To all my Laurel and Hardy friends, fellow Sons, and those who have been so supportive over my 26 year quest to make Laurel and Hardy available in the way the films were seen when they were first released–from 35mm and, hopefully, from the original camera negatives: First, a “This Is Your Life” moment, if you don’t mind. As many of you know, I began my work on the Hal Roach films back in October of 1984 when I brought my dearest friend and, in many ways, “second father”, Frank Capra, from his home in La Quinta, California to a meeting he had asked me to arrange with the Chairman of the Board at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood. I had casually mentioned to Frank that I had seen an incredible bit of HRS footage on CNN–footage from Helpmates, appropriately enough (Rob Lewis!)–footage which had been Colorized! And I was knocked away by it. Frank had thought about it for a few days and called me back. Could I get an appointment with those guys to talk about Colorizing It’s A Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe? That’s why we were at HRS (despite later declarations Frank was pressured to make by John Huston’s agent, Herman Citron. Frank told me “You do it with my blessing. I’m just too old to fight them anymore”).

A half hour into the meeting, it became clear to the Chairman of HRS that I knew more about his company than he did. And he ultimately asked me to come to work for him right then and there. (Frank told me “Hey, Kid–I’m 87 years old–you have a hell of a lot longer future with him than you’ve got with me”, so I took it.) January 1, I replaced the legendary Herb Gelbspan and began assembling HRS Film Classics, an in-house home video company of which I was founding President. When I started, Roach stock was seventy-five cents. Sixteen months later, it was $17.50! A new crowd came into Roach in 1986 and I was asked to prepare L&H masters for a new TV show, being promised I had six months to perform the work. (King World had examined the materials and declared the library “gone”, canceling a $15 million dollar, ten year deal to which I was violently opposed--especially in light of the Our Gang sale back in the 1960's for a lousy $30,000!.) I called the director of the Motion Picture Division at the Library of Congress who, as a personal favor to me, shipped almost three million feet of nitrate film to me at the studio office. He told me it was the largest shipment ever made in the history of LOC. I went through every frame of it by hand, breathing in all the fumes, and requested certain items based on the first-ever inventory we had ever received of the 1968 deposit by HRS at LOC that had been arranged by Richard Feiner. (Roach was then in one of its many bankruptcies, and the very survival of the film was in serious question–Bonded Storage threatened to throw it away until LOC paid their bill!)

I noticed a cutting picture element on Laughing Gravy which was THREE reels in length–not two. I had the picture and answer track shipped out at once, and discovered reel two with the crayon written words “Lifted Sequence” on the front of the can. This contained the now famous “second reel” for which others have claimed credit of discovery. I called Hal Roach and asked him about it. He explained “We used to just shoot a story and go wherever it took us. When it finished, we stopped. So we had a lot of films in the early days of sound that were longer than the contracted length of two reels. But MGM didn’t mind, and we just put them out that way–we didn’t get paid any extra. But Louis Mayer called me one day and said ‘we don’t want any more shorts longer that two reels’. They had their own stuff then and it was getting crowded out by us.

So I told Laurel and he made the cuts.” And that’s the story of Laughing Gravy as I learned it 24 years ago. (I frankly think the shorter version is easier to watch.) I also found listed a composite answer print, seven reels in length, entitled Their First Mistake. I thought that was odd, in as much as that was the title of the Boys’ final two-reeler, and immediately had it sent out. I was in beautiful color screened cans (one of which I still have on my mantle) and it was marked “Pomona Preview Print”. I soon discovered this was the original print of what was to become Pardon Us which Stan ran at a sneak preview out in Pomona in 1930, some months before the film was finished. It included the machine gun and fire wagon finish present in the Spanish version, some really cruel and painful gags which Stan removed, and was missing the entire reel that was soon added, the schoolroom sequence with Jimmy Finlayson, which I always thought was the funniest part of the picture. The songs were a bit longer too, as I recall. So I cut the remaining 56 minute fine grain together with everything I could use from this print and created a film that ran almost 70 minutes. The sensitive “new Boys” immediately cut it for the TV show so they could add movies of Lois Laurel. Amazing. (I did get the full version out on 3M laserdisc though.)

Oh–and that six months I was to have to complete the masters? They changed their minds–make that FOUR months. I had four rooms going ten to twelve hours a day at Fototronics in Burbank, wetgate transferring all that film; then I would spend six hours daily at Film Classics piecing the several copies of each film together to make as seamless a master as I could. They had promised when I was finished with the TV masters, I could preserve everything on film. They grabbed the $7 million for the TV show and changed the locks on the vault. And that was that.

Except for one minor thing–I started getting sick Constant pneumonia. Nightmares. It was bad. Finally a doctor sampled my hair and found it was loaded with silver–I had silver nitrate poisoning. I never have really gotten over it.

Undeterred, in January of 1992 I acquired the rights to the pre-1931 films from Richard Feiner and dedicated the next fourteen years to finding 35mm material on all of those early epics, including the French nitrate negatives on all the early Pathe’s on which I’d given up ever finding anything useful. I was pretty satisfied with most of them, but–despite finding R1 of Battle of the Century and the camera negative on many of the early films, I never could locate Hats Off. I think I know where there may be a copy, but it’s across the world and I’m too sick to make the trek. So, I put together all the stills and the script, and found an Edgar Kennedy “remake” with the same director, Hal Law, called It’s Your Move, which tells the same story.

