Labs #2

As the title of our films got bigger and better so did their print quality. We now began to use fine grain 16mm or 35mm prints for the labs to produce our negs from. Filmatic was by now a distant memory and we now used Rank Labs at Denham and Buck Labs in Slough. David Buck was a slick salesman, while at Rank there was affable and charming Peter Richardson in charge, a director who had a small but smart office in the main building at Denham. It was Peter who who would work out the printing charges and whenever we received a call from him asking us to make an appointment, we knew that it was generally about a price increase. The department itself was run by Roy Hubbard, a bald headed gent, who always had his shirt sleeves rolled up and had a small office area set aside in his large and busy section, his young co-manager was Peter John, who would later take over when Roy retired. For a short time we were also used a third Lab called Meridian, a small lab that seemed to appear from nowhere. They had approached us and asked to be given an opportunity to prove their worth. Later they had managed to persuade Disney UK to let them do their 8mm printing, but Disney had then rejected the prints (many thousands of prints, I can remember that even their corridors were almost completely blocked by the rejected prints, slit or otherwise). They folded, but before they closed their doors they produced a number of shorts for us, including ‘The Creeping Flesh’ and ‘The Sorcerers’ 200′ versions and we thought that their work was on par with Buck Labs.  Were possible the editing was still done in house, in fact Derek and I had edited the first extract from 42nd Street on his dining room table at his house one Sunday afternoon, using a 16mm fine grain print, (a form of special  low contrast print).  The resulting 8mm prints were very impressive, and from then on we always tried to use the best material available, well, the best we could afford. When we started to utilize 35mm prints for our masters, Keith Wilton, who had worked as an editor at the BBC, took over the the job of editor and would spend many hours editing, with great care and affection, such classics as ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ and other Errol Flynn swashbucklers. Ken Locke also edited some of the Warner Brothers titles including ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’. As time progressed we invested in two 35mm editors, including a vast Steenbeck which weighed a ton, and were able to come up with some fine extracts from the likes of, ‘633 Squadron’, ‘The NeverEnding Story’, ‘Superman II’ and ‘Gremlins’. The feature films from 20th Century Fox would come off their 35mm negs directly down to a 16mm neg, which would then be used to produce our prints. By the time we issued ‘Independence Day’ this was beginning to get awkward as they were starting to use digital media even for negs and in this particular case, we had by necessity had used a 35mm print.  Disney would always insist on their negs being made by Technicolor, New York and shipped directly to ourselves, we would then produce test prints for them to view, in order to get their approval and then we could go ahead to make our sales prints, once they were happy with the 8mm box labels.

….To be continued