Thanks to Bob Furmanek, the same man responsible for the preservation of numerous motion-pictures including September Storm (1960) and The Bubble (1966), one of Abbott and Costello's most widely-seen motion-pictures is about to receive a facelift.
Having starred in a number of motion-pictures for Universal Studios, and three for MGM, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello agreed to a joint venture producing their own movie, Africa Screams, which was ultimately distributed through United Artists. Filmed from November to December 1948 at the Nassour Studios in Los Angeles, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello made a tidy profit from the production, later selling ownership in 1953 to Robert Haggiag, an independent distributor in New York, who quickly re-released the movie to theaters to get a return on his investment. Haggiag failed to renew the copyright registration in 1977 and as a result the movie fell into the public domain. This meant anyone can duplicate and sell the movie on any format. Sadly, many prints of the film were slightly edited, many transferred from 16mm, and duplicated in second and third-generation copies. In short, Africa Screams has been subject to hundreds of VHS and DVD releases but never in superior picture or sound.
In the late 1980s, film preservationist Bob Furmanek contacted Haggiag to obtain the original nitrate stock. Most of the original camera negatives had decomposed but the nitrate fine grain was still serviceable and promptly transferred to 35mm for preservation. Since October 2015, Furmanek's 3-D Film Archive successfully restored 17 vintage 3-D features for presentation, most released commercially on DVD and BluRay. With his track record for film preservation, Furmanek decided to take the plunge and utilize Kickstarter, a crowd-funding opportunity for fans to make financial pledges to ensure the surviving nitrates safely transferred to digital format to enable him with financial flexibility to do 4K digital scans of all the surviving elements, and a meticulous frame-by-frame digital clean-up of all dirt and damage, flicker reduction, image stabilization and grading to assemble a fully-restored final 4K composite master.
Keeping in mind that all of Abbott and Costello's movies have received 35mm print transfers from the major studios, Africa Screams (1949) remains the only full-length motion-picture needing a major restoration. Fans of the screen comedians can donate any funds beginning with a single dollar, but for $25, fans can receive a DVD of the restored version (estimated release date June 2020).
Bob Furmanek went into detail on Kickstarter about the necessity of having the film restored, with a financial goal of $7,500 to be reached within 30 days. And the good news? Fans came to the rescue and he reached his goal within three days. You can still contribute to the cause until the end of December, which would also get your name on the website and in the DVD/BluRay credits, as well as pre-purchasing the DVD or BluRay in advance. Link provided below.
