Vancouver, 2011: My then-roommate Willa Ross and I are at our wit’s end in one of Simon Fraser University’s characteristically antiseptic editing suites, having just spent the weekend hacking together three distinct copies of Sergio Leone’s 1966 western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all illegally ripped. The film had fallen victim to an MGM “restoration” in the early 2000s: Scenes Leone cut were reinstated, inflating the English-language runtime from 161 to 179 minutes, with Eastwood and Wallach dubbing the missing dialogue and a soundalike standing in for the late Lee Van Cleef. The mono soundtrack, meanwhile, had been reworked into a surround mix with jarringly modern gunshot effects. This “extended” cut was the only version commercially available for nearly a decade.
Our goal was simple: undo this butchery. We planned to combine sound from an out-of-print 1998 DVD with video from a recently imported Blu-ray of the Italian cut. After successfully navigating the various pitfalls of late-2000s home video ripping, our hopes were dashed: The Italian cut was even more dissimilar to the international cut than the extended cut. We gave up for nearly a decade.
Publicly accessible versions of major works of cinema are often wholly inadequate. A major studio’s home video arm might “expand” a film, remix a monaural audio track, wipe away digital grain, oversaturate or oversharpen the image, or even change the aspect ratio. At other points, low budgets and corporate apathy lead to corners being cut.
This is where boutique labels come in—companies that independently license and release archival titles in something like the spirit of Criterion’s founding aim. Outfits like Arrow, Kino, and Eureka operate on a version of that premise. James Flower, director of production at Arrow Films, raises a different culprit for historical inaccuracies: living filmmakers. The revisionist impulse is nearly as old as cinema—from Charlie Chaplin modernizing his silent classics to Wong Kar-wai radically altering color grading, aspect ratios, and soundtracks for a 2021 Criterion box set.
Vancouver, July 2019. Radicalized by a disheartening screening of the official MGM masters of Leone’s Dollars trilogy, Willa and I resume work. We now have better raw materials: a new Blu-ray and an old LaserDisc with an uncompromised mono track. A local repertory cinema programmer books an official Digital Cinema Package from MGM and we swap it for our homebrew copy for a public screening.
While digital tools have evolved, unofficial preservation is by no means new. It’s the reason F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) survives after a German court ordered every print destroyed. Kevin Brownlow’s reconstruction of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) began as an illicit teenage hobby.
The most famous retrospective cinematic alteration was George Lucas’s Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy—and the subsequent unavailability of unaltered versions. Two distinct projects emerged: Petr “Harmy” Harmáček’s “Despecialized” edition and Team Negative1’s Project 4K77, which used homebrew 4K scans of 35mm theatrical prints.
Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up. Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without generational loss.
Legally, this is piracy. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, merely breaking a Blu-ray’s digital lock is a federal violation, regardless of intent. A sort of “pirate’s code” has emerged: own a physical copy; don’t make money; don’t dump bootlegs on eBay.
Vancouver, December 2020. Word of our screening reached a California mastering engineer. What ensued was a months-long collaboration on Kino Lorber’s 2021 release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—turning an underfunded disaster-in-waiting into the best home video release of the film since the 1990s.
Flower had been leveraging fan knowledge for Arrow releases: “What have the fan restorers done? Can we pre-empt them… by bringing that fix into an official space?” In May 2024, Benji, Jordan, Willa, Spencer, and I were officially brought in as consultants on Arrow’s Dollars trilogy release. The process took a leisurely year. And we still used the LaserDisc audio.
While drafting this article, I checked my usual private torrent site for the latest copy of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The 4K Arrow release is on there—with the Italian track Arrow couldn’t secure and every commentary track ever released. The cycle continues.
[Full essay at the canonical URL.]