While I was editing Bubba Ho-tep I received a call from a self-professed Phantasm fan. He introduced himself to me as a television producer who had recently completed a series entitled Felicity and was working on a new show. His name was J. J. Abrams and he described in enthusiastic detail how he had seen Phantasm when he was in his teens and that it had a lasting impact on him. Even though I had no idea who he was, I found his comments about Phantasm to be very thoughtful and incisive. On the spur of the moment I invited J.J. to come over to my little editing trailer on my driveway and watch the cut of my new film with the intent that he might give me a fresh view of the material.
I played Bubba Ho-tep for him and he gave me some valuable notes. Afterward, while we were hanging out in the trailer he casually mentioned that he was working on a new spy series for ABC. He even played the pulsing new theme music for me on his laptop, which he had just composed himself. On a lark I tossed out a suggestion that he should really meet Angus Scrimm. I told him that not only was he a great guy, but that he was a great actor and maybe they could find a way to work together one day. J.J. eagerly took Angus’s phone number from me and departed. Within just a couple of days I heard from Angus that he had a very pleasant conversation with “a nice young chap.” He told me they discussed J.J.’s new show and it appeared there might be a featured role in it for him as an interrogator named McCullough. The show was Alias.
Angus was so excited to get the role. He had toiled in the trenches of low-budget indie films for most of his career and I know he relished the opportunity to appear in such a mainstream network show of high quality. And more importantly, Angus loved working with J.J., who treated him with such respect and kindness.
Over the years J.J. and I stayed in touch as he created some impressive work in both television and film. Just as I was finishing up John Dies at the End I received an email from him asking if I would be interested in bringing Phantasm over to his production company, Bad Robot Productions, to screen for his coworkers. Several of his team had never seen the film. I told him that would be great, but the only problem was what to screen. I had a single 35 mm print in my possession but it was pretty scratched up. The only alternative was a standard-definition commercial DVD. Neither was optimal. J.J. was surprised we had no high-definition materials for a film like Phantasm, but I explained that the distribution license with the current distributor was coming to an end in a couple years so they had no incentive to invest in a new HD version. J.J. told me we needed to fix this and he would get me over to his company to meet with Ben Rosenblatt, his head of postproduction. He was sure Ben could find a way to solve the problem.
A week later I arrived in the vicinity of the Bad Robot world headquarters and was unable to find it! I was at the address, but there was no Bad Robot, just a company called the “National Typewriter Company.” I went into an office next door and they informed me that the National Typewriter Company was in fact the Bad Robot offices and that people came in their office by mistake all the time. I walked back over and peered through a window and all I could make out inside were vintage printing presses and typesetting machines. I approached the heavy steel door and noticed a tiny sign over the doorbell. It cryptically read, “Are You Ready?” I knew I was in the right place.
Ben Rosenblatt had a plan. Bad Robot was producing the newest feature film incarnation of Star Trek along with several television series and had brought a lot of postproduction resources in-house. In particular they had recently invested in a high-end Spanish film finishing system called Mistika, which they were using on all their big projects. Ben suggested we start with a full-frame 4K scan of the original Phantasm negative at Bad Robot’s film lab of choice, FotoKem. Ben intimated that since they ran so much Bad Robot television series work through FotoKem, he believed they would give us an excellent price for the scan. Ben proposed that if I could cover the cost of the scan and the hourly cost of the technician, Bad Robot could provide everything else we would need as long as I wouldn’t mind working around their other projects.
Decades ago I had attended a seminar at the Directors Guild hosted by director Martin Scorsese about long-term storage of film elements and the peril that our collective motion picture history was in as film negatives degraded over time from improper storage conditions. I learned that to preserve the color integrity of a film negative, it needed to be stored at a constant temperature of around forty degrees Fahrenheit with very low humidity. When film goes bad, you can smell it. It reeks of vinegar. They call this vinegar syndrome. Independent films were at the most risk as they frequently had no major studio behind them to monitor and protect their valuable negative materials. A couple of years after that seminar, I decided to move the original Phantasm camera negative over to a high-security, long-term cold storage vault. It cost some money, but in the long run it proved to be well worth it. The Bad Robot restoration project was a terrific opportunity to make a permanent digital record of my film in a pristine version, and essentially protect it forever.
