at the long-gone Paradise Theater. When his father was late picking him up, he stayed with his brother, eager for a second showing. “That’s when I was really impressed. It was as good or better the second time around,” Mike remembers clearly. Had his father been on time, who knows if fate would have inseparably linked him and the triffids?
His own interest in film collecting began in the early 1970s when he was running a college film series and couldn’t get a print of George Pal’s The Time Machine to screen. “At that time I decided if I could somehow buy a print from a collector, I’d hang on to it to make it available,” Mike says. “That’s the thing about collecting, it’s really for people who love the movies. It’s a custodial thing. You try to keep the print as close to its original condition as possible.” He thinks for a moment, then continues, “It became a spiritual thing after a while, because I realized that the movies I loved were not the same as other people loved. For example, your writing partner Jeff loved the musicals. Some friends I knew loved the animated films. That was their responsibility. I loved science fiction and fantasy. That became part of my raison d’être.” At the time, he couldn’t have imagined that his raison d’être would one day become The Day of the Triffids.
“I didn’t get involved with Triffids initially as preservation,” he says now, looking back on a quest that’s absorbed much of his life. Around 1975 he simply wanted to find a print of the film to screen at Louis Federici’s Encore Theatre revival house but discovered there were none available. He tracked down the film’s executive producer, Philip Yordan, to whom the film’s rights had reverted. At the same time he also befriended the director, Steve Sekely. It was, he observes, “a spiritual synchronicity of being in the right place at the right time.” Sekely loved the film but openly wished some shots were better. “Most of the effects were terrific, but money and time kept others from being finished correctly,” Mike says. He began thinking more and more about the movie. “I thought the film was still powerful and solid, but contemporary viewers would have a hard time forgiving those shots. I thought, ‘There must be a way to make this movie fly with a modern audience.’ And then, ‘What if those shots were improved and made to look as if they had been there all along?’ The rationale came from reading Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock, as the master discussed the context and collective value of each image.”
It was this relatively benign idea to improve some of the visual-effects shots that led him down a slippery slope. By 1982 Yordan confirmed that he’d sold his interest in the film to its original writer, Bernard Gordon, and his then-partner, Richard Rosenfeld. Gordon was a prolific scenarist who’d been blacklisted in the 1950s and forced to write under the pseudonym “Raymond T. Marcus” on films including Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Zombies of Mora Tau. He spent years in the shadow of Yordan, working for him on films such as Circus World, while Yordan took on-screen credit. (After Gordon’s death in 2007, he was posthumously granted sole writing credit on The Day of the Triffids, which had previously been credited to Yordan.) Mike made a presentation with storyboards and drawings of his ideas, and Gordon and Rosenfeld sparked to the notion of improving the visual effects and overhauling the film for a contemporary rerelease. But in the middle of discussions, Gordon decided he and his partner wanted to make their money more quickly: “Bernie was bitter at the blacklist and having been denied his Triffids credit. He also felt he’d been cheated and brushed aside by the film community. So he was now trying his hand as an entrepreneur.” Gordon decided to release the film on home video, but because a single sale couldn’t generate enough money, he devised a plan to sell a number of legitimate but time-limited, nonexclusive licenses to a group of paying (but substandard) VHS labels. Mike was dumbstruck: “I told Bernie, “You’re muddying the public’s perception of the film and ruining its chances for a rerelease.’” Some of the budget video labels carried public domain titles, and although The Day of the Triffids was copyrighted and properly renewed, this caused some people to mistakenly think the film was in the public domain, too—and cheap. “Hyatt, you’re interfering!” Gordon shot back when Mike warned him his plan would devalue the film. “Keep in mind that Bernie was the person who wrote the film—probably his best work. And now he was forced to show a financial return on an investment. The years of suffering only made him more cynical. At that point the film’s reputation meant less than the money it could immediately generate. So we had a fight and a huge falling-out,” Mike recalls sadly. It should have spelled the end of his interest in the film on a professional level, but it didn’t. Twelve years later he reapproached Gordon, who’d softened since their falling-out. Mike’s career had advanced in the field of film restoration, and he’d just completed work on My Fair Lady with preservationist Robert Harris. To Mike’s surprise, Gordon gave him access to the original 35mm negative of Triffids, but what he discovered was sad: “It was falling apart. It also had thousands of specks of embedded dirt throughout from a treatment performed in a release to laserdisc home video. The dirt translates as minus-density spots. These are pure white specks that appear like little stars. It creates a wall, a psychological block between the audience and the film, because you become aware of these spots.” Mike was brought on to work on a restoration. He was made a partner in lieu of payment, for one dollar.