I intended to wrap up my quarter century work on these films with a gigantic boxed set of around 28 discs, including all the other Roach films I had accumulated plus the early TV classics done by Roach Jr. And, a couple of very special documentaries and a few items that had little to do with HRS but which I was determined to let see the light of day. My oldest friend, Bruce Venezia, was a VP at Image Entertainment and he urged me to compress and double layer everything down to a dozen discs, cut the cost in half and put it out late in 2006 or early in 2007. Instead of $400 it would sell for half that price. ( A full disc-by-disc rundown is attached hereto. Check it out!)

I worked every weekday at my friend’s lab from 7pm to 5am editing the films together, again from several different sources. On weekends, I went in on Friday night and worked straight through till Monday morning. I was absolutely beat, but seven weeks later, it was finished and compression and menus began to be created. I was obligated to drive a friend to Vancouver (where I planned to move) and was feeling really lousy by the time I returned south ten days later. While driving a mountain road in Mono County in Northern California, I suddenly went blind. Somehow I got to the side of the High Sierra two-lane road, where I sat in mild hysterics until rescued and taken to the hospital by a cop. I have been in bed almost continuously ever since. My vision returned but not my stamina. Two weeks later I lost my young wife, Dyan, whom I had met the same night I met Feiner in January of 1992. So, add severe depression to stroke and I was ripe to be fiscally raped, poked, and cleaned out by insurance companies and doctors, which is exactly what happened. The guy who had never drank or smoked a cigarette was plied with the worst drugs the world has ever known. They almost killed me. As soon as they heard I was sick, Image stopped paying our royalties. So when they, apparently in error, sent a letter cancelling the boxed set, I said “fine”. (But, it would be nice to get back a bit of the many hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been spent to create it–“perfection” ain’t cheap!)

But there it has sat–just $108,000 worth of authoring and test discs for my viewing pleasure--until now. In two weeks, the lab will begin pressing four thousand copies of the boxed set. Now, I have long wanted to set up a “new paradigm” for DVD release, under which I would deal directly with Amazon.com (who have sold over 85% of all HRS DVD’s ever sold!) and eliminate the middle man. When the boxed sets are delivered to Amazon, they will announce the upcoming release at its $199.95 retail price (some two months thereafter) and the product will finally be available after all this time, around July of this year.

But, I wanted to do something for you guys and gals, the ones who have been the core of my support all these years. So we have made available four hundred copies of the boxed set to a small company in advance of the announcement and full release. These four hundred sets are for sale to you only over the next ten days via PayPal for the actual manufacturer’s cost for which the sets will be sold to Amazon–just $110 plus shipping. And, you will receive the set as soon as they are pressed–two months before anyone else, in around 30 to 45 days. When we ship the 4,000 units to Amazon, they will ship your 400 units to you.

As for me, I had another “incident” March 21 and woke up on the bathroom floor at 3am. I lost my vision again for a day and it was pretty scary. So I don’t know if I will ever see you folks again because I’m not sure I can ever travel. I can no longer drive. I have no living family, and most of my friends are dead. But I want to say “thanks” and selling twelve discs with almost 4-1/2 hours of Hal Roach on each one seems like a good way to do it–and for our manufacturer’s cost. Now, almost all of the titles are improvements from the original ten disc releases, with many titles amazingly upgraded–to 35mm camera negatives.

So, don’t tarry. When they’re gone, you’ll have to wait for the general release. And, the order goes to the pressing plant in two weeks, so you don’t have much time.

Thank you for all your support over a quarter century and I hope you like my final work. Farewell and have a good life, all of you.

Sincerely,
MICHAEL AGEE

Note about my early career and Colorization:
It was not because I was unhappy with black and white that I advanced Colorization, but because of my experiences having more or less made possible the explosion of home video back in 1977 when I was a technical director at CBS. I knew Snuff Garrett had obtained rights to the entire Republic Pictures library from NTA (7,400 titles!) And I had suggested they put these films out on Betamax and, ultimately, VHS cassettes. The President on the company, Nick Draklich, looked at me for a moment and asked “What’s a videocassette??”. (He’s in the “Video Hall of Fame” and I’m a potted plant.) When I explained it to him, he asked NTA about it, and they laughed–not the first time I would get that reaction over the years. “That’ll never be anything” said Bud Groskopf, owner of NTA–and he simply gave them the rights to put out cassettes in perpetuity (!) for a ten per cent royalty. My partner and I built the first lab in Hollywood to churn out cassettes. There were days when RCA would only sell us two dozen VHS cassettes! Garrett quickly signed up RKO, getting their entire library for ten years for $250,000(!). Ditto, in 1979, Hal Roach Studios. At one incredible point in the late 1970's, at which most of the studios still pooh-poohed home video, we claimed almost forty per cent of the entire home video market–and those tapes sold for sixty bucks! But I noticed the young folks would not, in those days, watch classic black and white movies. That’s the one reason I was interested in Colorization. Well, that and I was convinced it was a tool to force the studios to preserve their films in 35mm--we ultimately got it written into the copyright rules that, in order to file a copyright on a Colorized videotape, the claimant had to deposit a 35mm fine grain of the black and white film at the Library of Congress, making it a part of the national collection. So, I think we did good.