Michael Agee

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

THE COUSIN ALSO RISES

By TOM SOTER
from VIDEO MAGAZINE, 1992

Michael Agee is obsessed. "It's unbelievable to me that no one takes care of this crap," he says in the gruff manner of a Hemingway hero. Yet Hemingway never created a character like Agee, cousin of screenwriter James (The African Queen) Agee, formerly a CBS-TV newsman, cameraman, editor and buddy of director Frank Capra, and currently a self-described "archivist and musical historian" who runs The Nostalgia Archive out of his Los Angeles home.

His current obsession is Laurel and Hardy. If Agee has anything to say about it, the comic pair will be appearing in pristine new versions of their earliest silent work – much of it not seen for decades – on a 16-volume laser disc collection from Image Entertainment that will include their first film together, Lucky Dog (1917), as well as a hitherto lost early pairing, Duck Soup (1927), in which the team created their comic personas.

The August release of the initial volume has not come easy – it has involved battles over rights and film quality – but then nothing has for the 43-year-old Agee, who covered (and then wrote a book on) the Mai Lai Massacre Court-Martial of Lt. William Calley in 1971 before moving to TV news. In 1972, he began his life as a jack-of-many trades: technical director, tape operator, telecine technician, film editor, and camera operator. "It's why I can take these films apart and restore them, because I did all those jobs," he says now. "I was doing everything myself. I wanted to know it all."

That quest led him to Capra, director of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and that in turn took him to Capra cronies William Hornbeck, an editor who began his career in 1913, and Joseph Walker, a cinematographer who invented the zoom lens. It also convinced him to start Hollywood Video Enterprises, the first West Coast company offering mass duplication of Betamax and VHS tapes. "There was company called the Nostalgia Merchant releasing old films on 16-millimeter; I convinced them there was a market for videotape and began doing the transfers for them."

In 1984, he founded the video division of Hal Roach Studios, overseeing and championing colorization as a way to restore classic films and keep them in the public's eye. "If things don't change, they die," he notes. "All the complaints about colorization are crap. The guy who is 75 years old complains about colorization, but the guy who is 18 won't watch it if it's black and white. It's not the medium, it's the message."

But his biggest challenge came in 1986, when King World Productions cancelled a $10 million agreement with Roach to syndicate the Laurel and Hardy film library, maintaining that it was so decomposed as to be unusable. Calling King World "weasels," he personally sifted through one and half million feet of decaying nitrate film stock and three months later produced pristine master videotapes and a successful TV show. The 26-episode series earned over $5 million in its 1986-89 release. There was a serious side effect, however: Agee contracted silver nitrate poisoning from the decomposing film and was sick for three months. He shrugs it off with a typical tough guy remark: "Hey, somebody had to do it. Those guys are geniuses – I just love their films, and it's disgusting the way they've been kept."