By Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 11/28/23 – For filmmaker Judy Irving, love is for the birds.
Well, more accurately, Irving fell in love with some birds, and the result was a wonderful film about a flock of parrots who inhabit the area around Coit Tower in San Francisco. “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” tells the story of these birds and the man who lovingly cared for them.
Now, some 20 years after that love affair began, Irving has brought the film back to audiences with a remastered 4k version. Undoubtedly, everyone who views it will fall in love all over again, just as they did back in the early 2000’s when she first made the film about the feral flock of birds and their volunteer caregiver, Mark Bittner.
“I had been getting interested in birds again in my late 40s, early 50’s, after I had lost interest in boys,” Irving said with a chuckle during an exclusive interview this week with The Hollywood Times, ahead of the film’s Los Angeles re-release this week. “I had made a couple of short films about birds, and some friends said, ‘Hey you should make a film about this guy who feeds the parrots.’”
Click for our exclusive interview:
Irving’s friends persisted with their suggestion, so she decided to check it out.
“I finally called Mark and went over there and saw this amazing scene on the Greenwich Steps of Telegraph Hill, with all these colorful parrots and this guy who seemed to know them all and had named them, and could tell stories about them,” she said, recalling her first encounter with this amazing flock of birds and the wonderful human who looked after them. “And I said Hey, this could make a good film.”
As Irving began following Bittner and the birds with her camera, this fascinating film was hatched. Audiences and critics fell in love with the story of Bittner, an unemployed musician who was living rent free at a cabin in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, and the flock of birds composed primarily of cherry-headed conures and one lonely blue crowned conure who are all native to South America.
The film proved captivating with its initial debut at the 2003 Austin Film Festival and continued to impress with eventual release in 2005. The following year it was presented with a Genesis award, given by the Humane Society of the United States, for best documentary feature and in 2007 it was included in the PBS series “Independent Lens”.
Much of the film focuses on the individual personalities of the parrots, their relationships of one another and with Bittner who has a story of his own to tell. Not a native of the area as well, Bittner had ventured south from Seattle to pursue his dream of being a musician. When that failed to take flight, he found himself without direction and homeless for a number of years managing off odd jobs. Eventually, he found a free long-term place to stay in the Telegraph Hill area which provided stability and purpose as his relationship with the parrots developed.
Bittner eventually had to vacate his free nest, as the owners decided to renovate the property, meaning he would have to leave the birds behind.
But not for long.
By the end of filming, Bittner had discovered another love beyond the birds, one with Irving. The two eventually married and were back living in the Telegraph Hill area, not far from where his old residents had been within about a years’ time. This allowed Bittner to reestablish his connection with the flock, which had grown during his absence.
These days, the couple continues to live near the flock, which still inhabitants Telegraph Hill and is thriving. “The birds are still in San Francisco,” Irving said. “The wild parrot flock is doing very well. They’ve adapted to the urban environment like a lot of wild parrot flocks in the Los Angeles area. And the beautiful birds are very much a part of the Telegraph Hill culture,” Irving said.
“They are here, and they squawk, and they fly wherever they want, and they produce joy,” she said. Well, they make most people happy. But for some, it’s a different story.
“Some people who stay up late at night and don’t want to wake up early are sort of annoyed by the noise, but everybody basically loves them and they’re part of the culture now,” Irving said. “In fact, they are the official animal of San Francisco! We’ve just won a contest that was sponsored by the San Francisco Chronicle, and we beat the sea lions of Pier 39!”
So why the remastering? Well, Irving explained that the shift to streaming prompted the project.
“These streaming platforms had started to drop standard-definition movies from their palate, and I didn’t want “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” to fall through the cracks and basically disappear,” she said. “So, I knew because it had been shot on film, and it was standard def … we needed to restore it to 4K ultra-high definition to make it available again. That was the impetus.”
Irving and Bittner, to whom she has been married since 2007, embarked on the arduous task of remastering the film. With a huge assist from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, they began the project, which took 5 1/2 years to complete.
“It took a really long time to do the restoration, because it is painstaking work,” she said. The Academy donated the 4K scanner, which resulted in the updated version being even more captivating than the original.
“It’s beautiful, it’s vibrant … the colors are so rich,” Irving said. “And because it was originally shot on film, I’m calling it the ‘Director’s Framing.’”
Irving explained that when her original film, shot on 16mm film, was blown up to 35mm, a third of the frame either at the top or the bottom was lost because of the process.
“This is the original framing so you’re going to get to see the whole thing,” she said. “The Academy scanned every single frame of the 16mm negative that was in the movie – 119,500 frames – and then because the negatives had picked up dust and had some other imperfections in it to begin with, we worked part-time cleaning up every one of those frames to get rid of the dust, to get rid of all of the imperfections. It has never really looked better, in my opinion.”
The film’s soundtrack features original music composed by the late Chris Michie, a Bay Area musician who had been the guitarist for Van Morrison. He died before the film premiered in 2005.
“Unbeknownst to us, he was dying of melanoma, so this was his last big project,” Irving said. “He was very proud of it, and so are we.” It is a beautiful and very touching tribute to Michie that the film, which now features a 5.1 surround remix, was dedicated to him.
Irving and the preservation officer from the Academy will be doing a Q&A with audiences following its Los Angeles premiere screening on Wednesday, Nov. 29, at the Laemmle NoHo, and at the Laemmle Royal Theater on Thursday, Nov. 30, before it’s general release on Friday, Dec. 1, at the Laemmle Glendale Theater.
The remastered film will screen January 12, 2024, in San Francisco, and is also being screened in New York City ahead of its national re-release. “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” is also a best-selling book by Bittner, published in hard-cover and paperback editions by Random House Publishing.
And as the film’s subtitle says, “It’s a love story … with wings.”