Moving the precious Phantasm camera negative from the cold storage vault over to FotoKem was a terrifying prospect. What if it was lost or damaged along the way? It just didn’t feel right to trust it to some delivery guy with a truck. I remembered reading a story about director Stanley Kubrick and how once when he was forced to change film labs he personally picked up his negative and instructed his driver to not exceed thirty miles an hour on the drive to his new lab. Following in the master’s footsteps, I engaged in a similar process of personally picking up just one reel of negative at a time, driving it slowly over to FotoKem, and not bringing them another until the previous reel was successfully scanned. (Unlike Kubrick, I did not have a chauffeur.) Everybody thought I was crazy to do it this way, but god forbid Phantasm was incinerated in a car crash!
Once the negative was scanned, over the next year and a half, it would go something like this. Ben would ring me up, “Hey Don, are you free tonight at eight p.m.? We’ve got four hours available.” And I would go over to Bad Robot and work with their in-house colorist, Juan Cabrera, on the restoration. Juan did a fantastic job using the Mistika and together we created a version of the film that I believe is better than the 35 mm prints originally screened in theaters.
Once Juan was finished, Nate Orloff came in to assist with the grunt work of the restoration. For months on end I would sit with Nate as we went through the entire film and removed every scratch or ding in the image. He was also able to fix some serious original flaws in the film. In the third act, our heroes Mike, Jody, and Reggie enter the white room—and on the floor, in the shadows, sat a yellow bucket that was accidentally left in the shot. For decades, no one else noticed it, but I had been groaning every time I saw that damn bucket. With a few quick keystrokes it disappeared forever. I was extremely careful not to fall into the trap that some directors have in which they alter important and meaningful sections of their classic films. The only other alteration I allowed was to a less than one-second-long profile shot of the sphere. The new effect, composited by VFX wizard Andrew Kramer, blends seamlessly, and in my mind is now perfect.
After color-correction and restoration were complete I stopped by Bad Robot to take a final look and bumped into J.J. in the hallway. He wanted to know what we were doing about the audio. I was very clear with him that I did not want to overstay my welcome at Bad Robot; he had been so extremely generous in supporting the visual restoration, but J.J. insisted that if the visuals were perfect, we needed to make the audio perfect also. He got with Ben and they brought in their resident Bad Robot audio wiz, Robby Stambler, who it turned out just happened to be a huge Phantasm fan like J.J. Robby went to work with his teammate Lindsey Alvarez. They took the original mono tracks, ripped them apart, and put them together again with enhanced sound effects and clever mixing. They turned it into one blistering, kickass soundtrack. Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave’s music was now so present, warm, and powerful that I think this new soundtrack may be my favorite part of the entire restoration. Hats off to others in the Bad Robot crew including Mike Silver, Phil Hoang, and Josh Tate for all their hard work on the restoration.
Later that year and early the next, Phantasm Remastered, as it was now called, had its first two major screenings, coincidentally both in Austin, Texas. The first one, stealth and off-the-radar, was held at Harry Knowles’s now defunct twenty-four-hour Butt-Numb-A-Thon festival as a special surprise screening. It was a powerful and vivid premiere at the state-of-the-art Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar theater. The audience loved it and the film had never looked so spectacular or sounded so clear and brilliant. As actor Michael Baldwin and I entered the theater to surprise the audience, it turned out that Alamo impresario Tim League had turned the tables with a special surprise for us. Above the audience, two flying spheres (modified model drones!) flew in over the crowd in unison and hovered in the auditorium. Specially designed just for the screening, these actual flying spheres buzzed over the audience to their delight.
Thanks to senior film programmer Jarod Neece, the official premiere of Phantasm Remastered was held a few months later at the South by Southwest Film Festival. J.J. was at SXSW and very kindly introduced the film to a warm response from the assembled crowd of Phantasm fans. They loved it.
Subsequently I have attended over a dozen screenings of Phantasm Remastered around the world, and the film has looked and sounded absolutely gorgeous. Aaron Lea created an impressive new reimagining of the original poster and I was honored to have Phantasm Remastered subsequently selected for inclusion in Art House Theater Day, and the restoration played nationwide in a hundred art house cinemas around the country.
I am honored and grateful that J. J. Abrams and his dedicated Bad Robot Productions staff would so generously offer their talents and resources to archive Phantasm in such a pristine form in perpetuity. I, along with Phantasm fans around the world, definitely owe them a sincere debt of gratitude.