If you’re unfamiliar with the boutique Blu-ray distributor Deaf Crocodile, I like to think of them as the Criterion Collection for weirdos who aren’t afraid of a blind buy. Over the last 4-and-a-half years they’ve managed to acquire and restore a wide range of obscure world cinema sure to surprise even the most seasoned of cinephiles. I was lucky enough to sit down with co-founders Dennis Bartok and Craig Rogers recently to get a sneak peak at some upcoming releases, learn a bit about the restoration process, and discuss how their genuine love for film permeates everything they do. Edited for content/clarity/length
Josh – I know you guys have worked together for a while with your history at Cinelicious Pics and Arbelos films. I’m curious though, going way back, what was your kind of foot in the door? When did you first realize that you wanted to work in some aspect with film?
Craig – I’d always been a film kind of nut. My mother also loved going to the movies so she and I would go to the theater multiple times a week sometimes. Then with VHS I got the bug of buying films for myself to watch at home, which introduced me to lots of older films. I loved the Warner Brothers stuff, the crime stuff from the 30’s and 40’s. So I’d always been a huge film buff, but never really thought about working in the industry because it just seemed so foreign, like it didn’t seem like that’s even a thing people do. That was until I saw a friend from high school in a TV movie and I was like “wait a second, yeah, I guess this is a job people do!” So then I went to a film trade school out here in California and that eventually led to me working at IMAX for about 11 years. After that, I decided my primary interest was in restoration and preservation, so I just kind of DIY tested out all different softwares and started doing it myself. One day I needed a scan for a job I was working on and that brought me to Cinelicious in Hollywood. I spent most of the afternoon there talking to the owner while they were working on the scan, and before I left he offered me a job to work there doing restoration. Not long after they decided to branch out into distribution and that’s where Dennis came in.
Dennis – Like Craig, I think I was inspired by my mom. She was primarily an avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. In the late 1950’s she lived briefly in Tokyo where she wound up working as an actress for Toho and Nikkatsu Studios. In the late 60’s/early 70’s she started working as a painter and then a filmmaker. She made these wonderful 16mm avant-garde films of her conceptual art projects called Sky Works where she dropped mile-length streamers out of airplanes over the deserts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. She filmed them from the planes and the ground, and skydivers had 16mm bolex cameras on their helmets as they plummeted to earth at 160 miles an hour. So I grew up around someone who was always editing 16mm films, but I kind of gravitated more towards narrative filmmaking myself. Maybe the single most important moment was in my early teens. I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and you could actually book a little room and reserve 16mm prints and they would set up a projector. I remember I watched what survives of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, and two films by the French filmmaker Jean Vigo – L’Atalante and Zero for Conduct – in one afternoon. When I emerged I was completely converted to the religion of cinema. It really just blew my mind. Then I went to NYU film school in the 1980’s. Alex Winter was one of my classmates and is still a friend. When I got out I worked for Robert De Niro’s production company for a little when he first opened the Tribeca Film Center with his partner Jane Rosenthal. Then in the early 90’s I decided to move out to California. Through a contact at Martin Scorsese’s office I got connected with the American Cinematheque, where I wound up being the head of programming for a number of years.
Josh – You’ve also done some filmmaking as well, correct?
Dennis – Yeah, I started writing screenplays as a parallel path. I sold some scripts to Fox and New Line, then decided I wanted to try and produce a movie. So I produced an anthology horror film called Trapped Ashes with episodes by Joe Dante, Monty Hellman, and Ken Russell that we actually just licensed ourselves. We did a beautiful 4k restoration and put it out last October on 4k UHD and blu-ray for the first time. Then I’ve been working kind of both sides of the fence as a writer/producer/director. I directed a supernatural horror film in Ireland called Nails around 2016-2017 For Fantastic Films in Dublin. I also wrote a book about Film collectors and film dealers called A Thousand Cuts.
Josh – So how did Deaf Crocodile start?
