7 ms·

Spanish crew shot an alternative Dracula after Bela Lugosi had gone to bed

169 points by samizdis 6y ago

Daho0n 6y ago
>Then in the early 1990s it transpired there was a copy in Cuba, a fact confirmed by the Cinemateca de Cuba in Havana. Still, it took four meetings – the UCLA Film and Television Archive had to fly out to take part in negotiations – to arrange a temporary loan. As of 2015, the film sits in the US Library of Congress So, they made a deal and Library of Congress broke it? Or is it still on loan or is it a copy?
- tomcam 6y ago
  Yeah, the most important news about this extraordinary piece of history is omitted!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- karaterobot 6y ago
  Cuba should charge them $.10 a day in overdue fines.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Cuba interestingly enough already has a policy of not accepting money from the US for stolen property. The US writes a check each month for the rent of Guantanamo Bay that the Cuban government then doesn't cash in protest.
- joshuaissac 6y ago
  I was wondering the same thing when I read that. According to https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/movies-news-reviews/article41628312.html https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/movies-news-review... (2015), the loan was made by 1995, and it does not mention anything about it not being returned, so it seems somewhat unlikely that the US Library of Congress version (which was added in 2015) is the original.
- wearsshoes 6y ago
  Probably they made new prints from the Havana copy, or digitized it and returned the original.
- toyg 6y ago
  This sort of diplomatic “loan” with extensive negotiations is typically done with the expectation from both sides that, in practice, it will never be returned. I expect (and hope) that Cubans got something in return.
drfuchs 6y ago
Laurel and Hardy had a different scheme: they'd leave up all the sets, and later re-take all the scenes that had made it into the final cut, phonetically, in up to 4 additional languages. All of the other actors were replaced by native speakers, but audiences everywhere wanted to see, and hear, the real Laurel and Hardy. Randy Skretvodt's "Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind The Movies" quotes Stan Laurel: ...after shooting the entire picture in English, editing it and previewing it, they would bring in "French, German, Italian and Spanish interpreters. And they translated our dialogue into each language...we'd set up the camera, and we'd do the French version of the first scene...and each scene we did four times before we moved the camera for the different change."
- smegger001 6y ago
  I have often wondered recently why this isn't done more? Just re-shoot the same show/movie with Spanish French Chinese Japanesse Arabic etc.. speaking casts. make the smae show for diffenrt markets with different actors use the same sets the directors already have the scenes set up hell you could record camera positions and the camera could move exactly the same in different versions.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Cost too much in labor/time. Overdub is super cheap compared to multiple shoots.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Probably because it would still be significantly cheaper to just sub/dub the english version. And finding quality casts for all the languages would be a lot harder too. I'd much rather watch a foreign production with top quality actors subbed in english than an assembly line english version with sub par acting. (Although I can see it being alright for stuff you already don't expect to be quality, like soaps)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
peanut_worm 6y ago
I remember learning this from the Angry Video Game Nerd like 10 years ago, which made me want to read the book. The acting was a lot more flamboyant in the Spanish version , I kind of prefer it in some ways.
vncecartersknee 6y ago
Bela Lugosi's bed... the bat has left the film set
danielparks 6y ago
Is this https://lccn.loc.gov/2003636872 https://lccn.loc.gov/2003636872? It’s in Spanish and directed by George Melford, but it’s on VHS and it’s dated 1992. Plus it has English subtitles. It would be fun to see this, but I get the impression that it would involve a visit to the Library of Congress. Or maybe Cuba? Is there more information on the Library web site that I’m missing?
- DoktorDelta 6y ago
  It looks like any registered reader at LOC can request it for on-site use, but that seems like the only way to see it. Anyone can become a reader but you need to complete registration in-person at the building.
- tiahura 6y ago
  https://www.worldcat.org/title/dracula-dracula-spanish-version-dir-by-george-melford-draculas-daughter-dir-by-lambert-hiilyer-son-of-dracula-dir-by-robert-siodmak-house-of-dracula-dir-by-erle-c-kenton/oclc/1040538915&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/dracula-dracula-spanish-versi...
- Noos 6y ago
  It's an extra on the Dracula Complete Legacy collection; I don't think it's rare or anything, usually it gets bundled with Universal's collections of Dracula films i think.
  - philistine 6y ago
    Not rare, and outside of Lugosi's performance, is considered the better film. Think about it, the Spanish language crew could watch the English dailies and improve on their work.
minikomi 6y ago
The original fansub
KMag 6y ago
