Revisiting Big Top Pee-wee for its remaster opens memories of circus shoots, film-era experimentation and the evolving craft of colour in cinema.

I’ve been thinking of this next column since I finished the last. I was scheduled to re-master Big Top Pee-wee. I was very excited about getting to look at this little gem of a movie again. I had a wonderful time making this movie in the first place. Spending four months with a real circus at the Disney Ranch was exciting enough. But the romance I had with our six-year-old rescued baby elephant named Flora was extraordinary. I visited her almost every day of production.

The real treat however was getting to watch the true genius of Paul Reubens who created this amazing character, Pee-wee Herman. The entire time we were with him he never broke character once. 

This was going to be the first time in several years that I would be working with a movie that I had shot on film. 

I have spent many years diving deeply into digital production. It was a bit ironic because in the early days of the transition I pushed very hard to make the manufacturers, engineers and salespeople see that “it wasn’t good enough yet.” I consequently got a reputation that I was against the transition to digital. As soon as Panavision and Sony developed the Panavision Genesis HD Camera, I announced publicly that digital filmmaking has truly arrived. With enough testing of that system, I was satisfied that I could have as much image satisfaction as I would have had by shooting film. And I ‘put my money where my mouth was’ and shot The Box for Richard Kelly digitally.

But back to film: Big Top was the story of Pee-wee, the farmer living happily with his friends the farm animals until, one day a huge storm hit the farm and a Circus was blown onto Pee-wee’s farm. Of course, all the circus tents had red stripes. And since I had tested the Red Enhancing Filter for Tiffen MFG I decided to introduce that effect to the rest of the movie. This filter, which is no longer available because it was made from a rare earth glass that was radioactive (what did we know back then), added an unearthly red glow from anything that was coloured red. 

On top of that when we scouted Disney Ranch it was the end of summer and the large fields of grass were verdantly green. I asked (always sticking my neck out) “doesn’t the grass turn brown in the winter when we will be shooting Pee-wee?” Oh no. Disney Ranch is irrigated all year round. So, when we got there to make the movie, the grass was mostly brown. So, the simplest solution was to paint the grass that we saw green. It kind of worked. But the most effective part was turning all our shoes green. 

Between the green and the red enhancement, the second half of the print had a unique colour tone that worked fine for the movie.

From OCN to HDR

Now we get to the digital remaster. First, the OCN was scanned by one of the best secrets in Hollywood, a second wet lab named Gotham Photochemical, owned and operated by one of the most dedicated restorationists in the business, Jamie Busby. He is so dedicated that he builds his own scanners to faithfully transfer the original negative to digital. Jamie is celebrating 10 years in business with a passion for excellence in restoration.

Then off to the art of forcing these colours down the digital pipeline to create our HDR master for this classic movie. Our colourist was the multi-talented Cullen Kelly who invents ways of “doing it better.” And then he reports to the entire community what he and Dr. Mitch Bogdanowicz (his own kind of colour genius) have developed for the process. 

If you would like to see how he helped me crawl into the soul of the emulsion through the addition of plug ins to reach each layer of the emulsion, here’s a few tools that he used on Pee-wee: 

“Our imaging pipeline for Big Top Pee-wee was built with two tools developed by Dr. Mitch Bogdanowicz and me: Genesis and Compass.

Genesis provided the digital modeling of the same photochemical process responsible for the film’s original answer print: lab work and printing to an era-correct print stock. The plugin includes robust models of every major motion picture stock ever released, so it was easy for us to select the appropriate print and tackle the grade from a foundation aligned with the original visual identity of the film. 

Compass handled the input mapping of the original camera negative scans — done impeccably by Gotham Photochemical — into well-defined digital colour space, allowing us to grade with modern tools before feeding the graded image into Genesis for final rendering to HDR.

We also deployed a custom Dolby Vision workflow to ensure the SDR down-conversion aligned as tightly as possible with a direct output to SDR from within Genesis.”

And of course, our shoes were green and the circus tents had a strange and wonderful glow to them. But the movie in this digital form now has a wonderfully ephemeral feeling that seems very organic.