Famous Players, citing inadequate production facilities.
The digital reconstruction of what remains of this long-lost 1922 feature was supervised by producer Jeffery Jon Masino of Flicker Alley, a company which produces new digital editions of silent films, in association with Turner Classic Movies. In 1998 the Library of the Moving Image in Los Angeles
purchased what is believed to be the only surviving copy, non-sequential fragments totalling 26 minutes, at a Sotheby’s auction of the Leslie Flint Collection. Leslie Flint, president of the Valentino Memorial Guild in London, and a professional medium claiming regular spiritualist contact with Valentino, came into possession of a 16mm print that was allegedly discovered in an Italian chicken coop in the 1960s. Alas, too much time passed before enough funding was acquired to transfer the complete film, ultimately proving detrimental to its survival. To provide a more fluid narrative, Flicker Alley has augmented it using two promotional trailers and production stills culled from private collections and the Paramount Special Collections at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library. Alongside the original intertitles, continuity titles derived from original Paramount editing scripts help bridge the gaps in the plot. Storyboards were also developed to
see how these sequences would be laid out.The restored intertitles and “still photo” sequences were worked on separately, and then combined in an off-line edit. The poor image quality of the 16mm print was considerably enhanced during transfer by Advanced Digital Services of Hollywood, who
devised a process of down-converting a 1080 x 1920 pixel HD image into four 540 x 960 pixel PAL quadrants.The four separate images were then “cleaned” by a digital filtering system and “stitched” back into an HD image, which was in turn down-converted into a final uncompressed NTSC Quicktime file to run at approximately 21 frames per second.
Now, with new and existing intertitles, photographic stills in place of missing live-action segments, and corrected speed, the reconstructed version runs 52 minutes. Not nearly as long at the original 1922 version’s c.88-100 minutes, but enough to offer today’s audiences a unique opportunity to view a mythical lost production, and reach their own conclusions as to the quality of piece. – BRANDEE BRANNIGAN COX, Giornate del Cinema muto, Pordenone 2006, Katalog
General Information
The young Rajah is a motion picture produced in the year 1922 as a USA production. The Film was directed by Philip Rosen, with Rudolph Valentino, Wanda Hawley, Pat Moore, Charles Ogle, Fanny Midgley, in the leading parts. We have currently no synopsis of this picture on file; There are no reviews of The young Rajah available.Bibliographie Pordenone 2006, Katalog pg 126f
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