This reminds me of putting the LimeWire stub installer into production the first day of the COO/CTO's vacation. We were the most popular Java desktop app at the time, circa 2005, P2P file sharing. At the time, we had approximately 60 million client GUIDs connecting to the network per month (or was that quarterly?, in any case, tons of users). It was a small company, 5 developers, 13 employees total. One of the largest costs was bandwidth for the free version of the software. We already had a mechanism for using the P2P network to save bandwidth on version upgrades of the free version. The hello handshake between peers included the serial number for a signed (1024-bit DSA) XML message containing the SHA-1 hash of the latest free installer. If the serial numbers didn't match, the out-of-date peer would download the latest XML message from the other. Within 60 seconds of a new release coming out, over 99% of the online nodes would have the SHA-1 hash of the latest free installer and start downloading the latest free version installer from each other. Edit: Originally, the XML update messages just had a URL for the installer. We accidentally DDoS'd ourselves the first time we used it, with millions of users flooding in within minutes of the latest release, so we added a randomized delay over 24 hours for actually notifying the user of a new version. After we added the P2P download of the upgraded installer, we still redirected the user to our website for the upsell opportunity. I don't recall how we got the already-downloaded installer to launch after visiting our website. So, one of the other developers and I wrote a proof-of-concept minimal C++ installer. Its only GUI was a progress bar. It had just the DSA verification code from Crypto++, a minimal parser for just the subset of XML we were using, and enough of the P2P protocol to bootstrap into the network and download the latest free installer. It would check the SHA-1 of the downloaded installer and then launch the downloaded installer. It was less than 1/100th the size of the actual application installer, and had the advantage that it would always install the absolute latest release version of the free version of the application. Also, the monthly profit sharing payment was roughly the same as my salary. For more senior developers, it exceeded their salary, so we were all highly incentivized to cut costs. The COO/CTO shot down our proof of concept with just vague worries that we might have broken something, that maybe it only worked from the office and our apartments. He had no concrete criticisms. So, the next time the COO/CTO went on vacation, we went into the webserver and replaced the full sized free version installer with the tiny stub installer. The first time the free version started up after install and successfully bootstrapped onto the P2P network, it would make a tiny HTTP request to our webserver, so we could monitor for problems. We watched carefully the metrics for successful first-time P2P bootstraps, and they were fine. We were all very happy. About an hour later, the COO/CTO called into the office from the beach on a Monday morning. He said we broke something. We asked what we broke, and he said he wasn't sure, but he was checking total badwidth usage, and it dropped off a cliff about an hour earlier. We told him to calm down, than free version successful connection rates were unchanged... but that stub installer he had nixed was saving bandwidth. He wasn't happy, but agreed to let us to continue trialing the stub installer while he was on vacation. We were the only two C++ developers at LW, and we both left for Google within a year. The stub installer stayed in production for a year or so after we left, but eventually they got rid of it due to maintenance concerns. Edit 2: "The Bulgarian Nuclear Option": I noticed a flaw in that we used a Java long for the XML message serial number, not an arbitrary precision integer. When the recording industry started threatening a lawsuit and the owner asked us to start researching options for a censored version of LW, one of the developers claimed he took my observed flaw and signed a message with serial number Long.MAX_VALUE to lock everything at the current version. He claimed he had this final version message on his home machine and had a chatbot mechanism he could activate from his cell phone to be able to lock out the owner from being able to auto-update people to a censored version. The developer in question was from Bulgaria, and hence, this was "The Bulgarian Nuclear Option". News got back to the owner, and I heard that the developer in question came back white as a sheet from being called into the owner's office. The Bulgarian wasn't the other C++ dev.
ggm 6y ago
Jaques Tati did multiple takes.
ruslanmsv 6y ago
why the hell is this shit on hacker news? In which way does it relate to "hacker news" ?
ginko 6y ago
The article makes it sound like this was some skunkworks project the crew did behind the producer's back, but as far as I know alternative language productions using the same set during off hours was standard practice before dubbing became widespread.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Yes, it's strange. The article completely acknowledges this was a normal practice, but the title makes it sound sneaky. I guess it's just to make it more clickbaity.
joejohnson 6y ago
Bela Lugosi’s in bed
nottorp 6y ago
And this is how the fear of subtitles began...
coldpie 6y ago
The Angry Video Game Nerd (who also does a lot of classic cinema stuff) had a brief discussion of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWYOLo_qIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWYOLo_qIM
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Aside, @personlurking[0] on HN (you won't see this but thanks) mentioned FlixOlé[1] the other day and I've been hooked on Spanish cinema for a few days now. $4/mo (14 day trial) and there are no subtitles, so for the HN crowd it's only good for Spanish learners forced to finally wean off subtitles. While Netflix has stellar Spanish shows/movies from El silencio del pantano (movie) to El desorden que dejas (show), it's a fun break from Netflix with a large catalog of eras (1950-2000) that Netflix doesn't have at all. I wouldn't normally watch a movie from 1957, but there's something easier about doing that when it's a culture you weren't born into. I think this is the spice of learning another language, especially for us native English speakers since we have no real impetus beyond leisure to engulf ourselves in other languages/cultures. IME this is something people take for granted who learn English as a 2nd language and wonder why English speakers are monolingual. This comment doesn't fit here (just triggered by Spanish and Dracula and a couple statements in TFA) but it's something I was thinking about over the last couple days that I wanted to jettison into the ether. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25977953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25977953 [1] https://ver.flixole.com/ https://ver.flixole.com/

