He sued the company for damages and won, and resigned himself to never seeing "Incubus" again. "But the nature of the curse is that you cannot kill this film," he says. In 1996 a friend, Hollywood agent Howard Rubin, called and said hed found a print at the Cinimathhque Frangaise in Paris. Taylor was shocked.

"It turns out they had been running it for 30 years to packed audiences," he says. "I had no idea."

But he still wasn't home-free. "I thought that, as the copyright owner and producer, I could tell them, send the print over here and I'll borrow it and send it back to you," he says.

Instead, he had to negotiate with the organization, which dragged its feet for a year. "They acted like I wanted to go into their archives and smoke crack in the vault," says Taylor. Finally, the UCLA Film Archive contacted the Cinimathhque on his behalf, and it sent a print to be copied at a French lab.

But that still wasn't the end of it. "The lab called to tell me the perforations were messed up," he says. "I had to make optical negatives and redo [the] whole thing. I went back and forth for a long time, sending faxes and wiring money.

"Then one day Fed Ex showed up with a bunch of large cans of film. I had no idea if it was a film you could see or if it would be all scratched."

That was in the summer of 1998. He and two restoration consultants brought the film to a lab in Los Angeles. "I was surprised at how good it looked," says Taylor. "It was a lot better film than I remembered."

Taylor cleaned out his savings restoring the film. The French version had French subtitles; he had to pay to have English subtitles put on over the French ones. He was able to consult the only remaining version of the script, which he'd had bound in leather back in 1965. "I'd expected to have 45 of [the scripts] lined up in my office," he says. It was prohibitively expensive to remove the French subtitles. "It'd be nice if they werent there, but I was happy to get anything," he says.

He sold the French rights to a large French company, and is purveying the video out of his house, where he divides his time between "talking to Academy Award nominees and schlepping stuff to the post office." (The video is available through Taylor's Web site.)

He can't afford to release the film theatrically. But later this year Taylor will offer the film on DVD, complete with an introduction by cinematographer Hall.

"When someone hears that it's black and white and 35 years old, they think it's going to look like some World War I newsreel," says Taylor. "Then they hear it's in a foreign language and think they're in for a root canal or something. They're usually pleasantly surprised.

"But I don't think I'll make another movie in Esperanto."

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So was there really a curse?

If there was, Taylors own scourge has finally been removed. Picking up where he left off 30 years ago, he recently optioned a screenplay for "a rock 'n' roll story" by Jake Records head John Hartmann. Graham Nash has signed on to do the music, and production starts next year.

"Theres somebody who hasnt been cursed, and thats the star," says Hall. Shatner "goes on and on, doing better and better. If Tony wanted to remake it, he could still play himself -- just play him older. Play everybody a little older. Maybe thats what Tony ought to do, to take out the curse.

"Ive had misfortunes, too," Hall adds. "But I dont believe thats part of any curse. Thats just due to my own bad judgment."

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