The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled beaches of Persona’s summer escape (shot on the same spot where Bergman eventually built his own house) suddenly buffeted by crystal blue waves. Or the setting for Shame’s detached, ash gray apocalypse made verdant by expanses of lush farmland pasture. To be amid the splendor of Fårö, the Swedish island where Bergman lived for decades and is now buried, sheds new light (often literally) on the works of this most forbidding and visually influential of film artists. Additionally, being there for the fifth annual Bergmanveckan, or Bergman Week, the first since his death in July 2007, has made me reassess my notions of what defines a film festival. Rather than the usual community of film journalists and programmers fighting each other over screenings and proffering instantaneous responses to films once the lights came up, I was surrounded by what seemed like an equal number of local islanders and Bergman devotees who had traveled from far and wide, all of whom were enjoying being outside as much as in the darkened spaces of the theaters. Indeed, Bergman Week is as much about the setting as the artist.

Wandering Fårö’s wildly varied terrain and braving its erratic weather, one can feel and see the source of Bergman’s inspiration behind every tree, reverberating among its rocky, barren cliffs. Located on the northernmost tip of Gotland, the smaller island of Fårö, accessible only by ferry, is a remarkably wondrous place in the summer, its east side defined by acres of farmland, its west by magnificent seaside rock formations surrounded by the chilly blue depths of the Baltic Sea. Bergman first came to Fårö, reluctantly, while scouting locations for Through a Glass Darkly in 1960; he was instantly smitten, although the resulting film exploits the island for its remoteness rather than its enchantment, depicting its stony beaches as more of an interior, psychological topography than the rejuvenating landscape that appears in vibrant summertime. Eventually, Fårö would become the location for some of Bergman’s greatest films, not only the aforementioned Persona and Shame but also The Passion of Anna and some of Scenes from a Marriage, as well as the headquarters for his company, Cinematograph, founded in the late 1960s. Taking up permanent residence there during Midsummer’s Eve 1967 (although continuing to live in Stockholm off-season until recent years), Bergman became an island fixture, and his pure relationship with the locals, borne out of mutual respect, has proven a fascinating counterpoint to the somewhat complicated one he had with the Swedish film industry for decades. Whereas everywhere else he could only be Bergman the feared film master, on Fårö he felt he could be Bergman the quiet neighbor.



Naturally, then, the man was at first ambivalent, and even hostile, to the idea of a film festival celebrating him on his little island paradise. The festival’s independent programmers and organizers (a group of six women, headed by Jannike Åhlund, who receive aid from Fårö and neighboring Gotland, as well as the Göteborg International Film Festival) enjoy regaling first-time visitors with tales of how Bergman, despite his initial hesitancy, would casually show up at screenings and discussions, once even getting into a spirited argument with guest speaker Harriet Andersson during a Q&A session. Yet now with Bergman’s passing, all focus has shifted away from his possible presence to his definitive absence and, further, how to deal with his legacy. This has manifested in matters as practical as what to do with his house (the cause of much debate during the week at Fårö, and even the subject of a panel discussion, which ended up as more of a town meeting: his nine children have shown an interest in selling it, while many, including some of the festival’s organizers and those involved in the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, want to see the Swedish state declare it a landmark) and as nebulous as how to properly memorialize him in a festival setting. It was a fascinating, expansive week, bustling with screenings of films new and old, from Bergman and others; lectures by eminent film scholars; bus tours of Bergman’s on-screen haunts; live music events—all of it poignant while never overly sentimental, just as Bergman would have preferred.

The lectures set the scene, running the gamut from birth to death: formidable Swedish film scholar Birgitta Steene (whose most recent contribution to Criterion was her essay on August Strindberg for our release of Alf Sjöberg’s Miss Julie) on the representation of children in Bergman’s films and the University of Amsterdam’s Egil Törnqvist on Bergman’s favorite film, Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, and how it influenced his similarly death-tinged films The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries together painted a clear picture of Bergman’s existential quandaries. The latter presentation also tied in with the festival’s closing-night event, The Phantom Carriage accompanied by a live performance of a splendid new score by Matti Bye, so appropriately rich and evocative of the film on-screen that one often forgot the presence of the ensemble.



Paying tribute to Bergman by showing the work of his idol seemed the perfect way to cap a week in which so many other filmmakers showed up to idolize Bergman. Jan Troell (The Emigrants) and Margarethe von Trotta (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) were lively and articulate guest speakers—less eulogists than appreciative visitors—and their robust conversations, accompanied by presentations of their own films (Troell’s newest, the lovingly detailed and empathetic turn-of-the-century period piece Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moment, and von Trotta’s most acclaimed, The German Sisters, which Bergman named as one of his favorite films), were reminders that Bergman’s legacy will live on in films by those he influenced. But perhaps most inspiring were the showings of Bergman’s rarely screened documentaries, Fårö Document 1969 and Fårö Document 1979 (he had planned on making another in 1989, but it never came to fruition), presented in the converted barn where Bergman used to watch dailies and attended by many Fårö locals, who were not only paying tribute to their neighbor but watching images of themselves or their ancestors up on the screen. The documentaries are gorgeous, straddling the line between the ethnographic and the deeply personal, with Bergman lovingly detailing the daily ins and outs of the island, the population and season changes, and how its land is cultivated—all with the merest sliver of editorializing. Bergman lets the images speak for themselves, and no sequence better captures the sense of remoteness, survival, and casual beauty than the extended, wordless one of a fisherman cleaning, cooking, and eating the day’s catch one winter night; when Bergman ends the scene by suddenly cutting to witness the man from outside his large, dark house, his window the only illumination, I could nearly feel a winter chill rush through me. It’s appropriately elemental filmmaking, and perhaps the week’s cinematic highlight.

Between walking across sun-dappled farmland and craggy stretches of seaside beach and revisiting Bergman’s classic films (lesser-known titles like Summer Interlude, Waiting Women, and The Touch were shown alongside expected fare like Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal), it was easy to get lost in the memory of the artist rather than to consider his vital, ongoing legacy. The people I met during my week on Fårö who have the best game plan for how to enrich and extend that legacy are the folks at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation. Set up in 2002 by the Swedish Film Institute, the Royal Dramatic Theatre (whose former president Ingrid Dahlberg is the foundation’s CEO), Sveriges Television, and Svensk Filmindustri, the foundation began because Bergman, who it is said never threw away a single piece of paper, donated his archive to the SFI—forty-five large boxes filled with manuscripts, notebooks, letters, plot summaries, and sketches. While his more private material will not be made available for fifty years, most of the donated papers will be accessible for researchers in Stockholm.

In 2003, as Bergman was preparing to direct his final film, Saraband, he said in an interview, “Now I’ve left the theater, filming, and television behind me. I’m just going to make one more film this summer. Then I’m going to be a true Fårö-fella forever, and I’m going to live there all-year-round. I can’t wait to get there.” Now buried at the island’s old church, Bergman will always be remembered as a “true Fårö-fella forever,” and by situating this annual celebration on the island he loved, the programmers of Bergmanveckan have forever made Fårö-fellas of all us Bergman lovers.

Sometimes it’s pretty tough for me to divorce my inner fanboy from the (probably unrealistic) ideal of a business-only, detached producer. One such moment was when I saw that Anthony Mann’s The Furies was a part of our Paramount deal. I think the geeked-out obsessive in me pounced to work on it before the aloof “professional” part of my brain even absorbed the rest of the list.