Seeing the sorry condition of the original camera negative seems to have set the hook deep in Mike’s psyche. The film’s distributors had run over 150 release prints directly off the negative. “It’s a miracle it survived without losing footage,” he observes. In the middle of repairing the film, he got a call from Gordon, who’d sold his rights to his partner Rosenfeld. But Rosenfeld was in turn short on cash and was now offering him some rights on Triffids. “I basically took all the money I had out of the bank and bought these rights, which were for North American theatrical and home video, from Richard,” he recalls about that fateful decision. “Now I was involved in a restoration not just because I loved the movie, but because I owned it, too. The rights enabled me to restore and release it however I saw fit.”
What he didn’t know at the time was that he hadn’t clearly bought the film. Unknown to Mike, Rosenfeld had previously sold an option agreement on a package of films, including Triffids, to a well-known Dutch distributor named Jan Willem Bosman Jansen. Bosman Jansen showed up unexpectedly one day at the lab where Mike was working, demanding his Triffids negative. Words passed between them, and Mike hired an attorney. After a three-year legal battle, he and Bosman Jansen settled out of court, with Mike retaining the rights he originally purchased. “The legal battle was never acrimonious. The great thing about Jan Willem was his ability to see past the troubles. Once we settled, we became friends. He then made me restoration supervisor on all the films in his library,” he says.
The legal battle to hold on to Triffids was small potatoes compared to the actual restoration of the film negative. More than anything, it’s this dogged, single-handed mission that has inextricably linked Mike and the film in the minds of other collectors worldwide. “I returned to working heavily on the film in 2004,” he says about the unbelievably arduous and painstaking process of manually removing the stuck-on dirt. Nowadays it’s work that would be done completely digitally, with a restoration expert sitting at a computer workstation, but not in Mike’s case. His description of the process is lengthy but well worth reading: “I’d had training working on A Hard Day’s Night, Tom Jones, Sweet Smell of Success, and The Great Escape, removing dirt by hand. I developed this technique using a jeweler’s loupe and a needle, and using a recent print of the film as a guide to where the specks were. I’d line up the original camera negative with a frame counter on a bench, and then using the recent print on a Moviola, I’d wind down to the frame and very gingerly, holding my breath, pick the dirt out of the negative, which is the only way it would come out. There were so many specks on each frame that I had to break down the image on the Moviola into an imaginary sixteen areas: four down and four across to find each speck on each shot, and I would run from the beginning of the shot to the end of the shot focused on that one area, and then go back to the beginning of the shot focused on the next area. Each time I ran across a speck, I’d return to the negative, gently wind it down to the correct frame, locate it with the loupe, and gingerly pick it out. So each shot in the film was reviewed sixteen times on that Moviola. There are maybe a thousand shots in the film, I’ve never counted the number. I estimate I must’ve removed over twenty thousand specks from the one negative of Triffids. Maybe as many as thirty thousand specks.”
Imagine for a moment sitting by your lonesome at an editing bench, gently handling the fragile, already deteriorated negative of The Day of the Triffids. You’re examining each teeny-tiny frame through a jeweler’s magnifying loupe, and plucking out infinitesimally small specks of dirt with a needle.
Then imagine doing this for years and years. It’s work that seems to belong to another age, like a medieval monk copying an illustrated manuscript by candlelight.
“It produced an absolutely perfect image. Flawless,” Mike says. When Jeff asks how much he’s spent total on his quest to preserve and restore Triffids, he thinks for a moment, then sighs, “Over one hundred thousand dollars.” It’s an investment that he will likely never see back, but it should be obvious by now that he didn’t do it for the money. His restored version of The Day of the Triffids screened to great acclaim at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in 2009 in Hollywood and at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 in New York City. “People were amazed at the power of the film and that the color is so beautiful. It looks like IB Tech,” he says with pride.
Jeff asks if after all this time and effort Mike is finally finished with Triffids. He shakes his head. It goes without saying that he will most likely never be done with the movie, nor the movie with him. In April of 2014, after this interview, Mike bought the rest of the North American rights to the film. Later, in October, he purchased all the worldwide rights to Triffids, with the exception of five countries owned by the BBC. Because of advancements in digital technology, he plans to travel to Poland to scan the film at 4K resolution and complete the restoration, replacing missing frames and reregistering cut-in dissolves more accurately than ever. Unfortunately, this will also mean losing the expensive color timing, and in many ways, it means going back and beginning again.
Was it all worth it? “Absolutely,” says Mike. “Now anyone will have a chance to own their own copy of this film looking and sounding exactly as created, and it will be even better than that. Both versions will be available: the original, perfected, and the alternate, improved. It will be the kind of movie that families can share together at holidays. Everyone should have a love they can complete. Mine is the luckiest I can think of: something that moved me as a kid will one day enable me to leave behind a special message of faith and hope. In my own way it makes this world a better place. When it comes down to it, what’s better than that?” It’s a grand and optimistic thought, that a single film could make the world a better place—and it’s also clear that his obsession with the movie continues, undimmed. It’s hard not to think that they are bound together now, like Ahab and the whale. Mike Hyatt and the triffids. Melville’s words come back to haunt me, out of the mouth of the great captain himself: “They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!”