The Keep - Official 4k from VS

[dvdmike]

How did they manage this????
Additional info:

2-disc Set: 4K Ultra HD / Region A Blu-ray
4K UHD presented in Dolby Vision High-Dynamic-Range
Newly scanned & restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative
Commentary track with Film Historian Matthew Aspery Gear
"Out of the Darkness" (7 min) - an interview with producer Gene Kirkwood
"Something Is Murdering My Men" (24 min) - an interview with The Keep author F. Paul Wilson
"What He Left Unfinished" (6 min) - an interview with VFX producer Peter Kuran
"An Evil Most Ancient" (24 min) - an interview with make-up effects designer Nick Maley
"Other Sounds for Other Worlds" (11 min) - an interview with co-composer Johannes Schmoelling
"I, Molasar" (25 min) - an interview with actor Michael Carter
Still gallery
Original trailer
TV spot
Reversible sleeve artwork
English SDH subtitles

[alexp2000]

Have to confess I've never actually seen it but my brother has always tried to convince me to give it a try - this sounds like the right opportunity..

[dvdmike]

Impact are also releasing it in Australia, so I expect a UK label will put it out also.
Don't know who has a deal with Paramount tho

[AdmiralNoodles]

Impact are also releasing it in Australia, so I expect a UK label will put it out also.
Don't know who has a deal with Paramount tho

Wonder if the bonus features will be straight carried over from Vinegar Syndrome release or it'd be different between the boutique labels.
I've always wanted to watch the original intended version instead of the 90+ minute one that's available.

[LucasGodzilla]

Hate that I actually saw this land on the store from day one but pushed off picking up a copy till after the LE version sold out.

The one time I actually care about checking out the essay booklet, it vanishes from my grasp LMAO

Either way, amazing to see this land finally on home video in proper UHD. The trailer looks pretty good for the most part; the only real qualm I have is that some of the optical effects look really weird, but I imagine that's a result of HDR–to–SDR tonemapping.



I'm mostly happy to actually be able to see the movie looking as sharp as it does, even with that YouTube compression. I thought it just had really soft photography all this time more than anything else hahaha

I've always wanted to watch the original intended version instead of the 90+ minute one that's available.

It does seem some elements do seem to still exist between the stuff Mann mentioned in the past (biggest hurdle being the unfinished–but-shot VFX situation) and the fact that this was posted last month.

For any of my pals interested in Michael Mann’s The Keep coming to Blu-Ray or 4K Blu-Ray, I just saw the film elements were in the recent work area at the Paramount Studios Archive in the Film Lab

It's hard to say though, because more recently, the same user who posted the pics above did have this to say...

I carefully looked at every box that was nearby and saw only that one cut of the film.

But I’m no expert, so who knows?

This will allow people to continue the hunt for other versions !

It would probably be copium to hope that Michael Mann might finally give the project another shot and end up repeating the Anchor Bay Manhunter situation where there'll be back–to–back re–releases of the movie in the short span of a couple years, but it's certainly possible that perhaps something might crop up some day down the line.

It is quite puzzling to see these boxes having been exhumed at all though. Makes me wonder if the folks VS tried seeing if there was an intact copy of the movie before it received the final cuts that Paramount enforced (as odds of seeing that version of the movie coming to light are far higher than seeing any efforts in trying to piece together the unrealized Wally Veevers cut) but either couldn't find anything or got blocked.

Whatever the case may have been, I'll take what I can get with the theatrical version. Despite all of its flaws as both a movie and an adaptation, I still find it works wonderfully when viewed under the same goggles as a Dario Argento picture like Inferno.

[AdmiralNoodles]

Agreed about the Theatrical Cut. Original intended cut has always been a 'fever dream' to watch i.e. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE - The Director's Edition (2002 & 2022), BLADE RUNNER: The Final Cut, etc. Those did get made, but, different situation with THE KEEP.
Or be released similar to a myriad of other Ridley Scott films where he usually has the majority of official cuts available to watch. Not the same with Michael Mann, especially with The Last of the Mohicans.
ANYWAY, I don't mind eventually getting the standard edition UHD down the line. In the past I had watched various fan restorations or archiving from various sources. Glad to finally see it's officially being released, and with a lot of bonus features.

[LucasGodzilla]

Agreed about the Theatrical Cut. Original intended cut has always been a 'fever dream' to watch i.e. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE - The Director's Edition (2002 & 2022), BLADE RUNNER: The Final Cut, etc. Those did get made, but, different situation with THE KEEP.
Or be released similar to a myriad of other Ridley Scott films where he usually has the majority of official cuts available to watch. Not the same with Michael Mann, especially with The Last of the Mohicans.

In total fairness, I think both of those films faced relatively similar issues that a DC restoration of The Keep would pose. With Star Trek, I know the last DC attempt required a fair amount of re–compositing work to both polish shots that were in the TC as well as add in unfinished VFX work in general.

Using scans of original 1979 photography plates-including some intended to be used but were omitted at the time–our team is digitally recombining these elements to present them as they were originally intended, and with a clarity and quality unimagined. I can’t wait for everyone to see it!

Blade Runner was more of a weird scenario where the only reason that a DC ever got created was because a workprint got screened by sheer happenstance. If that didn't ever happen, there probably wouldn't have ever been enough interest in exhuming the film.

However in both of those scenarios as far as their original releases went, they were mainly hindered by time and executives. As far as I'm aware of regarding the original vision of The Keep, neither would've been an issue if Wally Veevers didn't pass away during the start of post–production.

Despite all of Mann's infamy for being incredibly fastidious in the editing room, they technically did actually finish shooting the whole movie with the expectation of possibly only needing to go back and possibly shoot inserts and whatnot. However, with Wally Veever's death, it ended up negating a huge chunk of what they shot because no one could figure out what he was going to do in the day, thus leading to the hell everyone's familiar with to this day where the movie blew up and went over its original deadlines and budget.

Whilst odds are Mann would've still been editing that movie right up to the final days of post (knowing that most likely Paramount would've still asked for a shorter running time no matter what), the movie probably would've been given enough wiggle room to include more of those missing character–building scenes with extra bits of spectacle peppered all throughout—given there wouldn't have been any real serious technical issues.

Anyways, having gone off track there for a tick, the main point is that in total technicality, the situation isn't worlds off between each other to a certain degree. The footage was all shot, but without Michael Mann's willingness to return along with the support of VFX artists who could feasibly try and piece together the unfinished VFX, odds are none of that original version will ever really see the light of day in any real meaningful way. Plausibly some of the plates might crop up in documentaries at some point down the line, but nothing remotely "presentable" if I had to guess.

My biggest hope at this point is whether or not any of the missing dialog / character scenes might ever see the light of day, which likely were all compiled together in a finished edit by Mann but had to have been cut out at the final hour. This was how Mann was able to return to The Last Of The Mohicans, as he has talked about how his DC work on that movie involved mainly re–inserting previously excised lifts.

Borders: And even more recently in order to produce this director's cut for the DVD. How difficult was it to mesh what came out originally with the new version?

MM: Everything that I added had been there at one time because when we first put a film together, it's longer. Then, as you try to find the rhythms and the shape of the story, you compress or you find finesses through the material. You make certain decisions. Often times in that process, you may be looking at the film for the 3,167th time and you try to pretend you're objective and you're [the] audience who's never seen the film before. That's the struggle that you have, [that] all directors have in editing, and sometimes you guess wrong. I mean no one else took [the scenes] out, I took them out. There were things that were taken out in the interest of moving, in the interest of capturing [the actor's] emotion, and in our holding on to them, we were probably too tight. The scenes didn't have to be quite that tight. There were some dimensions of some of the people that were terribly important for the story to have its maximum impact. Some of the dimensions of Heyward, for example, really had to be there. The political intelligence of Magua, how smart he was about what was going on, had to be there for the story to be less a song and more an orchestral piece, you know? And so the wonderful thing about the digital realm is if you've been lucky enough to have your film archived correctly, you can go back and put these pieces back in. We [don't] leave a film in immaculate order with last minute decisions about "I'm going to take out this scene" or "I'm going to trim this line of dialogue down." All those final decisions are still intact and canned as cut pieces of film (which we call lifts). So if the stuff is kept in pretty good order, it's relatively easy to put it all back. We were fortunate in that 20th Century Fox did a wonderful job archiving this film (which is not common). So when we got about 80 large boxes full of film including old mixes and some what we call pre-mixes -- where it was a different soundtrack that incorporated the missing scene which I'm now putting back -- we were able to just literally reassemble everything. The only hit that the DVD takes is that if I cut a particular shot of say, Daniel Day-Lewis, and he says something, and then he goes on and says one more sentence and I cut that sentence off and I cut the picture there, to reassemble it we actually cut the negative and so you lose a frame or sometimes two frames. Now when I'm going to put it all back, those, there's an interim frame that in fact has been destroyed, and we have to clone and digitally recreate the missing frame to join the two pieces of film back together again.