That’s because Mann is, in my book, one of cinema history’s perfect filmmakers. That’s not to say that I think every film of his is a masterpiece. It’s rare for any director, especially one with a significant body of work, to bat a thousand and judging from comments he made, Mann would have been the first to agree. But the traits that define his work—lean characterization, immaculate and expressive cinematography, conflicted protagonists, hard-hitting action, and Olympian personal drama—pretty much define what I enjoy when I watch a movie.

The Furies has all of these trademark Mann motifs. It’s been, I think, kind of wrongly sidelined in relation to his more famous and rightfully canonized westerns with James Stewart (The Naked Spur, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73 ), so the chance to put it back on the map, so to speak, was a terrific opportunity. It’s a genuinely unique movie, one that blends melodrama, film noir, the western, and even screwball comedy into a single genre-defying work, and did so way before terms like deconstruction and revisionism became everyday catchphrases.

Mann passed away in 1967, but I was excited to see in my research that one of his daughters, actress Nina Mann, had introduced a screening of Winchester ’73 in Los Angeles some years ago. That led me to believe it’d be a pretty safe bet that she’d be happy to talk about her father’s work, and have some solid thoughts about it too. With some excellent leads and help (shout-outs to Jake Perlin, Jim Healy, and Jon Zelazny), I got in touch with Ms. Mann over the phone, and was instantly blown away not only by how knowledgeable she was about her father’s films but also by how articulate her storytelling and recollection process turned out to be.

After getting the ball rolling on a possible interview date and time, I think the fanboy in me slipped out again, and I rambled about how much of an honor it was for me to talk to her, how many of my friends would be amazed that this was happening, and how totally thrilled I was that the interview was going to happen. Absolutely sincere thoughts, but I’m sure I could’ve found a better, more dignified way of mentioning them if my brain hadn’t short-circuited.

When I met Ms. Mann a bit over a month later in L.A. for the interview, things couldn’t have gone better. Her responses were genuinely enlightening, she was a very engaging speaker, and she always found ways to bring her comments back to the film at hand. Trust me, this is a major plus when it comes time to edit, because it creates a lot of nice, ready material and keeps topics focused and relevant. It was one of the most painless edits I’ve worked on.

What threw me for a loop, however, was something that I’d never really considered. I guess it was a “given” for the cinemaniac part of my brain that Ms. Mann would have always been invested somehow in her father’s films (after all, he’s only One of the Best Filmmakers Ever, right?), that she would have seen every single one as it was finished, watched the dailies . . . I don’t know, eaten, breathed, lived Anthony Mann movies all of her life. Turned out that couldn’t have been further from the case, and that her “reconciliation” with and appreciation of his work really only happened a handful of years ago, when that aforementioned retrospective played in L.A. The fanboy in me had basically blocked out the concept of growing up in a household with a father who was constantly working (many times on remote locations), and the fact that it was, basically, those great movies that were keeping him away.

After the interview, the sound recordist, Percy, told me that he felt like he was tearing up during some of her responses, and I knew what he meant. I now consider it all the more amazing and genuinely moving that through his movies she found her way back to her father as an artist, and that she so swiftly developed a full yet ever growing appreciation of his work. It was, truly, an honor for me to meet her, and that goes for the fan and the producer sides of me.

I’m also happy to say that Ms. Mann was generous enough to shoot some short asides on various topics for possible inclusion on our website. This one is her recollection about the pure joy her father found in the simple act of storytelling.

Spring is ready to surrender to summer here in the Big Apple, and in keeping with my intentions, I sat down and watched The Love Parade and Monte Carlo from the Lubitsch Musicals Eclipse set. I found them to be as funny and uplifting as I had hoped, and they made a great Mother’s Day present too!

Shortly after watching those films, I transcribed the play La ronde and couldn’t help but notice how the human behavior in the Lubitsch films and La ronde (from the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries, respectively) is essentially the same as that in twenty-first-century entertainment. Whether it is the queen of Sylvania hiking her skirt up above the knee in front of her cabinet or a Miami party girl answering the door sans half her bikini, the look on the faces of the queen’s (male) advisers is the same one Harold and Kumar wear as they arrive at the party. In Schnitzler’s romp-filled La ronde, the count announces: “Pleasure. Intoxication. Fine. No complaints. You can depend on them.” And the actress to whom he is speaking later replies, “Count, you are a poseur.” Those lines of dialogue, after swapping in a few choice synonyms provided by the Urban Dictionary, could fit in seamlessly with the repartee found in The Real World or Flavor of Love.

It’s quite a contrast to sit at the front desk reflecting on the timeless societal and sexual conduct performed for our entertainment while the talk in the hallways and at the “gathering places” of the office (of which the front desk is one) is mainly about things that have never been seen before—the newest, “Blu”-est techniques and toys. Soon we’ll be rolling out both fresh and familiar titles in the new high-capacity hotness, with new branding (meaning, I’m sure, new shelving in my living room!).

Yet despite the new image—on the HDTV screen as well as the disc packaging—the essence of what we’re doing remains the same. Just as the spectacles we enjoy (or not) at the cinema and on cable are the same old stories presented with new characters and costumes, so too has the spirit of our mission statement endured rewrites, rereleases, and new formats: the goal has always been to gather and present the greatest films in editions of the highest technical quality. And so I reassure myself with the fact that I still have a handle on the fundamentals of our output, even if all the technical terminology flying around lately leaves me looking as bewildered as Prince Otto on his wedding day.

Judging from many of the reactions we get from viewers, there’s a gratifying sense of discovery that accompanies each new Eclipse release. That comes as little surprise to us, since that same feeling is as alive and well here in the Criterion offices. One of the most pleasurable things about embarking on each new Eclipse series is the excitement of delving into a chapter of film history that’s been cobwebbed by years of neglect. Though throughout our first ten releases there have been a number of known quantities (Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu), there have also been as many true revelations, some from filmmakers of whom we only had cursory prior knowledge, if even that. When the name Raymond Bernard was first uttered “on five,” all we could offer were blank or quizzical stares; yet when those screeners of Wooden Crosses and Les misérables started making the rounds, you could almost hear the collective exclamations of “Aha!” billowing about the halls. The sheer enjoyment of the latter was especially a relief for those of us who had screeners for future Criterion and Eclipse projects piling up in our homes and didn’t necessarily have five hours to spare—fleet, rich, and rewarding, Les misérables was, for me, one of 2007’s sweetest retro surprises (along with other movies, Criterion-related or otherwise, like Cría cuervos . . ., Antonio Gaudí, Bonjour tristesse, J’entends plus la guitare, and Black Christmas, all of which make going to the multiplex seem a fruitless chore).

Despite veritable eureka moments scattered about all the following sets (for Carlos Saura’s Blood Wedding, or Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, especially for Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert’s feature-length smack-down game of Sassy and Sassier), my next true revelation came when encountering the films in series nine, The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. Only generally knowing of Klein as a famed abstract New York photographer of the fifties and sixties (and even then only having seen a sampling of his work in online forums), and as a maker of documentaries (his subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali to Paris fashion), I had no idea what to expect from his fiction films, all made after he permanently relocated to Paris. That they turned out to be as boldly experimental and in-your-face subversive as his photography, and as politically charged and visually daring as primo 1960s-era Godard, made researching and writing about these films a pleasure, the process as exuberant and fascinating as the set’s eventual title would suggest.

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?’s mix of insidery, faux-vérité fashion satire and through-the-looking-glass surreality may be marvelous, and The Model Couple’s charmingly chintzy fascist future world often insightfully warped in its targets, but out of the three Klein films, it was the hilarious Mr. Freedom that made the biggest impression on me. Bounding teeth-first into farce rather than assuming a stance of smirking satire, Klein dolls up his film in outlandish sets and costumes (color bursts of primary putrescence spangle nearly every setup; the art direction is at once bargain-basement and mammoth in its ambitions), and personifies American jingoism in one rowdy Southwestern lunkhead obsessed with spreading capital-F Freedom throughout the world (yes, this was made in 1969, not 2003); instead, this reverse King Midas ends up destroying nearly everything he touches.

