FILM NOIR FOUNDATION NEWS

The Film Noir Foundation recently celebrated its greatest accomplishment to date: funding a complete restoration of The Prowler, the classic 1951 film noir written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by Joseph Losey. The film had its grand "re-premiere" at the Noir City 6 festival in San Francisco, introduced by James Ellroy, a member of the FNF Advisory Council who played a part in funding the restoration. Also in attendance was Christopher Trumbo, son of the author. The film is to be included in UCLA's upcoming Festival of Preservation later in 2008.

At the Noir City 6 "re-premiere" of The Prowler (l-r): Todd Wiener, archivist, UCLA Film and Television Archive; James Ellroy; Nancy Mysel, who managed the restoration for UCLA, and Eddie Muller.

On the horizon: the Foundation will partner with the San Francisco Film Society (producers of the S.F. International Film Festival) to present an International Noir City festival, featuring foreign noir films culled from archives around the globe. Stay tuned for more news on this exciting project.

A trip to Hollywood in April, 2008 by FNF president Eddie Muller and Board Director Anita Monga uncovered many new treasures from the studio vaults that will shortly be making their way back to the screen. Stay tuned for exciting news regarding the programming of upcoming festivals.

In addition to presenting the spectacularly successful annual Noir City festival each January in San Francisco, the FNF has expanded its public shows into Los Angeles, where the American Cinematheque's annual April "Festival of Film Noir" is now officially a "Noir City" event co-presented by the Foundation. This year's edition featured many rarities uncovered through the joint efforts of the FNF and Cinematheque. The FNF has also partnered with the Seattle Film Society to bring an annual Noir City festival to the just-restored McCaw Theatre in downtown Seattle.

Thanks to the efforts of FNF, several films long thought lost have returned to circulation: Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a long-missing Cornell Woolrich classic from 1948; Crane Wilbur's The Story of Molly X, starring June Havoc; the terrific Ida Lupino noir Woman In Hiding; I Walk Alone, a 1947 classic starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Lizabeth Scott; Abandoned, a 1949 exposé noir starring Dennis O'Keefe and Gale Storm, and (courtesy of Sony Corp.), a brand new 35mm print of Roy Huggins' 1948 detective yarn I Love Trouble. All of these films had virtually vanished for the past fifty years, but have now been rediscovered and are once again available for theatrical screening.

The first two rescue missions of the Film Noir Foundation were the creation of brand new 35mm prints of The Window and Nobody Lives Forever, struck from original negatives at the Warner Bros. film archive, a project funded by the Foundation. The films had their initial screenings at the Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco, in January, 2006 and have subsequently been screened at New York's Film Forum, the "Summer in the Dark" festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Seattle Art Museum's annual autumn film noir festival, with more bookings to come.

The Film Noir Foundation continues to work in cooperation with the studios and UCLA Film and Television Archive to bring other worthy films back into circulation.