GreenCine | article

The discovery and restoration of Beyond the Rocks, long thought lost to time, is without a doubt the silent movie event of the past few years. The 1922 romantic drama from Sam Wood, based on a lightweight romance by Elinor Glyn (most famous for It, starring "it" girl Clara Bow), is only marginally interesting as drama, but its one-of-a-kind star pairing of Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino makes it a landmark of Hollywood glamour.

Yet it might have remained little more than a footnote to history if not for the efforts of Milestone, which placed the film in the New York Film Festival and gave it a big screen revival run before its cable showing in Turner Classic Movies and, finally, its DVD release.

Launched in 1990 by film lovers Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, partners in business and marriage, Milestone has made a reputation not merely for its restorations and revivals, but for nurturing films that might otherwise have been drowned in the noise of the busy movie landscape. I Am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov's spellbinding and all but orphaned 1964 film portrait of communist Cuba, became the film event of 1995. Milestone's 2005 release of Winter Soldier (1972) not only redeemed a film vilified by the "Swift Boaters" of the 2004 presidential campaign, it also resurrected a forgotten masterpiece of American documentary cinema and revealed the film's true story to the public.

Milestone's legacy encompasses silent cinema (the 1929 Piccadilly with Anna May Wong; the Mary Pickford collection), classic rarities (Michael Powell's breathtaking breakthrough 1937 film The Edge of the World), and some of the most beautiful international features to ever see the light of an American screen (Maborosi, Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East? and Fireworks [Hana-Bi]). They've been honored by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics for their work in restoring and reviving classic films, though Doros is quick to credit the archivists and the programmers and the organizations that they work with.

And while Doros and Heller have embraced DVD with a passion, they remain committed to bringing their films to the big screen as well as to the small. "Movies are still a shared experience," he insists. "They are meant to be seen with an audience, audiences are meant to see films and laugh together and cry together. It's corny, but it really is the best way to see a film."

I've been an email and phone acquaintance of Dennis for years, but this interview was the first time I had really talked to Dennis for any length of time, and we discussed Milestone's legacy, ambitions and future plans - as well as some of our favorite films - in an hour-long phone conversation.

Beyond the Rocks was restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum, who discovered it in a legacy of film prints left to them by a film collector. When did you get involved with the film?

About three or four years ago, we borrowed footage from the Nederlands Filmmuseum to restore The Cook, the Buster Keaton-Fatty Arbuckle short. We got along very well with them and the curator of the archive, Giovanna Fossati, came to our house and we became very good friends. Then we saw each other in Sacile [at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto] three years ago, during the Cooper-Schoedsack retrospective.

I said, "What are you working on?" And she said, "I can't tell you." I hadn't heard that one before. She said, "We're not sure it's all there and it's too big to tell anybody." I said, "Well, then I have to know."

She promised that I would be the first to know outside the archive. Twenty minutes before they sent their email release out to the world, I got an email saying, "It's Beyond the Rocks with Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino." Having worked on three other Gloria Swanson films before, I was excited. And so I called her up and asked, "What do I need to do to distribute the film?" She said, "We're working on it, we're restoring it, we're commissioning a score for it, but the Filmmuseum people need to get to know you and know what you do."

So I got my ticket that day to go the Netherlands and spent a week at the Filmmuseum, and I met the heads of the museum, the heads of the archive, the heads of every department and we came up with a 20-page marketing plan for Beyond the Rocks. Like every distribution deal with an archive, they do have to know you, they do have to get to trust you. It helps that we have a track record, but it's their film, it's their child, and before they give it shared custody, they have to get to know you. I guess with our track record and our enthusiasm, they agreed that we would distribute it worldwide. And that's how we got it.

The film made its broadcast - or should I say cablecast - premiere in the United States on Turner Classic Movies, who also sponsored the theatrical release. Can you comment on their support of the restoration of silent cinema and, for that matter, other archival films? Have you worked with them before?

We've been working with them for 15 years now and, as of this year, we are hired consultants to help find event movies like Beyond the Rocks. We started this tradition with them, of sponsoring movies, with The Wide Blue Road, so it's not only silent films. When I needed money to restore Gillo Pontecorvo's The Wide Blue Road, they stepped in early and gave us enough money so we could afford to do the restoration. That was an enormously expensive one that we did ourselves.

So with Beyond the Rocks, I knew that this was an event film. It was going to be in the New York Film Festival, and I knew that this was the kind of thing that Turner Classic Movies likes to support. And though their money didn't go toward the restoration - ING Real Estate did that - their money allowed us to buy three extremely expensive prints, produce posters and release the film theatrically in the United States, which not too many companies are doing these days. Most of the silent films are going direct to television and DVD. Turner Classic Movies and Milestone have a shared belief that films should be seen in theaters, should be shared. At the same time, it also allowed us to show Beyond the Rocks to a national audience, which allowed as many people to see the Nederlands Filmmuseum work as possible. We want everybody to see this film, to see all our films, and Turner Classic Movies makes this possible.

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