Vancouver, December 2020. While cooking dinner in my apartment, I get a call from a California number. Must be a scam. Then an email: “Read your profile on National Post. I work in mastering and want to talk to you guys about The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” Apparently, word of our pseudo-legal screening had gotten around. So began my semi-official involvement in film preservation. I roped in Willa and, most importantly, Benji Heran—the man who had accosted me after our screening of the film the year prior—and Jordan Krug, the other party responsible for their remarkable bootleg restoration of the film which would prove to be the main editorial reference point of every subsequent release.
What ensued was a months-long collaboration to turn the drastically underfunded 2021 Kino Lorber release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from a disaster-in-waiting to the best home video release of the film since the 1990s. Doing so involved much chicanery: Benji and Jordan supplied ripped LaserDisc audio that became the release’s main track, while Blake Blasingame—who deserves the lion’s share of credit for this release’s strengths—fulfilled his contractual obligation for a surround mix by simply placing that mono track into a 5.1 container with extremely mild panning effects. When a high-up Kino figure made a Blu-Ray.com thread to read the room on whether to include the international cut, Willa and I made dummy accounts and anonymously badgered him into making our preferred version the primary feature.
The result was a release that—despite a highly compressed turnaround time, virtually nonexistent budget, and compromised source materials—was nonetheless a largely accurate approximation of the 1967 international cut of the film in reasonably high fidelity. At last.
Flower had been leveraging the fan community’s knowledge to assist with various releases for some time prior to his work on Arrow’s release of Leone’s Dollars trilogy. “That ultimately winds up being a regular part of my research process; I go, ‘What have the fan restorers done? Can we pre-empt them from having to [fix the release] by bringing that fix into an official space if we’re allowed?’ Just recently with Mortal Kombat [1995], I happened upon a capture of an original DTS cinema mix that walloped the 5.1 audio on the prior Blu-Ray, so I was like, ‘Well, we’ll just use that!’ That’s me pirating the pirates, I guess.”
Because labels like Arrow, Criterion, and Eureka release dozens of films a year, their researchers are by necessity generalists. “As much as I would love us to have intimate knowledge with every film that we work on, we’re usually not in that position,” says Flower. This is where he reaches out to amateur experts. “Brandon Bentley—who does a lot of stuff on the Hong Kong cinema side—started out literally as an amateur. His work is so good that I see him as a colleague; he’s the person we turn to when we want to digitally recreate photochemical credits.”
Flower compares his process in an official capacity with Arrow to his early days trawling internet forums: “When I came to work for Arrow, I was bringing a lot of awareness of the methods of fan preservationists on the torrent sites. When it came time to officially create different versions of things—the big box set of the Gamera films—it’s the same methodology. It’s just in an official capacity by sheer dint of the fact that we have the license for the film and I’m not working with a DVD rip, I’m working with a ProRes [a professional video codec] master.”
In May 2024, I met James—along with other key figures at Arrow—on a video call in which Benji, Jordan, Willa, myself, and eventually Spencer, were officially brought in as consultants on Arrow’s forthcoming release of the Dollars trilogy. The expertise of the amateur enthusiast community was, at long last, aligned with an officially sanctioned organization with the resources and patience to make a fully realized, historically rigorous release happen. No internet trolling of label heads or NDA-breaking was necessary. The process took a very leisurely and considered year. And we still used the LaserDisc audio.
While drafting this article, I checked my usual private torrent site for the latest copy of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The 4K Arrow release is on there, in all its 89gb glory, with the Italian track that Arrow was unable to secure the rights to and every single commentary track ever released—including those not present on the Arrow disc—all muxed in. The cycle continues.