Before "Footloose," before "High School Musical," there was "Take Down."
The forgotten Utah sports film directed by Academy Award Winner Kieth Merrill was recently restored by the BYU Motion Picture Archives and screened at BYU West Campus on Oct. 17. The film was screened in front of an audience composed of moviegoers and surviving cast and crew members. The audience, young and old, laughed and cheered as they followed the journey of the movie's underdog.
The film is about a high school English teacher named Ed Branish, played by Edward Herrmann, who is asked to coach a wrestling team against his will. He learns to warm up to the team throughout the movie.
The movie was filmed in various locations around Utah County, including Orem and the old American Fork High School building.
Various Utah high school students with wrestling experience were cast in the film alongside Hollywood actors such as Edward Herrmann and Maureen McCormick of "The Brady Bunch."
“I figured it was easier to teach wrestlers how to act than actors how to wrestle,” Kieth Merrill, the director of the film, said.
The film was released independently in Utah in 1979, where it was a top-grossing movie in the state and generated a lot of excitement from locals at that time.
“It was a big deal locally that here was a Hollywood level film made in the Utah Valley Area,” Roger Layton, the communications and PR manager at the BYU Library, said.
He added that everyone was excited to see it
The American Film Institute website said that Walt Disney Productions’ Buena Vista Distribution Co. Inc. picked up distribution rights to the film. It was the first film distributed by them to receive a PG rating.
The film’s box office results did not live up to the company’s expectations and they relinquished their involvement with the film in 1980.
The BYU Library's special collections blog states the film never took off in the home video market.
It has also not been released on DVD or streaming.
That is what caught the attention of Ben Harry, the audiovisual materials and media arts history archivist at the BYU library.
“We thought, here is an opportunity to show people something that they haven't seen in 45 years,” Harry said.
He and his team of students went to work for a month and a half to restore the film to its full glory. As soon as they began they ran into problems.
According to Kieth Merrill, he was unable to find the original camera negatives for "Take Down" because the company that funded the film went out of business years ago. As a result, the prints that he sent to BYU were not in the best condition.
“Unfortunately, all of our prints were pink,” Harry said. He explained that print films sent to theaters turn pink after a while.
After finding the best print, Harry and his team were able to use a software called DaVinci Resolve software to correct the coloring of the film.
Noah Richmond, a former BYU student who was part of the team, learned how to color correct while working for BYU TV. His knowledge helped with the restoration.
“We just digitized the film, we scanned it with the fancy scanner that gives you a really high-resolution detailed video to work with,” Richmond said.
Afterwards, it was in the computer and the team could put in the DaVinci software and change the colors. However, the opening titles also needed work, he said.
“Basically the opening title sequence looked a lot worse than the rest of the film because it was lower quality, because they had to put it through that process just to get the words on there,” Richmond said.
Harry said this sequence also needed audio enhancements because the marching band music in this scene is distorted heavily.
To solve this problem, Richmond was able to use a couple of different tricks to get the colors back into the opening sequence.
Harry and his team were not able to completely remove the distortion from this sequence, but they did work on pulling it down, he said.
However, they were able to rebalance the sounds in the wrestling scenes, so the screaming crowd sounds didn’t hurt the audience’s ears.
Despite the challenges, the final restoration received praise from director Kieth Merrell. He described it as a beautiful restoration.
After the lengthy restoration process, they finally presented the digitally restored print at BYU on Oct. 17. Those in attendance expressed that they were impressed.
Andrea Pay, who remembers watching the film growing up as a kid, described the screening as "awesome."
“I wish they made more movies like that today with a message,” Amy Allphin, an attendee at the screening, said.
The original cast of the movie was also impressed seeing the film again 45 years after it first premiered.
“There's a certain part of me that feels it's better now,” Darryl Peterson, who played Ted Yacabobich in the film, said.
Larry Miller, who played Leroy Barron in the film, talked about what changed from when it first premiered to the anniversary screening.
“Some things have changed, but the one thing that hasn't changed is the feeling here tonight,” Larry Miller said. “It invoked the same type of feelings that I had 45 years ago when this movie first came out.”
Noah Richmond believes it is important to remember this film for generations, even looking at it through a family history lens.
“'Take Down' might not be the most important for the world to remember but it's definitely important for people in Provo to remember," Richmond said.
He also added that “we don't have to learn the whole history of every town in the world, but it's good to know about the history of where you're living, where you came from.”
Harry hopes that the filmmakers, seeing the good attendance at the screening, will invest the resources necessary “so that it can be on a streaming platform” and DVD.
He shared that he is very proud of his team for restoring the film.
