Film Masters Founder Phil Hopkins
by CHAD KENNERK
Images courtesy Film Masters.
Film Masters celebrates the lost and orphaned films that once lined the public domain bargain bin by giving them new life through stunning restorations. A consortium of historians and enthusiasts focused on film preservation, Film Masters was launched in 2023 by industry veteran and film historian Phil Hopkins. The boutique home video label is committed to reviving films that have been sitting dormant for decades.
By scanning original elements – in some cases the original camera negative – in 2K and 4K, Film Masters presents Special Edition two-disc collections of cult classics, giving these often beloved, yet neglected, titles the full treatment with original and archival bonus materials, in-depth documentaries and audio commentaries on deluxe releases of definitive restorations. Film Masters has the worthy goal of making classic films widely accessible and in the best format possible. They also license their releases and work with preservation institutions to deposit films into locations that will properly preserve and store original masters for posterity.
In conversation with film archivist and producer Phil Hopkins.
How did your passion for classic film begin and how did that passion evolve into a career?
It's almost an accidental career, because I never thought of myself as actually making a living watching old films. My obsession with cinema started as a very young kid. I am from a certain generation that grew up having home movies. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had an uncle who had filmed my family from the 1920s all the way up through the 1970s on a 16mm camera. He then processed the film photochemically to bring back to family events to watch on a big screen, sometimes on a white sheet that was hung up. That was always in the background for me as a little kid, and I was transfixed by the fact that I could watch images of my grandparents and my dad as a little kid. That was sort of the first cinema experience that led me to the tactical nature of film and actually threading a projector — being around people to watch their expression and whatnot.
I inherited the family archive when my uncle decided that he no longer wanted to deal with it, and by the time I inherited it, most people had already seen these films a thousand times. The nature of me being a little kid projecting the film as the projectionist was enhanced when I started to discover that you could buy films from collectors and actually swap movies and go to these sorts of flea markets with dealers that had 16mm film prints. I got into film collecting. The way I got into it was because I wanted to save and preserve the family film archive. Then, because of the sheer boredom of the family members who had seen the same films, I had to find films to project. That got me into the very strange world of film collectors and people that had amassed hundreds and thousands of films. They would take the approach that they were going to sort of hoard these movies. How did these films get seen if collectors were not going to share them?
What really got me into it professionally was that I'm also a musician. Years ago, after doing music full time, I had the opportunity to start a record company. We were doing a lot of reissues of old music. A friend of mine had made a documentary called Sex, Drugs & Democracy. At the time, our record label was distributed into retail stores, and he asked me if I could help him distribute his movie. DVD had just come out and he said, “Maybe you could actually put the film out on DVD?” I took it to the sales team and the people who did the marketing, and they said, “This film is a good independent film, but we don't know how much interest we're going to get from retailers.” For some reason, I don't know if it was me or the fact that he knew I had it, but we came up with the idea of including Reefer Madness as a bonus feature, putting that on a DVD with his documentary. It did really well. Immediately the light bulb went off, “Oh my God, you've got access to all these 16mm films; maybe you could actually put more of these movies I’d been collecting out into the market.” I was always looking for film prints, but I never really thought of myself becoming a film distributor. I got into home video probably 26 years ago now, so that's my journey.
What led to the current situation is when I realised that with a lot of the films that have fallen into public domain, we now have the tools and access to much better means of scanning film and [producing] a higher resolution version. For two decades, we've been dealing with archival film salvage, helping people with film archives and getting film elements. That was out of private collections because one of the things that I was really aware of when a lot of these film holders and film collectors passed away; the family members had no idea how to deal with these collections, and more often than not, they would either go to other collectors, or they would get thrown away and go into a landfill. The nature of film preservation is challenging now too, because so many of the institutions don't have space and a room for film, especially nitrate film. Having access to the film, but also having the ability to store it and to take care of it, has been equally important for what we've been doing over the past few years since launching my new initiative.