Dennis – So with Cinelicious, the parent company kind of imploded, and I had gone back to work for the American Cinematheque around that time. This was around 2016-2017. We started Arbelos with two colleagues from Cinelicious, and then after a year or two we decided to branch out on our own and do Deaf Crocodile, which has been going for four-and-a-half years now. It’s essentially because the two of us pretty much agree on everything that we distribute. I do a little bit more of the detective work tracking down the films and negotiating the licenses on the distribution, and then Craig oversees the post-production and restoration. He’s our in-house restoration wizard, and because he’s able to restore these films in-house we’re able to license and then restore a lot of previously unseen, or in some cases completely lost movies. Like Solomon King, the Sal Watts independent black crime film that he shot in Oakland in 1974, which was completely lost. I think a 30-second TV trailer was all that existed of it before we took on that project a couple years ago. We do have this big advantage in that rather than just accept the materials that are out there we’re able to in many cases arrange for brand-new 4k scans of the films. Then Craig is able to work his magic on restoring them. In fact, most of the time when we’re doing interviews like this Craig is busy restoring a movie at the same time. Today he’s working on Marcell Yankovich’s psychedelic animated masterpiece The Tragedy of Man. Craig is restoring it as we speak.
Josh – Since you’re restoring it during the interview do you mind telling us a little more about it?
Craig – It really is incredible. It literally starts with the creation of the universe and follows humanity from Adam and Eve all through history. I haven’t got to the end, but basically it’s just following mankind through the ages.
Dennis – It’s sort of the endless battle between Adam and Eve and Lucifer. It’s 15 episodes, so there’s ancient Rome and Greece and Egypt and the Middle Ages. He used different visual styles to represent each of those ages, and it took him 23 years to finish. He would make one episode and then screen it for investors or go to festivals, and then try to cobble together money to make another one. When he was doing it it was at the period when Hungary changed from the Communist system. Pannonia film studios, which had been one of the largest animation studios in the world where he and all these other famous animators were employed, essentially kind of stopped. It was almost like the breakup of the Hollywood studio system. All of these animators who had like gone to the studio to work every day suddenly were independent filmmakers. It took him almost a quarter century to finish but he did and it’s unbelievable.
Josh – I was actually going to ask you Craig, as far as the restoration goes I Imagine it’s quite different to work on an animated feature as opposed to live-action. Are there any unique challenges with animation?
Craig – Obviously I’m working on traditional style animation, which just inherently has a lot of what I guess some people would call flaws, because it’s all handmade. So it’s all about finding the balance of what to keep in there and what to clean up, because it’s not like this is damage that happened to the negative over time – this is what it was when they made it. Then also most frames are photographed at least twice, and sometimes with the backgrounds they’ll use the same frame over and over and over again, and so there’s often dust and dirt on the actual cell. The way restoration software works is it’s looking for differences, so if a piece of dirt is in the same spot two frames in a row, it doesn’t register it as dirt. So again, it’s a balance of “well, how much of that should I clean up?”
Dennis – Craig, you should tell them about the Easter egg that you left in Felidae.
Craig – Well that’s actually happened in two films now. I think Son of the Stars or Delta Space Mission also had this happen. They’ll lay down the cells in their camera rig and when they go and take a photograph and – well, occasionally apparently this happens because I’ve seen it twice now – an insect will land on the cell just as they’re taking the photograph. So there’s a frame in Felidae where there’s some kind of bug. It looks like some sort of a little beetle or something. Then like I said, I can’t remember if it was Delta Space Mission or Son of the Stars, but the little guy was there for like two or three frames because he moved slightly In between exposures. Those definitely stayed in.
Josh – Now Dennis, let’s move to your side of things. I know you said you do the detective work and a lot of the negotiating and stuff. How long does that generally take?
Dennis – Well, we just signed a license on a really wonderful Estonian sci-fi kind of euro-thriller locked-room mystery called Dead Mountaineers’ Hotel from 1979-80. It took six years of patiently waiting and gently prodding to negotiate the license for us to restore. Every six months or so I would send an email to our contact in Estonia, and she would politely sort of say “We haven’t made up our minds, I need to talk to my colleagues, we’re hoping to get a grant on this end to restore it.” Then six months would go by and I’d send another email. This went on and on and finally Craig and I had kind of given up hope. Out of the blue I said “All right, I’ll give it one more chance” So I sent another email saying we’re still interested in Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel and amazingly she came back and said okay. We essentially wore them down, which I think is what happens with a number of these projects. Felidae, Michael Schaack’s amazing occult serial killer animated cat movie that we put out in December, was a similar project where we were going to the rights holder for years. They weren’t the company that produced the film, but they had bought it as part of a library. The underlying series of novels It’s based on have become kind of controversial because the writer of those novels, Akif Parinçci,, is a Turkish German immigrant who in recent years came out as very anti-immigrant, very far-right. The publisher of the books dropped them, and he’s sort of persona non grata in Germany these days. They asked us at one point why we even wanted to license the movie. We explained that we just think the movie’s great and it was made before the writer of the books came out as a far-right personality. The movie is kind of the polar opposite of his views today. They finally just sort of threw their hands up and and said “okay, we just don’t want to get any more emails.” Then when they finally located the 35 millimeter camera negative we had it shipped to a lab in Germany. The lab emailed and said it’s really good thing that we were paying for a new scan because it was suffering from vinegar syndrome. They said “in another year or two you’re not going to be able to scan this negative.”