Hopefully this Eclipse release, coming in May, will get the ball rolling on recouping the once lambasted Mr. Freedom as a valuable piece of sixties radical cinema; it was far too prescient to ever be appreciated in its time, so now will have to do. Mr. Freedom is the kind of discovery that will make younger cinephiles marvel at the fact of its very existence (in other words, “You mean this movie was made nearly forty years ago, and all this time I’ve been watching frickin’ Patton?!”). With so many cinematic depths left to plumb for Eclipse, I can only imagine what other surprises are in store. Already we’re getting ready for a set of films by the truly eclipsed Russian master filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, whose rapturous The Ascent, which I’ve now seen twice on the lovely big screen at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, certainly counts as one of my filmgoing revelations in recent years. And with some late Rossellini history films on the way, I’m looking forward to more cinematic avenues opening up for me in the very near future.

As a generation of artists passes, the deaths often seem to come eerily close together, amplifying their individual achievements. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost The Naked City screenwriter Malvin Wald, then the incomparable Richard Widmark, and now hear the incredibly sad news of Jules Dassin’s death. Somehow it feels wrong to learn of such events via e-mail—effectively flattening our communication such that the message of a great director’s passing sits side by side with “Lunch?”

Interviewing Dassin remains one of the highlights of my life, and I got to do it twice (both times with the help and contribution of the inimitable Bruce Goldstein). What still strikes me a few years later is how gracious he was. As a person, he belied the “great director as tyrant” stereotype—there was something elegant, sophisticated, and almost gentle about him. For one thing, as much as we tried to get him to talk about the blacklist, he was extremely reticent to do so. He refused to “name names,” which I suppose would have been out of character. He would only specifically mention people who had gone out of their way to combat the hysteria—especially pointing out Gene Kelly. But Dassin refused to talk about the people who had taken the easy way out. The one person whom he reserved the right to speak ill of was Roy “I Can Tell in Five Minutes If a Person Is a Communist” Brewer.

I think another reason that Dassin didn’t want to talk about the blacklist was to avoid being defined by it. He recognized, exile or no, that he did get to make quite a few movies and that they were damn good. Every now and then I have found someone of the opinion that Dassin is perhaps overrepresented in the Criterion Collection. I find this attitude completely befuddling. There are certainly directors I would love us to add to the collection, but not at the expense of the lapidary precision of Rififi or the almost unwatchably harrowing masterpiece that is Night and the City.

I look at Thieves’ Highway, a “minor,” neglected film, and wonder why it is not considered the achievement that it is. It’s my favorite Dassin, because the human relationships are drawn so exactingly, so tellingly, and so tragically. Even Lee J. Cobb’s villain is nuanced and complex, understandable as a product of the system every bit as much as Richard Conte. Some criticize the occasional flourish from Dassin, such as Hume Cronyn’s sadistic torture scene to the sounds of Wagner in Brute Force. I think rather that these are the moments where Dassin shows his hand. In transcending the taut realism for which he was known, he takes the audience somewhere else—ancient Greek tragedy, perhaps. I write this knowing he would have scoffed at such a comparison.

If consistently great performances from actors are a measure of a great director, then on this score I think Dassin is simply in a class by himself. Think of Cronyn in Brute Force, or of Valentina Cortese in Thieves’ Highway, Jean Servais in Rififi, Peter Ustinov in Topkapi, or again of the incredible Richard Widmark in Night and the City. One great performance can be attributed to good casting and luck, but Dassin filmed a number of performances over his career that were extraordinary, in some cases by actors who never really did much else.

Another thing that came through in meeting him was how much he loved and missed his wife, Melina Mercouri. I’m a little sad to learn that he passed in a hospital, rather than in his home on Melina Mercouri Street in Athens, which would have been fitting. I hope she’s waiting for you with an ouzo, Jules.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to explain which Criterion films I end up watching. For example, I saw Breathless over the holiday break after Abbey convinced me to give Godard a chance. Then I watched The Seventh Seal in January because, after sending out so many replacement DVDs for the Bergman Masterworks set, I felt compelled to watch a film whose popularity was quite literally tangible. And after transcribing Yukio Mishima’s powerful novella Patriotism (which will accompany the film version’s DVD release this summer), I was keen to watch a screener to see how Mishima translated his story for the screen.

Maybe it’s the aftereffect of a long, dreary February, maybe it’s the recent passing of my beloved cat Jackie Chan, or maybe it’s just what happens when you see some “serious” movies after a steady diet of sci-fi and romantic comedies, but I couldn’t help but notice the unmistakable theme of death in all three films. What struck me most was the variety of approaches (from subtle to graphic) and characters (from different nations and walks of life) the three directors used in order to examine the universal subject of human demise. Of course death isn’t an uncommon happening in Criterion DVDs—quite the opposite—but the sense of balance I felt after seeing these three examples was unexpected.

At one end of the spectrum there’s a tortured medieval knight, plagued by Death in more ways than one, brooding on the uncertain existence of God; then you have an insouciant charmer who casually takes another’s life and pulls faces when suddenly faced with his own end; and finally a young, intense couple who proudly and methodically carry out what they see as a most honorable suicide. I’d be out of my depth if I tried to break down further differences in style (I’ll gladly leave the analysis of camera angles and lighting to the film scholars!), but I feel like I’ve audited an introductory course at the “film school in a box.” An important experience, to be sure, but I’m looking forward to taking a more lighthearted “class” this spring. Lubitsch musicals, anyone?

We’re getting a huge amount of mail about our edition of The Last Emperor, specifically about the aspect ratio, which is 2:1. Some people seem to believe that we’ve lost our minds, forsaken our mission, and taken it upon ourselves to crop the sides off the picture. Others assume we just got careless. Either way, a rising chorus is asking how we could do this to Vittorio Storaro’s Academy Award–winning compositions. And to Bernardo Bertolucci’s framing. The answer is, we couldn’t, and we wouldn’t, and we didn’t do anything to violate the filmmakers’ wishes. This is the way the filmmakers want the film to be seen.

From the start of this project, Bertolucci has insisted that Storaro have ultimate approval of the mastering of the feature. This master was made in Rome under Storaro’s direct supervision, with Bertolucci’s approval. When we asked Storaro about the framing of the film, he unhesitatingly told us that the correct aspect ratio for The Last Emperor was 2:1, even though the film was commonly projected at 2.35:1. He told us that The Last Emperor was the first film he shot specifically for 2.0 framing, and Bertolucci backs him up. Our mission is to present each film as its makers would want it to be seen, and in this case the director and cinematographer asked that we release their film in the format they say they had always envisioned. We had quite a lot of discussion over this, and we certainly knew it would be controversial, but in the end the decision was not made by us. It was made, as it should be, by the filmmakers.

I can understand how people might be upset about this. The general rule of thumb where widescreen films is concerned is that wider is better, but in this case it’s not so obvious. I recently had the pleasure of joining producer Jeremy Thomas at a screening of The Last Emperor, and I asked him about this issue. Was it really true that they had envisioned the film less wide than the 2.35:1 aspect ratio in which it was commonly screened? Thomas said that they had originally hoped that all of the original release prints would be in 70 mm, framed at 2.2:1 or 2:1, but not 2.35:1 or 2.33:1. Thomas said Storaro and Bertolucci filled the wider frame knowing that there would be 2.35:1 prints in circulation as well, but that they always knew they were shooting a format wider than what they hoped to release.