We had a company that I sold several years ago, and I thought that might be the end of my journey doing physical media. Then a couple of years ago, we were asked to help Turner Classic Movies track down some film elements for a couple of movies. Lo and behold, I'm doing it again. Then we decided to put Blu-rays out in 2023, and that was another weird pivot. Home media has gone through this new renaissance with all these boutique, small companies that are not doing big box retail, but are finding their lane with what they're releasing. We've taken on the role of finding a lot of the orphan films or films that have come out in a crappy resolution and trying to come out with definitive versions of these lesser-known or usually ignored films that have been relegated to poor-quality releases.
The Killer Shrews, Image courtesy of Film Masters
As a boutique label, there are a lot of factors that go into producing a Film Masters release. What is that process like from selection to disc?
In terms of material, it's what we have access to more often than not. With what we're doing with physical media, we also have to look at how much we have available and then how much we can actually release without compromising the quality of what we've put out previously. That's challenging, because I didn't think physical [media] would be around in 2025. We're being told, especially by the major [studios], that it's kind of in their rear window right now. They’ve decided to not be in physical [media] from the studio perspective. What that means now is that the smaller companies, the boutique home video companies, have access to studio films to make 4k scans and then give back those elements to the studios, who probably have less interest in putting them out now.
For us, it really just comes down to what material we're working from. It's easier for us to do horror movies, B movies, sci-fi films, or 50s horror movies. There's a certain audience of monster kids that will buy every monster movie we can put out, and they're very impassioned and passionate about these releases. We also know there's a lot of other genres that we'd love to see out there. We put out The Scarlet Letter, the 1934 Colleen Moore [version]. It was the first sound adaption of that film and it was released by what we refer to as a poverty row studio called Majestic Pictures, but we had access to the original camera negative. That was incredible — to be able to work off of a preservation piece [like that.] Some of these smaller studios, like Majestic, are not going to get that kind of love. Very few people will sign up to put out a 4k scan and put the restoration work into films of that nature. Thankfully Turner Classic Movies is still out there and still showing these films, because that's a huge part of exposure for us, and certainly for everyone else that loves classic film. Having Turner Classic Movies still out there is critical.
Then we identify who's the best source to do a commentary for the particular film that we're working on. We have a number of different people we work with. Tom Weaver, who's written numerous books on horror movies and B movies. He is the ambassador of the monster kids right now, and he's done our most recent release, which is another Roger Corman film. We've done maybe seven Corman restorations in the past two years. Corman's first production, Monster from the Ocean Floor, was never released in high definition. We licensed it from the rights holder, Kit Parker of Kit Parker Films. We had access to the original camera negative of this very low-budget Corman monster movie, and we decided that was worth giving a lot of special attention to. We worked with Tom on the commentary and with Daniel Griffith’s company, Ballyhoo Motion Pictures, which does a lot of our special features. We put together almost a Criterion-level version of a movie that you probably would have seen in a bargain bin for five bucks 20 years ago.
There's an audience of very passionate monster movie fans that love these movies. We have to decide; do we just do that or do we try to go into other genres as well? That's why we try to mix up the releases. I love Pre-Code; I love film noir. We also know that we can't put everything out, so we have to sort of decide which is going to be the next release to get the deluxe treatment. Then it could be six or seven months by the time we actually get it released, because so much goes into the restoration, the production liner notes, and the commentary. Then it's a matter of moving on to the next one and deciding. We decide based on [film] elements, and then who's available that can really offer a lot in terms of backstory to contextualise the film and make it a special release.
The Terror, Image courtesy of Film Masters
One of the great casualties of streaming is that we don't get the behind the scenes content that we used to have. What is that process like in terms of compiling all of that material and how many works do you typically have in rotation?
We've scanned probably close to 70 or 80 films in the past two years. We're always in the midst of restoration on three or four films at one time, at different stages in the restoration process. By the time we get a film scanned, there are probably three or four other films that have been scanned five or six months earlier that are further along in the food chain of production. We have enough in the arsenal right now to easily release another 50 releases. Opportunities also come in front of us to either acquire or license additional titles, and that's when, being a boutique company, it's too bad we don't have those resources of a major studio. It's too bad it's not of an era where you can justify investing a lot of money into it, because the return is not what it was 20 years ago in terms of what you can make in physical, but thankfully, there is still enough of an audience to justify it. We have to strategically pace it, because the manufacturing of what we're doing with our special editions includes 20-page booklets, and in most cases, with our special editions, it's a two-disc collection. There's a lot involved in terms of the production and the investment and then getting it into retail and online. A lot of boutique home media companies are in the same position that we're in; they're putting out a release as often as they can, but they also have to wait until they're getting paid from the distributor to reinvest that. A lot of what we're doing is making sure that we're not over-releasing. Then we don't have enough left to pay for the restoration or to pay our contributors.
We also feel that it's important to have other areas to engage our audience. We have an editorial blog on our Film Masters website. We also have a YouTube channel, and sometimes we'll put up the raw scan so people can see what it looked like before it went through the restoration process. We'll put our trailers up there and some other things that we have access to that we're probably not going to put out on DVD or Blu-ray, just to have them on our channel. We also do different original productions too that, to your point earlier, a lot of those engagement tools that do the contextualising of the film, we think they should be available on streaming, because not everyone's going to buy a physical DVD or Blu-ray. We've made a lot of our original productions and features available on our YouTube channel. I think that's important, because they should be seen. If someone is really interested in Roger Corman, we've got a ton of stuff about him. That's something that I wish more companies would do: make those special features available as streaming assets, because if you think about it, there's hundreds of these special features that probably won't get seen. Unless you have hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays in your house, chances are you won't find these on a streaming site.
The Scarlet Letter, Image courtesy of Film Masters
Sam Sherman is a mentor that has influenced and perhaps inspired some of your trajectory.
Thanks for mentioning Sam, because Sam is a mentor and a very dear friend. Not many people realise how important and significant he is for saving hundreds of films. Sam is known mostly because of his association with his partner Al Adamson and their company Independent-International Pictures, which released a lot of drive-in movies like Satan's Sadists and Dracula vs. Frankenstein. But Sam, even going back to when he was in his early 20s, started a company called Signature Films when he was in college.
It's a funny story how he got into it, because he was fascinated with film history and filmmaking, but he when he was in college, he was asked to do a book report on The Scarlet Letter. When he didn't read the book, he panicked and asked his friend if he could loan him a 16mm copy of the 1934 film that he had. He realised it was kind of an important film, but where was the negative, and how could he get access to it? There was a gentleman by the name of Irwin Pizor, who was the owner of the Majestic holdings. Sam, through his friendship and relationship with Irwin, became the beneficiary of the entire collection of Majestic Pictures. So if you think about The Vampire Bat, which is another Majestic Pictures film, The Scarlet Letter, The Sin of Nora Moran; these are great movies. These are not throwaway films; they're significant. Even though they were released by a company like Majestic, the production value on all those films is quite good, and Sam has preserved those films, mostly with the Library of Congress and UCLA, which means that the films that Sam became the custodian of are now in those institutions.
When we decided to work on all three of them, we had access to great material that Sam had actually saved. UCLA made preservation prints of all three of those films. If Turner wanted to show The Sin of Nora Moran at a festival, which they did, they could go to UCLA and get one of the preservation prints and project a 35mm [version]. Sam doesn't get enough credit for what he's done over the years with film preservation, but he is also an amazing historian. He knew so many of these people personally, and if you look at what he did years later from when he was working in his budding film distribution company to when he met his partner, he was able to get a lot of actors who were not working into his films. His relationship with people like J. Carrol Naish or John Carradine was a result of Sam knowing them personally.
