Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Wings

Wings
Voting period ends on 26 Aug 2023  at 04:27:50 (UTC)
 * Reason:Recently becoming public domain this year, Wings is famously the first Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. A historic film outright.
 * Articles in which this image appears:Wings (1927 film), Public domain film
 * FP category for this image:Featured pictures/Culture, entertainment, and lifestyle/Entertainment
 * Creator:William A. Wellman


 * Support as nominator – GamerPro64  04:27, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Support - Though I'm curious why it goes from sepia to blue-ish to grayscale at points... was this spliced from several copies of varying states of preservation? — Chris Woodrich (talk) 10:59, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Back then, before the advent of 3-color Technicolor, night scenes were often tinted blue, as in this case. (Shooting at night was virtually impossible due to slow film speeds...) I also saw some frame-by-frame coloring of flames in aerial fighting images. --Janke | Talk 18:55, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Fascinating! — Chris Woodrich (talk) 19:00, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * And not just night scenes. Tinted prints were used for all sorts of reasons. I watched the new restoration of Hitchcock's Downhill with Ivor Novello a couple of weeks ago. The default tint for most of the film is a ruddy red color, but when Novello is feverish and delirious the scenes that represent his hallucinations are colored a sickly, bilious green. It's not a great film overall, but there are some good things in it, and the delirium scenes alone are worth the price of admission. Choliamb (talk) 00:04, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Support - Altogether a good restoration. --Janke | Talk 18:55, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Support. I first saw Wings in San Francisco in the early 1980s, with live organ accompaniment by the late lamented Bob Vaughan. On a big screen with live music it was really fantastic. (Bob Vaughan was a fixture at Bay Area silent film festivals for decades. He was later shamefully slandered by David Fincher in Zodiac, who portrayed him as a creepy and cadaverous psycho. The real Bob Vaughan was nothing like what you see in that movie: he was cheerful, outgoing, unfailingly friendly, and probably the least serial-killery guy you could ever hope to meet.) – Choliamb (talk) 00:29, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Random question. How did you see the film in the 80s if the film was lost for decades and was found in the 1990s? GamerPro64  04:02, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It's an excellent question! The answer is that the Wikipedia article is mistaken when it states that the film was considered lost until a print was found in the Cinemathèque française in 1992. Neither of the sources cited for that statement gives a date for the discovery, and I can't find any other pre-Wikipedia source that says it was as late as 1992. On the other hand, some notes from the SF silent film festival say it was found in the 1950s, while a blog post based on an interview with the person responsible for the later Paramount restoration suggests that the rumored Cinemathèque française print doesn't even exist. Neither of those are reliable sources and I have no idea what the truth is regarding the French print. But what I do know is that the Library of Congress owns a print and that they restored it in 1987: see, e.g., the catalogue of the American Film Archive and in this article in the New York Times from October 31, 1987. That's the one I saw. (I misremembered and wrote "early 1980s" above when I should have said "late 1980s" -- but it was certainly before 1992, when I was no longer living in San Francisco.) Not to mention that the film was already available on home video by 1989. I don't know how the "lost until 1992" statement got into the Wikipedia article, but it's demonstrably untrue. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 18:47, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Support – Bammesk (talk) 02:11, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Support – Hamid Hassani (talk) 08:22, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

--Armbrust The Homunculus 06:24, 26 August 2023 (UTC)