So, in short, while some viewers may prefer the wider framing, the filmmakers must have the final say. This is not a case of our losing track of our mission, but rather one of being true to it.

As I type this, our intrepid online editor Chris Ramey is laying back the final supplement for our upcoming release of The Ice Storm, which I coproduced with Johanna Schiller. This depressing film has actually been quite fun to work on (though I can say with some certainty that I won’t need to see the ending again for a while). I so often produce DVDs for films that predate, say, 1940 that it’s a real treat to work on a film where everyone involved is still very much alive. In fact, this project marks the first time I’ve ever interviewed anyone younger than I—for a while at least, I got to trade the pleasure of leafing through an archive for the excitement of jetting to L.A. to interview Elijah Wood.

It’s also a real treat to work on a film where everyone involved is so enthusiastic about participating—from director Ang Lee and producer James Schamus to the cast and the crew, it was always just a matter of working out the schedule, with none of the cajoling and persistence (read begging) that is sometimes required.

This was a film that I saw and loved when it was released back in 1997, though at that point I’m sure I identified entirely with the kids. So it was very interesting to see it again in 2007, this time as fatherhood approached. (We actually had to reschedule the interview with Rick Moody because the little guy insisted on showing up the night before we were to shoot. Luckily Rick was very understanding—ultimately the interview with him wound up being one of my favorite features on the disc.) Seeing the film from this new perspective allowed me to notice how subtly and, in the end, sympathetically the adults’ faults are laid out—these aren’t villains, just people trapped in a string of mistakes. The best films reward repeat viewings, naturally, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more radical change in my relationship to a film over time.

One thing I always enjoy in the process of diving into a film’s backstory is hearing the same production anecdote from multiple angles. Most of the time for the DVD you try to pare away duplication, but sometimes the difference of opinion is too interesting to pick one over the other. Here are two video clips exemplifying both situations. The first is costume designer Carol Oditz describing Kevin Kline’s feelings about his costumes, followed by Kevin describing them himself. Kevin’s bit didn’t make sense anywhere in the documentary we made for the disc, but I thought it was too great to leave on the cutting-room floor.



And here is a case where the two moments were different enough to leave both in: first Kevin again, followed by Ang and James with David Schwartz of the Museum of the Moving Image.



Anyway, just a little taste of what I think will be a very exciting release. And now I have to book a flight to Copenhagen, where I’ll be returning to the primary pleasures of being a Criterion DVD producer: working with cinema scholars and sifting elbow-deep through film archives.

PS: On an entirely different wavelength, some people have written in, after going over the announced specs for The Ice Storm, asking why the audio track is listed as stereo surround when the previously released disc listed a Dolby Digital 5.1 track. The track we are using is, in fact, the track that was used in the film’s theatrical release; the 5.1 track was made from that—a so-called fake 5.1 mix. It is possible to remix a film soundtrack in 5.1 after the fact and get great results, but that's something we would never do without the filmmakers' involvement, as it requires going back to raw, unmixed sound elements. And in this case, Ang Lee was happy with the original track, which will sound comparable to the previously released 5.1 when played through your receiver’s Dolby Pro Logic decoder.

We’ve been getting some questions about the three children’s classics from Janus Films. One good customer writes: “I’m wondering what the situation with The Red Balloon, White Mane, and Paddle to the Sea is. They are listed on the Criterion press release as April titles, but they don’t appear on the Coming Soon page. Will they indeed be Criterion titles with spine numbers, or are they being released by some other branch of the Janus family? If it is the latter, can we expect future titles to follow suit?"

The short answers are: no, the current editions will not have spine numbers or supplemental features; and no, we do not have plans to bring out more Janus Films–branded straight editions at the moment. We are working on Criterion editions of The Red Balloon and White Mane, which we hope to have ready for the fall of this year, but Paddle to the Sea is not currently scheduled for a full special edition.

So why the different handling? Because these films are different. Yes, they are classics of world cinema, but they also need to reach a broad audience we don’t usually have to consider: children and their families. Most Criterion editions are geared toward a fairly sophisticated viewership, lovers of classic and contemporary cinema who want to explore the making of each film in depth. They are undaunted by subtitles, for example, and they value supplemental features like interviews with filmmakers and scholars that set each film in context. In contrast to the average Cannes Palme d’or winner, The Red Balloon needs to reach an audience that may not even know how to read! Much of what sets a Criterion edition apart will be lost on them. As with our Eclipse line, we didn’t want our own work style (and its commensurate cost) to keep these films from reaching their audience. We don’t expect anyone to go out and buy both editions—we’re not fans of double dipping either—but in this case wanted to make simple editions of the films available, keeping costs as low as possible, to encourage a broader audience of children and their families to try what we think are some of the best children’s films ever made.

To give another example of how these films need special treatment, consider the recent theatrical release of The Red Balloon and White Mane, which has played across the country. When Janus released Pierrot le fou, it made only a few prints, playing them over a stretch of many months, so that in the end the film had been seen in more than fifty cities. For The Red Balloon and White Mane, the theatrical release had to be collapsed into a mere six weeks, running from the week before Thanksgiving to just after New Year’s. Showtimes needed to be limited mostly to matinees and weekends, and most theaters wanted to book the film during the holiday breaks from school. That meant making more prints than we usually would, playing as many as fifteen cities simultaneously, something we would never need to do for The Rules of the Game or a Kurosawa retrospective, for example. The point being: reaching this audience has meant being a little flexible and being willing to do things a little differently.

Another customer, watching out for our best interests and the interests of the films, writes: “I am absolutely delighted to learn of the upcoming April 29 release, via the Janus Films catalog, of Albert Lamorisse’s classic short films Le ballon rouge (1956) and Crin Blanc (1952). But I am puzzled and dismayed that you chose to issue them as separate titles, given that they total only 72 minutes combined and they have previously been available together on the VHS medium. I cannot fathom what reason your company had for not offering them together as a single DVD, especially since White Mane is by far the lesser known of the pair and will not receive the wide attention it deserves, and would obviously garner if it were coupled with the world-famous Red Balloon, for which there will naturally be very wide demand. I urge you to reconsider this bizarre marketing decision and promptly offer both titles as one release.”

Well, this one is a judgment call, and obviously not everyone is going to agree with our decision. I, for one, feel passionately that White Mane (Crin Blanc) has lived too long in the shadow of The Red Balloon. The film is a masterpiece in its own right and, as no less a figure than Pauline Kael said, “one of the most beautiful films ever made.” For decades White Mane has been treated as a kind of B side to The Red Balloon, but it is far too good for that. Cinematically it is stunningly visceral, and it so captured the attention of another of America’s great writers—James Agee—that he took it upon himself to write his own adaptation of the film. Lamorisse’s debut work made such an impression at Cannes that when The Red Balloon was submitted to the festival a few years later, it became the only short film admitted into competition for the Palme d’or. Since then, White Mane has been very poorly treated in the U.S.—rewritten with new narration and cut by about twenty minutes in all its previous video incarnations. All this will be explored in the Criterion edition, but in the meantime we feel the time has come for the rehabilitation of one of the long-lost classics. We don’t feel that force of habit is a good enough reason to keep releasing White Mane alongside its better-known younger brother. We made a similar decision when we uncoupled Alain Resnais’ thirty-one-minute Night and Fog from Hiroshima mon amour. Those two shared a VHS tape as well, but in our view it did both films—and their very different audiences—a disservice. We released Night and Fog separately at $14.95, as we are doing here, and we’ve never regretted that choice. White Mane deserves to stand on its own.

