Vancouver, July 2019. Radicalized by a disheartening screening of the official MGM masters of Leone’s Dollars trilogy at a local cinematheque, Willa and I resume work on our cobbled-together cut. We now have better raw materials: a new Blu-ray with far superior picture quality, and an old LaserDisc with an uncompromised mono track. A decade of expertise (I have become a colorist and Willa an editor), alongside a decade of technical progress in editing tools available for independent filmmakers, enables us to properly process them. A local repertory cinema programmer catches wind of this, and a plan is hatched: book an official Digital Cinema Package from MGM and swap it out with our homebrew copy for a public screening. A magical evening ensues: It was as if we were seeing the film for the first time, smuggled before a live audience.

After the screening, I’m approached by a man with an attitude that screams “so you think you know a thing or two, huh?” It turns out his attitude is warranted: He enthusiastically informs me that he’s spent years on his own far superior reconstruction—a 4K scan of a well-preserved IB Technicolor print of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

While digital tools have evolved, this pattern of unofficial preservation is by no means new. It’s the reason F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) survives: after Bram Stoker’s widow won a 1925 copyright suit, a German court ordered every print to be destroyed, but copies slipped past German jurisdiction and circulated for years as unauthorized bootlegs. Similarly, Kevin Brownlow’s reconstruction of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) began as an illicit teenage hobby. Starting in 1954, he spent decades tracking down fragments and duplicating fragile, rights-encumbered prints to keep them from disappearing—essentially a massive fan edit, eventually completed with Gance’s own participation.

The most famous retrospective cinematic alteration was committed by George Lucas with massively controversial Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy—and the subsequent unavailability of unaltered versions in anything resembling acceptable quality. Both Draper and Flower cite the 2004 DVD release and emergence of communities such as the one found on OriginalTrilogy.com as key personal entrees into the world of fan preservation. Draper jokes that “I’ve learned more from George Lucas than anyone ever because he made certain choices that I didn’t agree with, so I started digging!” Starting in the mid-2000s, he took an active role on various forums, contributing wherever he could: “They eventually made a sub-thread about preservation efforts, which was everybody capturing VHS tapes and laserdiscs and trying to upscale LDs and sync other audio tracks. One thing led to another as the preservation scene grew out of one little thread.”

Eventually, two distinct projects emerged. Petr “Harmy” Harmáček’s “Despecialized” edition, a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from various official releases, came first. Next was Team Negative1’s Project 4K77, which used homebrew 4K scans of 35mm theatrical prints to create accurate bootlegged digital copies. Both projects remain freely available to anyone willing to jump through some trivial internet hoops.

When an informal network of amateurs questions the work of industry standard-bearers, it is rarely a matter of raw technical superiority but rather a fundamental difference in constraints. While restoration entities often operate on strict budgets and tight deadlines, preservationists can spend years cross-referencing decades of older releases. This is not to say fan efforts are infallible—debates in online forums about accurate color grades spurred by the recent influx of amateur 35mm scans of release prints demonstrate how certain elements remain moving targets—but for objective elements like editorial cuts, missing frames, or unaltered audio, historical reference materials generally leave little room for debate.

Furthermore, fans operate entirely outside the structural limitations that thwart even skilled industry technicians. A professional lab might make all the right archival choices only to have those compromised by a revisionist director or a studio’s marketing needs. Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources and infrastructure haven’t: banding together to preserve and disseminate historically accurate versions of some of the most beloved films in history—an end-run around the rights and financial issues that hold legitimate enterprises back. Flower notes: “We don’t always have the time or budget, or even the legal right, to do multiple versions. Fans don’t have those restrictions. They can do as many variations as they want, and that’s fine.” As of this writing, Project 4K77 features dozens of audio tracks and a file size exceeding 100GB: both impossible on any commercial Blu-ray release, and unfeasible for online distribution via legitimate channels.

Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation. Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality. Want a version of Stop Making Sense (1984) in which you can freely select every soundtrack mix ever released? You won’t find it on the official A24 disc; you have to turn to a remux circulating on a few highly exclusive private torrent websites. The original 5.1 mix of Master and Commander (2003) married to the new 4K transfer? Remux. Dr. No (1962) with audio that hasn’t been scrubbed of all its detail? Remux.

Draper sees this pooling of resources as an incredible service: “Somebody’s already done a great job of the work you were going to do yourself.” His thoughts quickly turn, however: “We’re all worried about the crackdown coming at any point. Put your hood on, look over your shoulder, go to the back door video speakeasy and give the secret recognition code.”

The elephant in the room: Legally, this is piracy. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, merely breaking a Blu-ray’s digital lock to rip the video files is a federal violation, regardless of intent. The law makes no distinction between mass-distributing a movie for profit and preserving the historical record. To take part in these preservation projects is to take on significant legal risk, with admonishments from rights holders and cease-and-desist letters being common.

Flower sees copyright law as a double-edged sword for film preservation. Though intellectual property rights—and the resultant studio-mandated limitations—hold Arrow back from certain actions that would be theoretically possible otherwise, these same rights in many ways ensure their income: “We have to protect our interest as well as that of the rights holders that have entrusted their films to us. We spend a lot of money on licensing and restoring. I certainly don’t think that copyright is something that should be abolished, unless someone can think of another commercial framework that would allow us to invest in the work we do.” Yet he maintains that there is a place for piracy-based preservation: “It comes down to who is financially benefiting from these things. In terms of using a physical copy and then manipulating it or finding another use for it beyond just watching it, that is a gray area that I’m personally more inclined to be generous towards.”

A sort of “pirate’s code” has emerged among these communities: an attempt to create a parallel set of norms in a context in which the strict definition of “legal” can no longer operate as a guiding principle. “You have to own a physical copy of at least one version of any given film,” says Draper. “We’re not trying to make any money out of this. Don’t make your own bootleg copies and throw them on eBay, or throw them on Twitter of all places.” Nevertheless, the clandestine nature of these efforts weighs on Draper: “It would be nice if there was at least a little bit more recognition of unofficial preservation efforts. I feel like there’s a gigantic weight about to come crashing down on me at any second because, heaven forbid, I bought another twenty laserdiscs and captured audio tracks and bought VHS tapes on eBay to compare audio captures to fix the bad audio they didn’t care about the first time around.”