A Star Is Born

Norman Maine, an actor whose star is fading and who is losing to drink, discovers Esther Blodgett singing in a club. As she becomes a major star under the name Vicki Lester, he falls. That scissor movement is the centre of the film: one person's rise accelerates the other's collapse. George Cukor directed. Judy Garland plays Esther and James Mason plays Norman. What happened to it is one of the best-known cutting cases in Hollywood. Two months after release, while Cukor was out of the country, Warner Bros shortened the film by thirty minutes to please exhibitors, since its length allowed only three screenings a day. No effort was made to preserve the removed material. Most of the lost footage came back in 1983. The restoration was largely the work of Ron Haver of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who spent close to a year pulling material out of warehouses and underground vaults. Lose That Long Face, Here's What I'm Here For and the shampoo commercial sequence were reinstated in full. For roughly ten minutes where no footage could be found, a different solution was used: production stills from those scenes were tinted, re-photographed and cut in against the surviving soundtrack. In the restored film those passages run as still images. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hollywood musicals and Judy Garland. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a smooth watch. The photographic passages in the restoration deliberately break the flow, and that is not a defect but the record of what was done to the film.