One of the most recent titles I’ve had a chance to work on, The Naked Prey, is something of a personal favorite of mine. Sure, I’ve worked on DVDs for films that I fully recognize as unassailable cinematic perfection by comparison, but this one carries a bit of hallowed nostalgia for me. I think it’s because I saw it while I was an undergrad, dead-ending myself in a major that I had no desire to pursue. And I wasn’t remotely a full-blown film fan at that point. I couldn’t have told you the difference between aspect ratio and shooting ratio because I was too busy trying to understand the polymerase chain reaction. (I still don’t get it.)

Anyway, a classmate insisted that I rent a video of The Naked Prey, and even though it looked murky and the pan-and-scan presentation cut off (unbeknownst to me at the time) tons of visual information, the movie’s blunt storytelling and the tough physicality of the performances stuck with me.

Many years and a significant academic switcheroo later, I was given the opportunity to help present The Naked Prey in a manner that would finally do it justice. But . . . what to do? As is often the case, I was saddled with a picture with few surviving or easily locatable participants, so generating supplements was going to require some thought. At the same time, it didn’t make sense to toss in extras (Rare 8 mm safari movies! Thirty minutes of elephants lumbering across the savanna!) just for the sake of having more content on the disc, particularly because this is a film that derives its strength from its lean, unfettered simplicity.

For anyone who’s delved into the Criterion Collection, it’s pretty clear that we try to provide the viewer with as much appropriate context for a film as possible. When that context is aided by an original novel or story that inspired the movie, you can bet that we’ll often try to find a way to present the source material.

For those not already in the know about The Naked Prey, it was pretty well circulated that actor-director Cornel Wilde originally planned to film the story of John Colter, a trapper who journeyed with explorers Lewis and Clark in the 1800s and, in one legendary exploit, ran afoul of a tribe of Blackfoot Indians and was plunged into a savage life-or-death chase. Budgetary assistance and tax breaks from South Africa led Wilde to alter the script and relocate the adventure. Nevertheless, that original intention of Wilde’s was enough to convince me to include the story.

Choosing to present a written work with our DVDs often creates its own set of challenges, however: Do we reprint an entire novel or story? Provide excerpts only? Create an audio recording of the tale? Each option carries a certain amount of work, not only for the producer but for other members of our staff as well. Go for a recording, and add to the hours for the tireless audio department. Choose print, and deliver more madness to editorial and art. (Keep in mind that I, as a producer, am assigned a few films to work on every year. All the other departments are involved in every project that rolls through here.) That’s not to say the work isn’t worth it, but careful justification for the effort is key. For example, my decision to forgo including Ethel Lina White’s novel The Wheel Spins with the recent reissue of The Lady Vanishes stemmed from my feeling that the authorial stamp of a Hitchcock film is primarily his. Lady’s charms and the things that make it consistently worth revisiting are, to my mind, all found in that final on-screen masterpiece, and reading the book wouldn’t significantly add to or elevate the viewing experience. In the end, I let people like Bruce Eder, Leonard Leff, and Geoffrey O’Brien detail significant points regarding the book in their respective supplements and felt that was more than sufficient.

For Sansho the Bailiff, however, it seemed essential to include the original Ogai Mori story because the film’s prologue proclaimed the importance of its literary roots. The Mori story is somewhat long, so I felt that its words and pacing would be best served if left to the imagination of our viewers/readers. In addition, because I knew that I’d also be getting my hands on another iteration of the narrative courtesy of Susan Matisoff and Jeffrey Angles, having two printed versions of the story would allow people to really dig into them and absorb their similarities and differences without having to hit “pause” or “back” on their remotes.

There are other times, though, when going the audio route works out for the best. When I was working on The Devil and Daniel Webster, I thought the original Stephen Vincent Benét story had a lively pace and offered a lot of different dialogue opportunities for a voice actor—not to mention the fact that the story was so readily available in print—so it seemed only natural to include it in some kind of audio or audio-visual format. Fortunately for me, I knew that the actor Alec Baldwin was passionate about the story (as well as being blessed with a great reading voice), and so the joining of actor and material was pretty much a cakewalk.

The version of the Colter legend that I chose to include with The Naked Prey was short and swift, perfect for audio. But coming up with a vocal talent wasn’t nearly as easy for this project as it was with Devil. Wilde’s movie is a bit off radar, even among cult-film aficionados. It hasn’t enjoyed the cultural cachet of constant repertory house revivals and mainstream press reevaluations, or received Quentin Tarantino’s seal of approval.

Because of the story’s time period, I started thinking of character actors I liked, folks with laconic, gruff, campfireside storytelling voices that might directly evoke the period: people like Powers Boothe, Scott Wilson, Stacy Keach. You know, those guys who pop up in practically every Walter Hill movie ever made. In retrospect, perhaps my thinking was a bit too stereotype driven to begin with, but regardless, the chance that any of these people had seen The Naked Prey—I’m not even talking about being a fan of it, but just having viewed it at some point in time—didn’t seem likely to me.

My eureka moment came when I saw a schedule featuring films chosen by actor Paul Giamatti for a series named after him (Paul Giamatti Selects) at a local rep house, BAMcinématek. Anybody who’d pick movies like Mark Robson and Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (yes, Brewster McCloud, not Nashville or McCabe and Mrs. Miller) seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Hey, I like those movies too! In addition, I thought he was a consistently terrific and versatile performer (it’s pretty amazing that someone can slip back and forth between bare-bones indies and Hollywood extravaganzas, in leading roles and supporting parts, as well as he can), and I knew he did a lot of voice work to boot.

So, with some help from BAM assistant curator Jake, I got in touch with Mr. Giamatti and, lo and behold, he had not only the seen the film but was also a fan, and was more than happy to record the story. The session was a blast: Giamatti was a pro, completely genial, and an all-around nice guy, and we even killed some time talking about the kinds of movies that we both happened to watch on our downtime. Sure, I can immerse myself in classics like Ivan’s Childhood and The 400 Blows, but it’s always great to find a kindred spirit to wax euphoric over Coffin Joe, The Last Man on Earth, or Tombs of the Blind Dead with.

Anyway, for those of you who were wondering what Academy Award–nominated actor Paul Giamatti was doing on Criterion’s DVD of The Naked Prey, that’s your answer. And Mr. Giamatti was generous enough to add to our recording session a short audio recollection of the first time he saw The Naked Prey, which we’ve illustrated with clips and stills from the film and are presenting here.

WARNING: This audio-video presentation contains spoilers for the film.

Of all the great places I get to go for transfer work, London is probably my favorite. First off, everyone speaks English, and there’s an abundance of great Indian food. But there’s also the excitement that when the workday ends, you end up at the pub. I truly believe that this is how most of the English get through the workday. Another nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to get to London from New York—just a little longer than a flight to L.A. And speaking of the flight, I get to fly on Virgin Atlantic, which has the best film selection, so the flight whizzes by. I finally got to see Control and Waitress, two movies I never got around to seeing in the theater.

The main reason I most recently went to London was for The Thief of Bagdad. This has been a really involved title for a lot of us. The film has been out on DVD before, so Karen, Maria, Heather, and myself spent a long time comparing existing versions to see what we could improve. Thief is in glorious Technicolor and was one of the first films to use multiple special effects, such as blue screen. It’s beloved by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas, just to name a few. As a matter of fact, Karen is working on some great extras for the DVD, including a commentary with Scorsese and Coppola, and a piece on the special effects with Craig Baron (Matte World Digital), Dennis Muren (Industrial Light & Magic), and legendary filmmaker Ray Harryhausen.