169 points by samizdis 6y ago

>Then in the early 1990s it transpired there was a copy in Cuba, a fact confirmed by the Cinemateca de Cuba in Havana. Still, it took four meetings – the UCLA Film and Television Archive had to fly out to take part in negotiations – to arrange a temporary loan. As of 2015, the film sits in the US Library of Congress So, they made a deal and Library of Congress broke it? Or is it still on loan or is it a copy?

tomcam 6y ago
Yeah, the most important news about this extraordinary piece of history is omitted!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
karaterobot 6y ago
Cuba should charge them $.10 a day in overdue fines.
- monocasa 6y ago
  Cuba interestingly enough already has a policy of not accepting money from the US for stolen property. The US writes a check each month for the rent of Guantanamo Bay that the Cuban government then doesn't cash in protest.
joshuaissac 6y ago
I was wondering the same thing when I read that. According to https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/movies-news-reviews/article41628312.html https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/movies-news-review... (2015), the loan was made by 1995, and it does not mention anything about it not being returned, so it seems somewhat unlikely that the US Library of Congress version (which was added in 2015) is the original.
wearsshoes 6y ago
Probably they made new prints from the Havana copy, or digitized it and returned the original.
toyg 6y ago
This sort of diplomatic “loan” with extensive negotiations is typically done with the expectation from both sides that, in practice, it will never be returned. I expect (and hope) that Cubans got something in return.

drfuchs 6y ago

Laurel and Hardy had a different scheme: they'd leave up all the sets, and later re-take all the scenes that had made it into the final cut, phonetically, in up to 4 additional languages. All of the other actors were replaced by native speakers, but audiences everywhere wanted to see, and hear, the real Laurel and Hardy. Randy Skretvodt's "Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind The Movies" quotes Stan Laurel: ...after shooting the entire picture in English, editing it and previewing it, they would bring in "French, German, Italian and Spanish interpreters. And they translated our dialogue into each language...we'd set up the camera, and we'd do the French version of the first scene...and each scene we did four times before we moved the camera for the different change."

