We're hearing that the DVD release of Stephen Sondheim's Evening Primrose will be delayed a bit…but for a good reason. The folks assembling it were going to use a medium-quality 16mm black-and-white print but they've recently found what is apparently a better 16mm black-and-white print. So that has to be transferred and that will stall the release…how long, I do not know.
The show was originally done in color but that doesn't seem to exist any longer. Which reminds me of an informal debate I had some years ago with a bunch of fundamentalist film buffs. These folks were militant against "colorization" of black-and-white movies. Films, they insisted, should be exhibited and released for home video in as close to the original release version as humanly possible. They didn't even like it — and I always thought this was highly arguable on a case-by-case basis — someone restored deleted footage that the filmmakers wanted in and the studio wanted out…say, the "Cool, Conservative Men" scene in 1776.
The question naturally arose: Okay, so you detest "colorization." But what happens if a film is made in color, all the color prints are lost and it exists only in monochrome? Might not putting that film through a "colorization" not yield something closer to the original release version than using the black 'n' white print? In the case of Evening Primrose, that's probably moot. It won't be a lucrative-enough DVD either way to warrant the expense of adding color. But I can see both sides of this question and can sure imagine friends of mine arguing them for a long time.