We enlisted Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Michael Powell, to help with this one, since Powell was one of the directors of the film and she has a lot of knowledge about his involvement in Thief and is invested in preserving his archive. Scorsese holds an original 35 mm nitrate print of the film in his vaults, and we set off to try and screen it together. This was no easy task. There aren’t too many places around willing to project nitrate, since it’s superflammable (think of that scene in Cinema Paradiso.) Then there’s the simple matter of finding someone willing to even ship it. But we managed to set it up in New York, and all got together to watch the print, along with most of Criterion’s QC and audio department. It was a pretty exciting opportunity to view an original print from that era—kind of like opening an old bottle of wine and hoping it has aged well.

After the “shrinkage expert” determined that it was safe to screen, we concluded that the film looked pretty good. After the nitrate, we also watched a bit of the BFI’s restored print of Thief, and we were able to compare the colors of more recent celluloid to the nitrate version. Along with Thelma, we talked about Technicolor and what it made sense to try and achieve in the new transfer. Scorsese would have some ideas as well. I then went off to London and looked at two original elements for potential transfer: a mid-nineties version and another, late-seventies version. I settled on the latter, as it had better color, betting timings, and better resolution. I was quite surprised by this, as I had expected the newer one to be better. But the newer one looked as though one of the three strips had shrunk a bit, causing a registration problem. This is often an issue in Technicolor restorations, which is why we see the “bleeding” of colors onto other colors.

After scanning the seventies negative in 2k resolution, I sent the data off to L.A., where Maria will finish the color correction, then show it to Thelma and Dennis Muren for one last check. Dennis has a really good idea about how the special effects should look, so his input is going to be really helpful. The images will come back to New York for restoration work, and we’ll author and replicate the DVDs. New York to London to Los Angeles to New York to your home—just another typical work flow for a Criterion title.

From upstairs at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris, you have a perfect view of the Café de Flore, directly across the boulevard Saint-Germain. Both are famous Left Bank institutions where filmmakers such as Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard rubbed shoulders with musicians, fashion designers, and literati alike. (A good shot of le Lipp, as it’s known locally, can be seen in Malle’s The Fire Within [Le feu follet], as Alain Leroy, played by Maurice Ronet, sits outside at the Café de Flore, facing the boulevard, and facing his first drink in months.)

Upstairs at the Lipp, surrounded by original nineteenth-century crystal sconces and wall-length mirrors, cameraman André Bonzel, audio recordist Sylvain Ripaud, camera assistant Juraj Krasnohorsky, and I were setting up the shot for a video interview with the major darling of the nouvelle vague, Anna Karina. The maître d’ told us that she preferred to sit by the window. “It would be a nice-looking shot,” he said, with the refined wood molding and metal detailing. “It will look very French.” “But it doesn’t sparkle enough,” I responded, “like this room sparkles and like Anna Karina sparkles.” The interview was to accompany our special edition of Pierrot le fou. And after a publicized marriage to Godard, a few suicide attempts, a miscarriage of her child with Godard, and her ultimate divorce from him, Karina still manages to sparkle in Pierrot.

We could have used another thirty minutes to set up the shot when Karina arrived. She was ready to roll, with her dangley heart-shaped earrings jangling softly under her panama hat. As the producer of our DVD, I had a plan, a story I wanted to capture with the interview. In 1965, at Cannes, Karina was interviewed for the premiere of Pierrot. “Marianne is really a combination of all the characters I played for Jean-Luc: Angéla, Nana, Veronique,” she had said. My idea was to explore this comment with her—how Marianne Renoir was like a retrospective of all her roles with Godard. To me this said a great deal about the point in Godard’s career when he made Pierrot, reflecting on the past and, in the same breath, bidding it farewell.

I’d heard Karina likes champagne, so we ordered a bottle, popped the cork, and sat down to record. Pretty soon into the session, I posed the idea about her role of Marianne being “retrospective.”

“No, not at all. All my roles with Jean-Luc were so different. I loved to change my character, be someone new. My work with Jean-Luc was like a gift. My characters were all so different every time. Natasha in Alphaville has nothing to do with Nana in Vivre sa vie, has nothing to do with Angéla in A Woman Is a Woman, or with Marianne. And I looked so different in each one. Different hair and makeup, the way I dressed . . .” My plan had been swiftly foiled. “But I saw the interview from ’65 when you said . . . ” How could I say that, charge her with changing her mind, charge her with contradicting something she said almost forty years ago? Well, you can’t. Or at least I couldn’t. Nor did I have to, since the ’65 Cannes piece would be included on our DVD release.

So we can let the pictures speak for themselves. Anna Karina was captured vividly, and with total clarity, by cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s lens, every time. She beckons us to watch her, wearing a new wig, new coat and dress, in 1.33, in 2.35, black and white, color—but always sparkling as Anna Karina.

Appropriately for Fassbinder's fifteen-hour masterpiece, the process of coming up with a design for Berlin Alexanderplatz was epic. With a monumental film like this, there's obviously no shortage of possible concepts, but the biggest challenge is finding a design that can speak not just to one aspect, but to the film as a whole. At first I didn't really have much conceptual grounding beyond a sense of the color scheme I wanted (the particular browns of the film). The obvious solution was to focus on the main character, Franz Biberkopf, so that was where I started.

This was probably the best simple portrait image we had, but I was having trouble finding a compelling way to present it:



I tried incorporating this interesting archival photo of the actual Alexanderplatz in Berlin, but as I realized later, focusing on the history rather than the character wasn't going to be the way to go:



The birds on this next one (which are some sort of clip art, I forget from where--I probably would have sourced better imagery had we gone forward with this idea) are, of course, a reference to the canary that Mieze buys for Franz. (As an aside, having worked on Miss Julie just after this--what's up with the homicidal grudge these filmmakers seem to have against birds?) The birds were also inspired by John Gall's design for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle cover, which I was obsessed with for a few weeks there.



There's something about this gesture, where Franz grabs a woman by the neck as prelude to an embrace, that seems very evocative of the film to me: it's brutish and violent, but it's how he shows his affection and love. It's typical of the way Franz seems to lumber through his life. Unfortunately, I was never quite able to capture it in any visually interesting way.



Normally, I do my comps in Photoshop, but for whatever reason I did all the above in InDesign--and quickly remembered why I normally do my comps in Photoshop. So I switched back to try to rethink the design. As I found in the first batch of comps, the existing black-letter title treatment from the film was difficult to incorporate into the design in a bold way, mostly because "Alexanderplatz" is such a long, unwieldy word (and I say that as someone who took seven years' worth of middle- and high-school German classes). So I tried breaking it up and playing with scale, and wound up here (with the idea that we could print the type and ornamentation in gold foil):



Then I took that same treatment and applied it to the archival image.



But I was quickly becoming bored with that approach, so I went looking for design inspiration. Through some convergence of Google links, I stumbled on these posters advertising Egon Schiele shows:



There's no direct connection (that I know of, anyway) between Schiele and Fassbinder, but they seem to have a few of the same preoccupations, and something about these images just clicked with me--finally, something that evoked the period of the film without sacrificing its modernist ambitions. So I decided to steal Schiele's type idea: I broke out some Sharpies and started drawing the type. Once I got something I liked, I combined it with some photography, and voila:



That image fit the space well, but I was a little worried it made the film feel too much like a traditional romance. (Mieze's bloody nose certainly adds a bit of darkness to the photo, but a quick survey found that very few people noticed without having it pointed out to them.) So I tried the old standby Franz-at-the-pub shot:



I liked where those were going, but I began to get a little nervous that others wouldn't like the hand-drawn type, so I tried a similar effect with regular fonts. Contrasting the portrait of Franz with the violent image above seemed like an interesting way to add some complexity that had been missing from the previous "portrait" comps.