smegger001 6y ago
I have often wondered recently why this isn't done more? Just re-shoot the same show/movie with Spanish French Chinese Japanesse Arabic etc.. speaking casts. make the smae show for diffenrt markets with different actors use the same sets the directors already have the scenes set up hell you could record camera positions and the camera could move exactly the same in different versions.
- edoceo 6y ago
  Cost too much in labor/time. Overdub is super cheap compared to multiple shoots.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Probably because it would still be significantly cheaper to just sub/dub the english version. And finding quality casts for all the languages would be a lot harder too. I'd much rather watch a foreign production with top quality actors subbed in english than an assembly line english version with sub par acting. (Although I can see it being alright for stuff you already don't expect to be quality, like soaps)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

peanut_worm 6y ago

I remember learning this from the Angry Video Game Nerd like 10 years ago, which made me want to read the book. The acting was a lot more flamboyant in the Spanish version , I kind of prefer it in some ways.

vncecartersknee 6y ago

Bela Lugosi's bed... the bat has left the film set

danielparks 6y ago

Is this https://lccn.loc.gov/2003636872 https://lccn.loc.gov/2003636872? It’s in Spanish and directed by George Melford, but it’s on VHS and it’s dated 1992. Plus it has English subtitles. It would be fun to see this, but I get the impression that it would involve a visit to the Library of Congress. Or maybe Cuba? Is there more information on the Library web site that I’m missing?

DoktorDelta 6y ago
It looks like any registered reader at LOC can request it for on-site use, but that seems like the only way to see it. Anyone can become a reader but you need to complete registration in-person at the building.
tiahura 6y ago
https://www.worldcat.org/title/dracula-dracula-spanish-version-dir-by-george-melford-draculas-daughter-dir-by-lambert-hiilyer-son-of-dracula-dir-by-robert-siodmak-house-of-dracula-dir-by-erle-c-kenton/oclc/1040538915&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/dracula-dracula-spanish-versi...
Noos 6y ago
It's an extra on the Dracula Complete Legacy collection; I don't think it's rare or anything, usually it gets bundled with Universal's collections of Dracula films i think.
- philistine 6y ago
  Not rare, and outside of Lugosi's performance, is considered the better film. Think about it, the Spanish language crew could watch the English dailies and improve on their work.

