Street Date! - May 19th, 2009

Three Musketeers has been given the a-ok from Ryko. We now have a street date!

Ryko, our new distributor of our films, has given us the go ahead for Three Musketeers of the West.  May 19th, 2009 the film will be available in stores near you.  As always, or those international fans or for those who prefer to support us with direct sales, the DVD will be on sale here at doradofilms.com

Look for pre-orders opening up in April.

Filed Under:

In China and Russia?

Have you seen this movie theatrically? We are trying to figure out which country had the introduction to this movie where Argoman is in China and then goes to Russia.

Hey guys.  It has been a while I know, lot of activity behind the scenes though.

We are trying a new avenue of hunt for a scene that is not in our print of Argoman.  We have a UK theatrical print in our warehouse, but apparently the UK version didn't have the opening scene where Argoman evades capture in China and then goes to Russia to collect his fee.  Can anyone confirm or deny this?  We found a bootleg copy of this film on DVD and it has this scene, we just can't figure out where it is from.  The lab that holds this film does not have this scene and we worry that it might be lost to time if we can't find a collector with a decent copy of it.  Drop our production staff an email if you have any leads.  That would be greatly appreciated.

Filed Under:

80% better

Audio update for 3 Musketeers of the West.

The lab in Paris fell through.  They wrote back and said the master was no good and that they would need to take the audio from the negative, and then they quoted us some ridiculous price.

Fortunately, our networking just keeps improving and we found a guy who improved some of the other vintage films that have been released in recent years.  He called Enid today and said the shipment was sent off.  We are looking forward to hearing what he calls "80% better".  That is SO much further ahead than anything else we have done.  If the price is right, we may even get the Italian track fixed up so it is good too.  The Italian track is no where near as bad as the English, but it could still use some attention.

Also, we are in the process of updating our artwork a bit to include a wonderful write up that Lee Broughton (of Westerns All'Italiana fame) sent over to Rick.

We should have it in the shape necessary to release pretty soon.  We keep hearing that this is a great film from everyone who receives a copy.  All the waiting has really paid off, as this is SO much more improved than what we would have released a year ago.  Would have loved to have things fall in place earlier than now, but better late then never.

Filed Under:

Audio track coming

We ordered the audio track of 3 Musketeers of the West from the lab in Paris a few days ago, now we just need to wait for them to send it off.

The lab in Paris has honored our rights to the film and they have agreed to transfer the audio from the negative for us.  We have sent off the money, so all we need to do now is wait.

Once that arrives we need to (1) sync the audio with the video, (2) encode the audio and video into DVD compliant files, (3) re-author the DVD, and (4) do our Quality Assurance tests.

When we receive the audio, barring any further complications, we should be only a few weeks away from getting the DVD into the labs for reproduction.  Steps 2 - 4 will take two days.  Step 1 is the only thing posing any real level of difficulty and time consumption.

I do not think it is far fetched to say that by the end of October we should be, at the very least, be taking pre-orders.

Filed Under:

Possibly found Eurospy negatives

We may have just stumbled on which lab has the negatives for Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.

The Parisian lab that we found the negative for 3 Musketeers of the West might actually have negatives for these two films as well.  We are trying to get them to give us a definite answer one way or another.  This will be great, because the only one in office who has experience working with 35mm splicing is Rick, and he has had a lot of family issues the last few months that have kept him on the road a lot.  Plus, going from the negative should be a higher quality final product.

These two films have been simmering on the backburner for so long, that we have been getting complaints.  There is a lot of worked involved in releasing films in the quality we strive for.  We could easily release a cut version, taken from a 3/4" cassette or 1" tape and spit it out in a week or two... but the quality would be terrible and we don't feel comfortable releasing that on our label.  We appreciate your patience and we know that you have been waiting for a while to get these films.  Trust us, we are not trying to delay it any further than we feel is necessary.  We have sunk much capital into these films and we are determined to release them.

Every DVD is a learning experience for us.  We try to take all we learn and apply it moving forward.  We want to make Fuller Report and Tiffany Memorandum a step forward, not the status quo or, much worse, a step back.

Filed Under:

End in sight

Finally. FINALLY, we have a working solution for the audio in 3 Musketeers of the West.

We got back word from the lab in Paris about the pricing for getting the soundtrack directly from the negative.  It is going to cost 243.00 euros, which roughly translates into 350 US dollars.  We will still have to sync up the audio to the video, but that will be a whole lot less of a problem than the poor audio quality we have currently.  We should know in a few days whether the Parisian lab will honor our rights to this film or not and hopefully will have the DAT tape in hand by the end of October.

We are also going to be unable to sell the DVD for 9.95 now after so much cost and effort.  What should have been a simple and fast project has become anything BUT simple OR fast.  With the end in sight now, there is a huge sigh of relief from the crew who have toiled so long in getting this DVD out.

Filed Under: