“Audiences will be transfixed as B-17 pilots and gunners survive flak barrages, enemy fighters and sub-zero temperatures during some of the most harrowing bombing missions of the war.”

IT’S THE EUROPEAN air war like you’ve never seen it before.

The Cold Blue, a new film from Fathom Events and HBO Documentaries, uses digitally enhanced original wartime footage to retell the story of American bomber crews who fought and died in the skies above the Third Reich — and it does so in vivid detail.

Audiences will be transfixed as B-17 pilots and gunners survive flak barrages, enemy fighters and sub-zero temperatures during some of the most harrowing bombing missions of the war. Living Eighth Air Force veterans, now in their 90s, provide the voice-over for the dramatic 4K visuals.

Documentary filmmaker Erik Nelson stitched The Cold Blue together using 15 hours of archival footage shot in the spring and summer of 1943 by Oscar-winning director William Wyler (Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur).

Wyler, a major in the USAAF’s motion picture division at the time, flew with actual bomber crews to film his acclaimed wartime documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. It was a dangerous assignment; one of Wyler’s own cameramen was killed in action over Germany.

Nelson began the ambitious restoration project three years ago after happening across some old reels in the U.S. National Archives. You will soon be able to see the results of his work for yourself. The Cold Blue will be flying onto HBO in June.

MilitaryHistoryNow.com recently screened a copy of The Cold Blue and got Erik Nelson’s own insights into the project. Here’s what he told us.

Q: How did you come to learn about Wyler’s raw footage in the National Archives?

Nelson: In the fall of 2016, I was looking for any colour footage of World War Two aviation, and was working with Lisa Hartjens, who is one of the leading experts on their wartime collection. She casually mentioned that she knew about 34 reels of William Wyler outtakes. The moment she told me, I knew their importance – and potential.

Q: This footage had been unseen for 75 years. What were you trying to achieve creatively in making The Cold Blue? 

Nelson: One of our creative goals on this project was to create something that compelled people into going into a theatre — in the dark — to see something on a big screen. Feature documentaries of late have been channeled into streaming services, and cable, and few projects seem to demand a big screen presentation. In 2011, I was producing Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and faced a similar issue. I hit on the concept of filming — and screening — in 3D, which at the time was a breakthrough for feature documentaries. The Cold Blue is conceived in much the same way, to lure people in theatres. The new, digitally restored, wide-screen images of aerial combat, coupled with intricate sound design, are best appreciated in that setting. I am certain that my colleague William Wyler would agree with me that there is no substitute for this experience.

Q: In what condition was the newly discovered film and what was the process to restore it?

Nelson: For the most part, the film was one or two generations off of the original negative. The problem was that in 1943, a good deal of the original footage was accidentally scratched in a processing laboratory. Those scratches were included in every version of The Memphis Belle. It was obviously impossible to re-shoot, and the technology did not exist until a very few years ago to remove them. We went frame by frame and literally painted out the scratches, digitally, a process that went around the clock, for three months. By transferring the film to 4K using the state-of-the-art facilities at the National Archives, we were then able to enlarge the image, with zero loss of quality, to turn the footage into a widescreen presentation. As this footage was recorded without sound, we need to reconstruct the audio, as well as the visuals. A location recording team from Skywalker Ranch flew on a number of “missions” on one of the few remaining B-17’s, an airplane owned by the Collings Foundation. Using the most sophisticated recording equipment, and up to 18 microphones, they captured all the sounds of flying, and their work allows the closest possible approximation of what it really sounded to be inside, and outside, a B-17 during a mission.

Q: Can you take us through the process of restoring The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress?

Nelson: Every one of the original prints have all faded, in some cases beyond recognition, and after an unsuccessful worldwide search to find a decent copy of the original, there seemed to be no possibility of restoration. We decided to take a chance by hoping that our 34 reels constituted the entirety of The Memphis Belle, and decided to place over 500 individual shots over The Memphis Belle’s existing soundtrack. This heralds a new kind of restoration – where a film is literally recut from scratch – with all of the original elements – yet preserves exactly the same content of the original. Every frame was colour corrected and artifacts removed. By using the best existing print from the National Archives, we were able to restore the titles and the original animation, which presented one of the project’s greatest challenges, as we had to determine and then augment their original colours, which had faded over the last 75 years.

Q: You gathered interviews with surviving Air Force veterans of World War Two, putting together a so-called “composite” crew to tell their stories about flying missions like those seen in The Cold Blue. How did you find the interview subjects?

Nelson: The historian for the Eighth Air Force, Nancy Toombs, put us in touch with a composite crew, with one man who served in each position on the airplane, including her father, William. As Nancy knew each of them personally, she knew that they were articulate and able to recall the exact details of their experiences, something that one cannot take for granted any more. As none of our subjects was under the age of 90, we had to drive to them, so we traveled across the country in late August of 2017, and visited each of them at their homes, in most cases, with their families in attendance.

For more information about screenings, CLICK HERE. The Cold Blue will premiere on HBO in June, of 2019. Here’s the trailer…