He he wrote for Screen Thrills Illustrated magazine back in the 1960s, and he was also very good friends with people like Joe Franklin, who had his own New York-based TV and radio show that had a lot of these actors on later in their careers. Sam was a frequent guest on the Joe Franklin show. To have someone like Sam still around that has amazing recall of so many of these obscure B movie gems, it's incredibly invaluable for someone like myself. I talk to Sam pretty much daily, and he's been a great friend and a great mentor, and he’s also someone who is incredibly passionate about making sure that a younger generation knows about film. He's always encouraging us to go after certain movies that are not currently out there and try to get them restored and preserved into a better resolution. We're going to be working on a few more of Sam's films this year as well.
Monster from the Ocean Floor, Image courtesy of Film Masters
I'm curious if there's been a release that you've worked on, or one coming up, that's meant a lot to you personally.
The release that we're just about to put out, [Monster from the Ocean Floor], is meaningful to me because it's Corman's first production. I never in a million years thought we would have access to that film from the original source; being able to get the original camera negative for Corman's first production and work on that. Then to be able to have footage of Corman talking about it included and Tom Weaver's [commentary] contribution. It's not a giant film in the way of well-known horror movies, but to me, it's significant for all those reasons I just mentioned. But I guess I'm as excited and passionate about every release I'm just about to put to bed so that it can come out. If you ask me two weeks from now, it’ll probably be the next one I'm working on.
Now that you're a couple of years into Film Masters and have a better sense of the current environment, where are we headed with physical media?
I don't know. I think that people like myself and yourself, film nerds, want this to go on for a long time. We would hope to think that the films from the 1920s and the 1930s will be appreciated long after we've left this earth. I just wonder and hope that that's sustainable. I've gone to most of the Turner Classic Movie festivals and I am always encouraged when I see a younger demographic in line with their parents or grandparents. I also see that the new reality is films of the 1980s and 90s are now classic to a certain generation. We just hope that that doesn't mean that films from earlier get ignored. How do you put the same enthusiasm into something if an audience is potentially dying off? Will that audience exist for these types of films? We know that every generation is going to have their classic moment from that decade that they grew up in, but will we still have Pre-Code movies appreciated 25 years from now?
The Scarlet Letter, Image courtesy of Film Masters
I can only hope so, because the work that we're doing to restore these movies means that they're available in better resolution to be shown and seen. Making all these contextual tools will give people a better point of reference, because at some point, everyone involved with the films will no longer be alive. Some of the things that we did, even last year, we look at and say, “Thank God we have these.” We had Jonathan Haze contribute to one of the releases that we put out, and he passed away. And of course, we had Roger Corman pass away and we're very fortunate that Daniel had a lot of Corman footage that he had access to. And even Cora Sue Collins, who was the little girl in The Scarlet Letter and also is in The Sin of Nora Moran. She's still with us and she's amazing. We feel the need to take advantage of everything we possibly can, to make sure that if we have an opportunity to interview someone or film someone, we do it while we're able to. Hey, The Beatles are still relevant in 2025 and they still made documentaries about them and come up with ways to keep that property going. I think that having a Turner Classic Movies is an important part of that. If we lose a TV network that's done so much for the preservation and the promotion of these types of films, that hurts the community tremendously. I don't know how you replace that. If all the major bean counters at all these big companies don't see the significance and the importance of it, then then we're really in trouble.
Visit the official site of FIlm Masters
FILM MASTERS is a consortium of historians and enthusiasts who seek to celebrate the preservation and restoration of films. As archivists, Film Masters is committed to storing film elements for future generations and reviving films that have been sitting dormant for decades. By scanning in 2K and 4K, they give these lesser-known films the red-carpet treatment they deserve. Leveraging modern means of distribution to release forgotten films back into the world, Film Masters also produces original bonus materials—including feature-length documentaries, audio commentaries and historic articles—to contextualise and celebrate these works of art as they were meant to be.
