Clip from HIDE AND SEEK courtesy of Wild Strawberry Entertainment LLC – Wayne Schotten. Copyright 2015

In order to help fund the costly preservation work, we have to look for income streams.  In addition to our digital restoration work on old films (see the JFK sample on our site) we also have the facilities to colorize black and white films.  Here you can see a short sample of the Spencer Tracy film which has been colorized according to the color research we found of the scene, and the fact that Tracy did, in fact, have red hair. While there are limited reasons for colorizing material from a historical perspective, it is sometimes required by clients who want all material for a project to be in color.  We have decided to add this service to the wide range of film production services offered by Premiere Pictures.

Premiere Pictures International was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, January 23rd, 2014. Ron Merk, the owner of Premiere, was interviewed about the company’s stock footage project, and the compilation of old home videos into one, organized, database. The article focuses on Ron’s discovery of never-been-aired footage of John F. Kennedy, from his capaign, his election, to his funeral. The article is copied below. — Late in November, San Francisco film producer Ron Merk drove out to Oakley, where he’d never been, to see home movies made by a man he’d never met. He had no idea what he’d find when he got there, but he made the drive anyway, because Merk, 68, has assigned himself the duty to examine and preserve anything of value that anyone has bothered to put on film with a motion picture camera. In this case, he found a dusty canister, and written in faded pencil was “Building of the Golden Gate Bridge.” Other cans contained footage of Market Street during V-E Day, May 8, 1945, and at night in 1954 when it was lit with neon and lined with theater marquees leading up to the Fox. If these don’t sound like the home movies you’ve suffered through, of kids being spoon-fed in high chairs, Merk’s definition is a broad one. “A home movie is any personal film reflecting an event in the place that you live or are visiting,” he says. “They can capture a time and a place and a lifestyle and a world more precisely than commercial films or television programs.” Merk speaks with authority on this because he’s been in the business for 46 years. His production and distribution company, Premiere Pictures International Inc., specializes in family and children’s films. He recently sold two films to Lionsgate, and that helps fund Preservation Project Partnerships, his war to save home movies. It operates with a paid staff of four, stuffed into a windowless room in a Tenderloin “garden suite” sublet from the San Francisco Film Commission. Merk discourages people from dropping off stacks of reels at the door and running, but he’ll take appointments atwww.premierepicturesinc.com. “Anybody who thinks they have something that might be of cultural or historic interest, we look at it,” he says. It’s an ambitious undertaking, though maybe not as ambitious as his other project, which is to turn Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s first feature, “Hercules in New York,” into a musical for the stage. Merk has been collecting film since he was a kid in Newark, N.J., where his father built him a basement movie theater, for his grammar school friends. He arrived in San Francisco via Hollywood and built his own home theater in Bernal Heights. He now lives near the Civic Center with his partner, Ozgur Pamukcu, in an apartment with no room for a theater.

Fear of screening films

His office is just five blocks away, and for the past 18 months Merk has been searching out and bringing in footage shot on 16mm, 8mm and Super 8. You’d like to think of him raising one of those portable screens in a living room, then turning out the lights and turning on a projector that whirs and captures all the house dust in its light beam. But he doesn’t screen film for fear it will tear apart. Each reel is hand-cranked across a light table, with Merk or one of his staff hunched over it, examining it with a loupe. “Going into these home movies, in every one of them we have found a little gem,” says Merk, who takes a deep breath before answering a question, to make sure he does not run out of wind during his speech. “In 10 minutes of film there are 20 seconds of something that is unique. A building that’s gone – the World Trade Center. The Rockettes on the stage of Radio City Music Hall. Gay life in New York in the 1940s. Whatever it might be, just amazing things have emerged from this. There is stuff out there everywhere.” Less and less of it, though. People are converting old film reels to DVD at an accelerating rate and throwing away the original. “We don’t know how long a DVD will last,” he says. “Those films, if cared for properly, can last indefinitely.” At this point, he is operating on a six-month backlog. Boxes of reels are stacked up waiting to be examined and scanned. No topic is too boring, no reel is too long, no hand is too shaky. The stuff that might find use in documentary features, TV shows and commercials is licensed, and the proceeds are used to support the preservation project, which operates under the nonprofit Metro Theatre Center Foundation. Areas of specialization are show business personalities and cityscapes – New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas. “There are more movies shot in Las Vegas than any other city, and they’re all the same,” he says. “People are shooting the hotel signs because you can’t shoot inside the casinos.”

52 canisters in closet

Most people know when they have something valuable – like President Dwight Eisenhower pushing an Easter egg across the White House lawn with his nose, or Spencer Tracy with his wife , – and Merk is willing to pay for it. He won’t give a price, but the most he’s ever paid was for 38 minutes of John Kennedyfootage he found on eBay, including him campaigning while sitting on a mule. “I convinced him (the seller) that it didn’t belong in a private collection, it belonged to the world,” Merk said. “I made sure that’s what happened to it.” His luckiest find came free when he heard about a man named Martin Sterud who had filmed the Norwegian community at a Lutheran church in the Mission District. Merk found his phone number, but there was no answer. He called back the next day, and it was disconnected. Knowing what that meant, he searched the Internet to find that Sterud had died. He tracked down the family and was invited out to Oakley, where he found 52 film canisters in a dusty closet. The reels, mostly in color, span 1923 through the late 1980s. “Really a capsule of San Francisco,” he says.

Saving collective history

Once the rolls are scanned, labeled and archived, the film itself goes to Southern California to be stored in a facility operated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Merk values film too much to ship it. He drives the canisters down and hand-delivers them. “The end goal is to bring the public into the whole issue of film preservation,” he says, “because they are saving their own personal history and our collective history.” (Sam Whiting; SF Chronicle) See the article here.