Josh – And that was the original negative, right?
Dennis – Yeah! So in that case, it was a very good thing that we paid for the scan of the original camera negative. Craig did this amazing restoration that contains that one frame with the little bug. We did interviews with the director Michael Schaack, who since he made the film has retired from directing animation. He’s the one who actually connected us with the current rights holders initially. He even sent us from his personal collection several original animation cells of Francis the lead cat. Then we interviewed a number of the other key animators from around the world. The kind of central headquarters was in Germany, but then they farmed out animation sequences and characters to Dublin, where Don Bluth had briefly opened an animation studio, and then to Vancouver to South Korea. So we did zooms with animators who were still in the Dublin area and Vancouver and Los Angeles, and of course they hadn’t seen each other in like 30 years. They were all so excited and told wonderful stories and then one of them, It’s Paul Bolger, right? Who did the artwork?
Craig – Yep. I reached out to him to see if he would do a cover for us and he was happy to do it. Then he suggested he could actually create the cover in the same style that they animated the film. So the cover art for the deluxe edition has a fully painted background and then it’s got cell overlay with the cats from the film. It’s literally made like they made the film, with traditional cell animation.
Josh – Speaking of slipcovers, I’m curious – What goes into deciding the extras or the art that you use? because it’s just you two making those decisions, right?
Craig – Yeah, we make we make all the decisions, but we do have a handful of people that help us out tremendously. Beth Morris does all our graphic design. When we hire somebody to create new artwork they’re giving us a beautiful piece of artwork and then she has to integrate it so it’ll work with the packaging and whatnot. A lot of our titles she does the graphic design for the final artwork as well, so she’s been a godsend. She’s based in the UK. Anna Kaperska, who cuts all our trailers, is based in Bulgaria. We have writers for essays who are based in Germany and all over the place, so we literally are working on almost every release with people from all over the world. So not only is it a lot of world cinema and world animation, but the contributors are also scattered all over the globe, which is kind of amazing. It wasn’t planned this way, but we literally started the company at the start of Covid, which forced everyone to work remotely, and it’s worked out fantastic for us.
Dennis – I mean, Craig and I are both collectors of many kinds of physical media. We have thousands of Blu-rays, DVDs, comic books, movie posters, book books. So we do love physical media, and we put a lot of time and care and resources into the Blu-ray releases. We’re collectors too, so our deluxe editions are basically what we would want to buy and put on our shelf. We designed it basically for ourselves.
Josh – As far as your catalogue goes you guys mostly release older films, but also have some newer titles as well, correct?
Dennis – About 75% of our catalog are older rare vintage films, and of those probably 60% or more are restored in-house by Craig. Then about 25% of our catalog are newer films, so we do love showcasing the work of contemporary filmmakers. We have a number of Indian and South Asian films, particularly a director named Achal Mishra who did The Village House. And then there’s one of our favorite filmmakers, the wonderful Iranian director Shahram Mokri who did Fish and Cat and Careless Crime. We put out a box set of all four of his features. Then we have this amazing trilogy of feature films called The 2551 Trilogy by Austrian filmmaker Norbert Pfaffenbichler coming out in October. I sort of describe it like if Mad Max was set to run amok in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. There’s elements of the Brothers Quay and Jans Svankmajer and David Lynch, and they’re just astonishing. They’re basically experimental silent cinema for people that love Silent Hill, Hellboy 2, and Eraserhead. They’re incredibly accessible and yet also still incredibly avant-garde, and filled with all sorts of subterranean mutant monster action. The whole trilogy is shot underground in these abandoned World War II era bunkers outside of Vienna, and derelict alcohol storage caverns. We’re going to put all three of them out as a box set and I guarantee they are going to blow people’s minds. They are incredibly punk. So for like fans of Metallica or Bauhaus or The Cure. There’s Lucha Libre. The first film is inspired by Chaplin’s The Kid. It’s insane. I mean, they’re not a studio film. They’re independent and they’re not made in the U.S, so they go places a film made here would not dare go.