So unless Paramount did fully junk that pre–release workprint, it's plausible to imagine at some point down the line it could be restored (though probably not with Mann's involvement—looking at this from the perspective of another 10+ years from now). Once again, this sort of thing did happen before with Blade Runner (and more specifically with Mann, Manhunter) by accident, so you never know, though I'm not holding my breath.

On the upshot though, it does look like at least the footage for the extended ending does seem to still exist—though the details seem to be rather vague. It seems @Bilbofett here managed to find a snapshot of one of the early copies that showcased this disclaimer.

No clue if the problem lies with Mann or the "Walking in the Air" track that plays over it.

[Bilbofett]

following!

[zoidberg]

A lot of the visual effects supervisors in the optical years used their own custom-built equipment and had their own esoteric way of creating shots/composites. Basically nothing was standardised like nowadays and anything that got the image onto negative was fair game. So when your visual effects supervisor in that era of film-making dies during post, your goose is well and truly cooked. It's a lot like when the foreman of the glassworks dies and the secret of the Ruby Glass is lost forever.

It seems like all the elements have been preserved. I imagine the effects sequences was storyboarded, with modern technology I imagine the unfinished work could be completed digitally, the question is whether Paramount are prepared to finance it and whether Mann would be involved.

It's a shame as I think The Keep could have been a truly remarkable piece of film-making had it's production not been utterly scuppered. It would have also been interesting to see Mann pursue the genre further. As it is the situation is much like Dune 1984 was for David Lynch, it's simply too painful to revisit.

Genuine question for you all. Do you really think the o-neg for this film (shot on 80's stock with JDC anamorphics) is as sharp as the trailer suggests? Or has it possibly been helped along the way with modern enhancements, like so many (most, if not all) 4K 'restorations'

[LucasGodzilla]

A lot of the visual effects supervisors in the optical years used their own custom-built equipment and had their own esoteric way of creating shots/composites. Basically nothing was standardised like nowadays and anything that got the image onto negative was fair game. So when your visual effects supervisor in that era of film-making dies during post, your goose is well and truly cooked. It's a lot like when the foreman of the glassworks dies and the secret of the Ruby Glass is lost forever.

It seems like all the elements have been preserved. I imagine the effects sequences was storyboarded, with modern technology I imagine the unfinished work could be completed digitally, the question is whether Paramount are prepared to finance it and whether Mann would be involved.

I agree that it probably is possible to cobble the stuff together today if you had the right folks.

I don't know if the re–composite work would entail in trying to wrap one's head around what was technically possible possible in the day through opticals and recreate that digitally or if it becomes more of a creative matter of trying to twist the plates to create something new in a modern VFX pipeline, but I can't imagine that all of what was shot is totally unusable.

Though in either case though, the "Ruby Glass" analogy is true, because I don't think anyone could totally figure out what Wally Veevers fully had in mind in the day.

I don't even know if any of the boards from the movie still exist either, as purportedly a lot of the production art / materials got scrapped afterwards, let alone the fact that Wally Veevers was apparently known for being very secretive with his tradework.

Maybe bits and bobs could be pieced together through the above, but I'd assume a lot of the wire work and reverse photography and whatnot would be too cryptic to really figure out what they were fully intended for.

We were never really quite able to figure out how he (Wally Veevers) planned to combine all of these components that he shot, because it wasn't anything usual like green screen or blue screen. It was black velvet and all kinds of strange stuff to make smoke go backwards.

The closest I can think of to there being a hint that more VFX could be produced—outside of what was already put into the final cut—was a single optical shot that was in the theatrical trailer that got created that implied the climax staff effect being more elaborate (which I assume was produced post–Veevers).



Not sure if this got scrapped due to deadlines or if Mann changed his mind on how the redone climax should be approached. It does make me wonder though if the optical work that we see in the final film were primarily recycled from Veever's plates or if they were all reshot by Mann.

I guess—in a way—we'll have a few answers in the imminent future once copies of the UHD start arriving to Black Friday buyers given one of the featurettes goes into this specific subject.