minikomi 6y ago

The original fansub

KMag 6y ago

This reminds me of putting the LimeWire stub installer into production the first day of the COO/CTO's vacation. We were the most popular Java desktop app at the time, circa 2005, P2P file sharing. At the time, we had approximately 60 million client GUIDs connecting to the network per month (or was that quarterly?, in any case, tons of users). It was a small company, 5 developers, 13 employees total. One of the largest costs was bandwidth for the free version of the software. We already had a mechanism for using the P2P network to save bandwidth on version upgrades of the free version. The hello handshake between peers included the serial number for a signed (1024-bit DSA) XML message containing the SHA-1 hash of the latest free installer. If the serial numbers didn't match, the out-of-date peer would download the latest XML message from the other. Within 60 seconds of a new release coming out, over 99% of the online nodes would have the SHA-1 hash of the latest free installer and start downloading the latest free version installer from each other. Edit: Originally, the XML update messages just had a URL for the installer. We accidentally DDoS'd ourselves the first time we used it, with millions of users flooding in within minutes of the latest release, so we added a randomized delay over 24 hours for actually notifying the user of a new version. After we added the P2P download of the upgraded installer, we still redirected the user to our website for the upsell opportunity. I don't recall how we got the already-downloaded installer to launch after visiting our website. So, one of the other developers and I wrote a proof-of-concept minimal C++ installer. Its only GUI was a progress bar. It had just the DSA verification code from Crypto++, a minimal parser for just the subset of XML we were using, and enough of the P2P protocol to bootstrap into the network and download the latest free installer. It would check the SHA-1 of the downloaded installer and then launch the downloaded installer. It was less than 1/100th the size of the actual application installer, and had the advantage that it would always install the absolute latest release version of the free version of the application. Also, the monthly profit sharing payment was roughly the same as my salary. For more senior developers, it exceeded their salary, so we were all highly incentivized to cut costs. The COO/CTO shot down our proof of concept with just vague worries that we might have broken something, that maybe it only worked from the office and our apartments. He had no concrete criticisms. So, the next time the COO/CTO went on vacation, we went into the webserver and replaced the full sized free version installer with the tiny stub installer. The first time the free version started up after install and successfully bootstrapped onto the P2P network, it would make a tiny HTTP request to our webserver, so we could monitor for problems. We watched carefully the metrics for successful first-time P2P bootstraps, and they were fine. We were all very happy. About an hour later, the COO/CTO called into the office from the beach on a Monday morning. He said we broke something. We asked what we broke, and he said he wasn't sure, but he was checking total badwidth usage, and it dropped off a cliff about an hour earlier. We told him to calm down, than free version successful connection rates were unchanged... but that stub installer he had nixed was saving bandwidth. He wasn't happy, but agreed to let us to continue trialing the stub installer while he was on vacation. We were the only two C++ developers at LW, and we both left for Google within a year. The stub installer stayed in production for a year or so after we left, but eventually they got rid of it due to maintenance concerns. Edit 2: "The Bulgarian Nuclear Option": I noticed a flaw in that we used a Java long for the XML message serial number, not an arbitrary precision integer. When the recording industry started threatening a lawsuit and the owner asked us to start researching options for a censored version of LW, one of the developers claimed he took my observed flaw and signed a message with serial number Long.MAX_VALUE to lock everything at the current version. He claimed he had this final version message on his home machine and had a chatbot mechanism he could activate from his cell phone to be able to lock out the owner from being able to auto-update people to a censored version. The developer in question was from Bulgaria, and hence, this was "The Bulgarian Nuclear Option". News got back to the owner, and I heard that the developer in question came back white as a sheet from being called into the owner's office. The Bulgarian wasn't the other C++ dev.

ggm 6y ago

Jaques Tati did multiple takes.

ruslanmsv 6y ago

why the hell is this shit on hacker news? In which way does it relate to "hacker news" ?

ginko 6y ago

The article makes it sound like this was some skunkworks project the crew did behind the producer's back, but as far as I know alternative language productions using the same set during off hours was standard practice before dubbing became widespread.

kelnos 6y ago
Yes, it's strange. The article completely acknowledges this was a normal practice, but the title makes it sound sneaky. I guess it's just to make it more clickbaity.

joejohnson 6y ago

Bela Lugosi’s in bed

nottorp 6y ago

And this is how the fear of subtitles began...

coldpie 6y ago

The Angry Video Game Nerd (who also does a lot of classic cinema stuff) had a brief discussion of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWYOLo_qIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWYOLo_qIM

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Aside, @personlurking[0] on HN (you won't see this but thanks) mentioned FlixOlé[1] the other day and I've been hooked on Spanish cinema for a few days now. $4/mo (14 day trial) and there are no subtitles, so for the HN crowd it's only good for Spanish learners forced to finally wean off subtitles. While Netflix has stellar Spanish shows/movies from El silencio del pantano (movie) to El desorden que dejas (show), it's a fun break from Netflix with a large catalog of eras (1950-2000) that Netflix doesn't have at all. I wouldn't normally watch a movie from 1957, but there's something easier about doing that when it's a culture you weren't born into. I think this is the spice of learning another language, especially for us native English speakers since we have no real impetus beyond leisure to engulf ourselves in other languages/cultures. IME this is something people take for granted who learn English as a 2nd language and wonder why English speakers are monolingual. This comment doesn't fit here (just triggered by Spanish and Dracula and a couple statements in TFA) but it's something I was thinking about over the last couple days that I wanted to jettison into the ether. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25977953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25977953 [1] https://ver.flixole.com/ https://ver.flixole.com/