I liked that idea enough that I tried it again with the other title treatment:



We all talked through that second batch. Producer Issa Clubb and I (as well as some others around the office) had a fondness for the handmade type, but Peter Becker had some hesitation, and no one was quite jumping up and down for joy about any of them, so I went back to the drawing board to try to come up with some new directions.

This next one was an attempt to capitalize on the shock value of the image--it's repeated several times throughout the film and is clearly a defining event in Franz's life. There's something compelling about an image that says so much about Franz without actually showing him--in fact, the photo is all about his absence, really--so I thought it was kind of a bold choice for a cover. Ultimately probably not expansive enough to represent the whole film, though:



Another simple, elegant (read: boring) take on the portrait idea:



And then this one, which I have no real justification for other than trying an unexpected approach:



But none of them had any real staying power. After a lot of back and forth, we had pretty much whittled it down to two options that stuck with everyone:



At some point, we started to frame the debate in terms of artistic confrontation vs. what Peter self-effacingly termed "bourgeois sensibilities." The gold foil black-letter title treatment with the nostalgic cityscape photo came to represent a monument to the film's capital G Greatness, and the gold foil idea would have gone a long way toward convincing people they're getting their money's worth when they shell out their hard-earned cash. The hand-drawn type came to represent the particular ambition and more confrontational sensibilities of Fassbinder or novelist Alfred Doblin, an attempt to engage the film on its own terms rather than from a critical distance.

After submitting that "nostalgia" comp, I had become convinced it was the wrong way to go--the film doesn't really feel like a period piece, and I think that image promises a kind of nostalgia that doesn't have anything to do with the film. So I was pushing pretty hard for the hand-drawn type, but there were still some reservations. Peter was worried about evoking what he called the "Mickey Hart Drumming Around the World" look. (Speaking of that type, which I don't really think is that close to the Berlin type, actually, here's a very interesting article on the bizarre, "jingoistic" use of that particular style of typography. (link via India, Ink.)) So we asked font guru F. Ron Miller (designer of such Criterion titles as Kind Hearts and Coronets and Masculin feminin) to delve into the history of that type, to double check that we weren't making any references we weren't comfortable with, and he sent us the following background info:

"According to The Modern Poster, (Museum of Modern Art, 1988), the second image you referenced--the one of the figures at the table reading--is a lithograph solely attributed to Egon Schiele. I assume the whole thing was created by his hand. The poster is dated 1918. The style of the type is by no means his alone, though I'd say it's emblematic of the expressionist movement. I'd call the style Germanic rather than German per se. The Austrians affect it, as do the Swiss. Birds of a feather. Here's a couple more in the same 'style'. The first is Oskar Kokoschka (1907), and the second is Max Oppenheimer (1911)."

So with Ron's help we all got more comfortable with the type on an intellectual level, but something about that comp was still rubbing Peter the wrong way--eventually he came to the conclusion that he just didn't like the way it was interacting with the photography. The original posters, he said, had a coherence that was lacking here, since they were all produced by a single hand. That's hard to argue with, especially considering the hand in question was Egon Schiele's!

So, as kind of a Hail Mary pass at the hand-drawn idea, I decided to try drawing it myself. Apart from the Wajda box, I've been kind of out of practice with actual hand-drawing the past few years--I've definitely focused more on Photoshop and InDesign. I decided to take an old drawing style I hadn't used since college out of mothballs, one that I thought had a bit of Weimar flavor without being a particular reference to anything other than itself. Certainly it doesn't look anything like Schiele. Using that as a foundation, I built an image of Franz to fit into the existing title treatment. I wound up being pretty happy with it, and everyone else was too, as that wound up being the approved cover:



(For more on the technique involved in creating the final image, check out my design process blog, Cozy Lummox.)

We've received a number of letters recently inquiring about the various versions of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. I've been immersed in the film for several months now and wanted to clarify a few misconceptions.

When I started working on the project, I began with the assumption that we would be releasing both versions of the film--the original theatrical version (165 minutes, on the NTSC version) and the "director's cut" (218 minutes, NTSC). Knowing that mastering would be the first step in the process, I reached out to the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, as we wanted him to be involved in a new HD transfer of the film for our release. He wrote back right away, mentioning that he had supervised a 2K transfer of the film in Rome a year or so back. I had accumulated the various European DVD releases of the film--all of which featured both versions--so I asked him which version he had transferred. His response was surprising. He said that the director-approved version of the film (and the one he supervised) was the one we all knew from seeing it screened in theaters in 1987--the 165-minute version.

Not long after we began corresponding, Storaro came to New York, and when we met he explained the story behind the two different cuts. The filmmakers had been required to deliver a four-hour television version as part of their original deal. They delivered four 50-plus-minute episodes, accounting for the 218-minute length. Gabriella Cristiani, the editor, and Bertolucci then continued editing until they had the picture they wanted. The film screened in movie theaters in 1987--and which swept the Oscars--is Bertolucci's final cut.

Because we wanted this to be a "director-approved" release, I contacted Bertolucci, and he confirmed the above with the following response, which I cherish:

"I would be very pleased to present the theatrical version for The Last Emperor, but I'm perplexed on presenting the director's cut, because I wouldn't know what else to say about a version that in my opinion is not much different from the other one, just a little bit more boring (as very often the director's cut can be). That's my sincere feeling."

It seems that in the past few years, the television version has been improperly marketed as the approved "director's cut." Our four-disc edition will also include this longer version, which is fascinating in its own right, but it will be called precisely what it is--the television version. In the past, we've released television versions of films (Fanny and Alexander and Scenes from a Marriage, to name two) that were the directors' preferred cuts. In this case, we wanted to show the alternative--the different ways a director can refine and achieve his final vision.

The music I play in the front office gets a lot of comments--from "What's that beeping noise?" to "Wow, you really love that Timberlake album." Of late, several people have commented on the profusion of Talking Heads and Madonna coming from my speakers (interspersed with Christmas carols, of course!), and the surprising response is that upcoming Criterion DVD supplements are responsible for my current pop playlist. I was absolutely over the moon when I first heard that Kim was interviewing David Byrne about his work on the soundtrack for The Last Emperor. In fact, that very same day I had been singing "Girlfriend Is Better" on my way to work! And when Alex sent an e-mail update about the 4 by Agnes Varda set (which he is producing), I had to call him to check and see if it was really the Madonna who's in one of the new Cleo from 5 to 7 supplements, on the off chance that it was actually some obscure, Varda-specific Madonna that I'd never heard of. But there is, after all, only one Madonna, and now she's on Criterion DVD!

Another star has just appeared in a Criterion supplement (of a sort) as well: Will Ferrell and Adam McKay just released the "Criterion Edition" of their popular Internet movie The Landlord. Scroll down to watch the deluxe version, as inspired by Criterion commentary tracks. Happy viewing!

It's been one of those weeks. First we learned we'd made a mastering error on our Mala Noche edition. Then the first run of the new collectors' set Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks shipped with the wrong disc--the Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films edition of The Seventh Seal--in the Criterion special edition package. I'm just hoping these things don't come in threes.

We've stopped all shipments of both products, but if you got one of the problem discs, please send it to us. We'll replace it and send you a $10 gift certificate (good at criterion.com) to offset the postage. Please don't send the whole package, just the actual Mala Noche or Essential Art House Seventh Seal disc in an envelope. Send your disc to the Criterion Collection, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003, and mark it "Attn: Jon Mulvaney." Be sure to include a mailing address in the U.S. or Canada for the replacement as we cannot ship outside of North America. Please also include your email address in the package and we'll send your gift certificate by email once we've mailed you replacement DVD(s).