"What He Left Unfinished" (6 min) - an interview with VFX producer Peter Kuran

It's a shame as I think The Keep could have been a truly remarkable piece of film-making had it's production not been utterly scuppered. It would have also been interesting to see Mann pursue the genre further. As it is the situation is much like Dune 1984 was for David Lynch, it's simply too painful to revisit.

It certainly would be a fascinating to imagine a scenario where the movie ended up being Veever's swan song in visual effects work as well as an alternate universe where Michael Mann pursued a filmography of creating atmospheric horror films as the movie does show he has the chops for it—as well as Manhunter to a degree, but I guess that's what dreams are for hahaha

Interestingly though on the subject, a Collider interview did go up a day ago and it went a little bit into this movie.

How ‘The Keep’ Changed Michael Mann’s Filmmaking

I know that when you directed The Keep , you originally had a much longer cut, but it's never seen the light of day. Do you still have a copy of the longer cut, or does it no longer exist?

MANN: I don't even know. I’d have to dig into our archives to find out. We have a pretty spectacular archive. We saved everything, but I don't know how much I've saved on The Keep. The poignant tragedy that came was that the visual effects genius who worked on it, Wally Veevers — who was a spectacular guy, who goes all the way back from The Shape of Things to Come all the way through 2001 [A Space Odyssey] — died halfway through post. He had many esoteric forms of creating some of the visual effects, and it was only through the generosity of the visual effects community in England that we were able even to finish the picture. A lot of people who knew and respected Wally dove in to try to figure some of this out. So, it was a bizarre project.

You've expressed dissatisfaction with the final cut of The Keep , and I'm curious, did your experience on that project turn you towards more grounded genres permanently?

MANN: No, it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with going forward and shooting a movie before the screenplay’s ready. There was a one-year window in which to get the movie up and running and finished because of something that had to do with Paramount and a UK tax deal. I agreed to do that and was trying to finish the screenplay at the same time. So, no, it's nothing to do with gothic or sci-fi subject matter.

One of the big thrills of that was to work with John Box, who was a fantastic production designer with three Academy Awards, Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver Twist, A Man for All Seasons. What an honor. A lot of things about it were new that we did, especially the design influence of German Expressionism and the exploitation of Albrecht Speer, the Nazi architect. I was very interested in the causes of fascism, the nature of its malign appeal to cultures in distress and a form of mass schizophrenia, and to try to express that in the form of a Freudian fairy tale, meaning not metaphor or allegory. It was informed by reading Bruno Bettleheim and was an interesting challenge. If I made it again, it would be much better. [Laughs]

I really, really hope that one day you will go into your archives and see what you have because I would love to see if there is a longer cut. The problem obviously is VFX aren't done, music's not done, but it's definitely something that I'm sure fans would love to see, even in a rough cut.

MANN: So, since The Keep, after that, I’ve always been much more careful about not going forward to something until it's ready.

Unfortunately, unless I'm reading the room wrong, it does seem to still showcase Mann's keenness to steer the conversation away from the subject of a director's cut of the movie (though has far as jaded outlooks go, I'll take him saying "I’d have to dig into our archives to find out" over him glossing over the question in its entirety). Still, always interesting to see him say anything about the movie though.

He also hints at UHDs for The Insider and The Last Of The Mohicans in the same interview which would be nice to see at some point.

Genuine question for you all. Do you really think the o-neg for this film (shot on 80's stock with JDC anamorphics) is as sharp as the trailer suggests? Or has it possibly been helped along the way with modern enhancements, like so many (most, if not all) 4K 'restorations'

Given the production crew involved between the designer, the cinematographer and Michael Mann himself being a control freak, I imagine the photography were in about as optimal conditions as one could get in those days. Sharpness on anamorphic productions usually came down to how open the lens was, and given the elaborate nature of the sets involved, I can't imagine them not lighting it all as well as they possibly could've with the budget they initially had at their disposal.

So given I know what the opposite end of the spectrum looks like with Dean Cundey and John Carpenter abusing high–speed Panavision lenses in the day for their low–budget productions, I could feasibly see The Keep being a rather sharp looking movie with it having conditions on the opposite side of the production spectrum.

All that said, I will concede that it is possible some further sharpening was sneakily applied, but probably nothing too drastic if I had to guess. Best way to get an answer I suppose is to see whether or not there are any interviews with Vinegar Syndrome staff on the subject of film restoration enhancements.