Josh – That’s perfect. Are there any other upcoming projects you’re excited about that you can discuss?
Dennis – Let’s see. We just dropped a trailer this morning for this Japanese – how would you describe it? It’s like a sleaze noir. It’s called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wasteland. It’s directed by Atsushi Yamatoya, who was a really fascinating writer/director who worked on the outside fringes of the Japanese industry for many years. He co-wrote Branded to Kill, Seijun Suzuki’s famous 1967 film. This one came out the same year, and they’re sort of companion pieces. I kind of describe this like a Velvet Underground song on film, sort of like Sister Ray or Venus in Furs. It has a fractured time bending narrative that’s similar to John Boorman’s Point Blank or Christopher Nolan’s Memento. It’s about a hit man who’s trying to get revenge for the murder of his girlfriend years earlier, but it sort of flows back and forth in time. It was a very difficult restoration because there’s only one surviving film element. It was scanned by the partners at Rapid Eye in Germany, and so we licensed the film from them. It was produced by one of the few women who was in the Japanese pink film industry, Keiko Sato. This was a restoration that literally took Craig years to do. We also had the sound restored by Audio Mechanics in Burbank, who did an amazing job.
Josh – I saw you have Bill Plympton’s I Married A Strange Person coming out as well. I haven’t seen his other stuff, but I enjoyed that one quite a bit.
Dennis – We’re actually putting out two more films by Bill Plympton – I Married a Strange Person and Mutant Aliens. We had earlier put out The Tune, so these are the second and third features by Bill that we’re releasing on Blu-ray here in the U.S. for the first time. I think there are actually a lot of parallels between Bill’s work and the late David Lynch, because they both had this fondness and nostalgia for a 1950’s vision of America, but with this surreal, rotten underbelly like you see at the beginning of Blue Velvet or certainly in Twin Peaks. Bill sort of does the equivalent of that in the animated sphere. Then we’re putting out an extended edition of Jirí Barta’s The Pied Piper, his amazing stop-motion animated film. It’s going to be a two-disc set with newly restored versions of his short films, which are incredible. There’ll be a second disc with Club of the Laid Off, A Ballad About Green Wood, Riddle for A Candy, Diskzokej, and all of these amazing short films that are as astonishing and strange and surreal as The Pied Piper, with a brand new interview with him about all of his short films that I did a couple weeks ago.
Josh – My last question for you is more of a personal interest. I’ve been on a bit of a Tubi kick lately. I was building up my watch list with stuff I’ve never seen, like Sampo and Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, when I suddenly realized Deaf Crocodile has a lot of stuff on there. What factors into what you put up on streaming?
Dennis – Most of our films are available for streaming a couple months after we put them out on physical media.So we usually have a little bit of a blackout window for a couple months for people to buy them on Blu-ray or 4K UHD, and then we’ll have them available for streaming. MVD is our digital distribution partner, and they also distribute our standard edition for physical media now. The deluxe limited editions for Blu-ray and 4K UHD are available through our website and through DiabolikDVD.com exclusively. With streaming though it really depends. MVD will go out and pitch the movies to the various streaming platforms, and they’ll say “yeah, yeah, this looks great,” or “no, it doesn’t really fit with our brand.” We’re often surprised. Eternal Family has licensed a number of our films recently, which is great. You can find them on Amazon, you can find them on Google Play, iTunes. But it really depends on what the platforms are interested in. You can rent them on YouTube. Oh, and Kanopy for educational.
Craig – I was going to say Kanopy, a lot of our stuff is up there as well. Kanopy is kind of the best of both worlds. If you’ve got a library card, it’s free, and I don’t believe there’s any ads. A lot of the other streaming platforms, if they’re free, the film’s going to have ads stuck into it arbitrarily. But Kanopy, I don’t believe there’s any ads, so just get yourself a library card and sign up for Kanopy.
Josh – Nice. Well, I do want to say bless you guys for making your stuff available on streaming for a wider audience, especially the types of films that you guys put out. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to talk with me today.