We all hate it when we make mistakes like these. As Stephane, who heads up our QC and restoration group, says, "I wish we could go back in time." We did all the requisite hunting around to figure out exactly how this happened, but in the end they were just mistakes. Mala Noche is mostly in black and white, but about twenty-three minutes in, there are three color shots that total ten seconds and twenty-two frames. In our version, they appear in black and white. No one caught it. The Bergman problem happened at the manufacturer's. It was just a matter of a couple of letters on a chart--SEV100 vs. SEV100-JF--but as Jon said, "It's lucky we're not doing surgery. An R or an L on a chart could make a world of difference when you go in to have your leg amputated!"

Fortunately it's a little easier for us to make up for our mistakes. The Mala Noche master has been fixed and is being reauthored starting Monday, but it doesn't look like we'll have replacement copies ready until January. We should be ready to replace The Seventh Seal discs starting next week. And as for this week . . . well, TGIF.

I've always been fascinated by the details of getting places. Bill Becker would often say that the best part of a trip for me was getting there and back--what happened while I was there was less important. Figuring out how to get from one place to another is a hobby--I read the OAG for fun--so the October newsletter's trivia contest was my idea. I was overwhelmed by the number of people who responded to both questions, the first of which asked you to match ten films with the city in which they take place, and the second to find the shortest way to fly between all ten cities. When Peter and I started discussing the correct answer, we didn't quite grasp the importance of which crossing to skip--Asia, the Atlantic, or the Pacific. The key was not to fly across Asia. The correct mileage was approximately 14,570 miles, depending upon which atlas you chose. You were entered in the winning drawing even if your mileage didn't match exactly, as long as your trip started in Rome and ended in Taipei and didn't fly across Asia. Thanks to everyone who entered. We realize it was a fair amount of work, so we issued three gift certificates instead of one.

As I said, I've always been taken by the idea of flying--waking up in the morning in New York and arriving in Los Angeles in time for a late breakfast. Had my eyesight not been so bad, I would have tried to become a pilot, but that wasn't to be. I had a brief stint working at NASA, but spent all my time in the office and newsroom, so that didn't scratch my itch all that well. Happily, traveling for work has been an exciting benefit of distributing films from around the world. For years, we had offices in both New York and Santa Monica, California. I would fly back and forth every other week. These were the days before 9/11, and flying was easy and fun. I got to know cabin crews. I would leave my Santa Monica office at 3:15 and still make the 3:45 flight, all the while racking up hundreds of thousands of miles and achieving Gold Elite status on Continental and 1k status on United.

Those days are gone, but a couple of trips stand out for me. After my father died in 1986, I was asked to go to Tokyo to meet with Toho Studios and talk about our future plans for the distribution of their films. In addition, the Jerusalem Festival was dedicated to my father that year. I decided to combine the trips, but it was before the era when flights were allowed over the Soviet Union, so the shortest flight from Tokyo back to Tel Aviv was through New York. There was no way I was stopping back home, so I looked for another route. For those curious, it ended up LGA, DFW, NRT, ANC, AMS, TLV, JFK. The flight from Anchorage to Amsterdam was over the North Pole, complete with polar reflective emergency suits.

Another time I was heading to Milia, an interactive media show in the south of France. We were involved in discussions with MGM, and the only date for a meeting was the day I was scheduled to leave. I flew from New York to Los Angeles in the morning and then took the red-eye from L.A. to Paris, which got into Paris the next evening and connected on to Nice, and arrived in time for dinner, some twenty-seven hours after I left New York.

This past year has seen a lot of traveling for work, although others take most of the trips now. In search of films, we traveled to Berlin, Paris, Cannes, Bologna, Toronto, and L.A. And our technical crew did new film transfers in London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, and Prague. We are very lucky in our business. The people and places we see are wonderful, but for me, getting there (and back) will always be more than half the fun.

After the mugginess of the New York City summer, and with the launch of the new Criterion web store and the New York Film Festival keeping us all plenty busy through the end of September, Western Australia was a breath of fresh air for me--literally. Everywhere I went, whether it was a winery (all right, a few wineries) or the beautiful port city of Perth or the iron mountains and gorges of Karijini National Park, I kept saying, "The air smells so good here!"

But my favorite thing about the trip by far was that I got to see lots of different animals. I'm lucky enough to have an Australian friend who showed me native fauna at the zoo, an animal park, and even in "the bush." That last one may be a bit of a stretch, but compared to the densely populated tri-state area, staying in a cottage sixteen kilometers away from the nearest town (population 1,000) feels pretty rural. You can't even get broadband out there! I definitely saw plenty of cute and/or deadly animals, including tiger snakes, kookaburras, emus, skinks, flocks of pink and gray cockatoos, and mobs of kangaroos. I didn't see any sharks, but I met a man who'd been bitten by one, which is as close as I care to get.

It was the perfect place to see Walkabout for the first time. My friend had seen it before, and was very indulgent with my outbursts--"An echidna! I saw one of those!"--and warned me to look away during the kangaroo-clubbing scenes. By that point, however, I had already seen a couple of them dead by the side of the road (common roadkill victims, unfortunately) and wasn't overly upset. What did shock me, though, was how eerie parts of that movie are. Before watching it I didn't know anything more than what was written on the back of the DVD. To me, Walkabout is light and beautiful and dark and disturbing in the best possible ways.

The flights between Newark and Perth total more than twenty-five hours, not including two layovers. I'm not sure if seeing Evan Almighty and License to Wed on a six-inch screen made the time pass more quickly or slowly, but the long journey was more than worth it. And I got back to the city just in time to catch the last screening of Blade Runner at the Ziegfeld! I brought back from Oz a new love of Tim Tams and Vegemite, and an interest in seeing more Australian films. Any recommendations?

Above: The 'Wacky C' on the beach in Mandurah, Western Australia.

When I started preparing for a new transfer of The Ice Storm, I asked director Ang Lee if he wanted to supervise the session. Ang said that he’d like the cinematographer, Fred Elmes, to supervise, and that he would come in at the end and review the color correction with us. That’s typically the way many directors go about the process these days, although they’re all different. Years ago, it wasn’t so easy to get a director in the room for a color-correction session, but things have changed. As Ang put it, “More people are watching the film on video than they are in the theater, and this is the way the film is going to live and be seen.”

I often find that directors are noncommittal about coming into a transfer session. When I asked Lars von Trier to come in for Zentropa recently, he said, “Thanks, but we trust you to do a good job.” That’s while I was in Copenhagen, mind you, just a few miles away! (Luckily I got to screen an original print at the lab while timing, therefore keeping the original ideas intact.) Then there is Jim Jarmusch, the complete opposite. Jim not only wants to watch the color correction, but he wants to review any fixes, check the compression on the DVD, and talk through the entire process. There were a few issues with Down by Law that had to be corrected in the transfer room, and Jim spent hours on one scene, making sure the black and white levels in the swamp were just right.

Like many filmmakers, Ang Lee knows that it’s as important to grade the video master as it is the prints. He also knows that you have to emphasize certain things for the small screen that you wouldn’t normally for a print being projected on a huge screen. I called Fred Elmes to come in for the Ice Storm transfer, and Fred wanted to try grading the film in the theater at Technicolor in New York. I hadn’t had this request before, since the theater is typically used for digital intermediate work—color correcting a digital scan of the original negative that will eventually be output back to film. It’s not normally used for video remastering. I phoned Joe Gawler at Technicolor, one of our favorite colorists, and told him Fred’s id