Wednesday, May 7, 2003

Play-Doh's Retreat

A week from tomorrow, May 15, the entirety of Late Night with Conan O'Brien is being done in clay animation. Honest.

• Posted at 10:10 PM · LINK

Saturday Morning Confusion

Animation World Magazine has a good article that answers the musical question, "Whatever happened to Saturday morning cartoons?"

• Posted at 10:03 PM · LINK

Comic Artist Website of the Day

There are loads of wonderful websites out there that spotlight the work of a talented artist for comic books and/or strips. I'm going to try to recommend one a day here, starting with Terry Beatty. Terry's a classy guy who has never done less than first-rate work. As you can see for yourself.

• Posted at 7:51 PM · LINK

Alternatives

From Scott Miller comes the following...

I really enjoy your weblog (and have for some time now), and your latest entry about the possibility of putting alternate versions on DVD reminded me that this has been tried at least once, with The Big Sleep. Someone (or several someones) has probably already brought this up, but just in case they haven't, the DVD currently available from Warner Bros. features (on Side A) the theatrical cut we all know and love from 1946, while Side B features the 1945 version that survived only because it was a print that had been sent overseas for the G.I.s to watch. The 1945 cut makes a little more sense plot-wise than the 1946 version (though not much more — this is The Big Sleep, after all, and not even Raymond Chandler knew who killed the chauffeur) and has a number of different scenes, despite there only being a 2-minute difference in run times.

I agree with you — it seems to me that this is exactly the sort of presentation DVD was made for. I'd love to see some of those alternate versions (like, for example, Horse Feathers, whose British versions apparently have a scene entirely missing from the US version on video — if I remember what I read in Joe Adamson's Marx Bros. book correctly).

I recall that from Joe's fine book...and perhaps now that I've posted this here, I'll hear from Joe, because I'm a little fuzzy on how long the "most complete" version is. Of course, this also raises the issue of what is the "correct" version and how we determine that. We've occasionally seen home video companies splice in outtakes or scenes that were cut before the official premiere and announce that they have "restored" a movie to its original version. The version that gets previewed is often not the version that anyone associated with a film ever felt was the final one. The interesting thing about the foreign versions is that both were meant to be exhibited.

• Posted at 7:43 PM · LINK

Forgot To Mention...

...that the current issue of Publishers Weekly has a good review of my book, Mad Art. If you don't have a copy of this handsome, informative volume, you can click on that name to order one. Please do this.

• Posted at 5:13 PM · LINK

Alternate Thoughts

The DVD is a wonderful invention...for the folks who market movies, at least. It has enabled them to sell me new copies of movies I already owned on VHS and/or Laserdisc. In some cases, when I really like the movie and am really stupid, they've really hit the jackpot. There are at least a dozen films I've bought in all three of those formats plus Beta, and a few where I also bought the Laserdisc twice (the regular release and then the Criterion Special Edition).

DVDs are terrific, though when I become National Video Czar, there will be a strict law that they cannot come in any form of packaging that does not fit neatly onto shelves that are spaced eight inches apart. A similar edict will apply to CDs, which must be in packaging the size of a CD. For some reason, some of the neatest CD collections come in these long, fancy boxes that fit nowhere. They make you want to slap the designer and ask what part of the word "compact" eludes him in the term, "compact disc." For the most part, I like DVDs because they're compact, because the picture quality is usually quite good and because most of them contain wonderful special features.

I suggested on my old weblog that someone try releasing comedy movies with an alternate audio track that included the sound of a live audience. Only one or two films (I'm told) have tried this, to almost no notice. I'd like to see it tried more, because I'd like the option of watching it "with" an audience. And now — just throwing an idea out there in the hope that it will land where it may do some good — I'd like to suggest something else that probably won't happen.

Back before around World War II, it was not uncommon for movies made in the U.S. to have two almost (but not quite) identical versions. They would shoot the movie with two cameras placed side-by-side. The idea was to generate two negatives of the movie so that after they got through editing the one that would be duped for America's theaters, they could edit a second negative and ship it off to Europe. Usually, the two versions would be identical in cutting and the main difference would be slightly-different camera angles and cropping of scenes. But sometimes the European print would also employ alternate takes from the camera shooting the U.S. version. Chaplin, it is said, edited two different prints of The Gold Rush and they differ in some gags. Several Marx Brothers movies exist in two versions made from different takes, and this is not generally known. Years ago, a gent named Richard Anobile published a couple of books of frame blow-ups and quoted dialogue from the Marx movies, and several British film buffs became incensed. He had, they insisted, slightly misquoted a staggering number of lines. But he hadn't. The prints of Duck Soup that were then widely-circulated in England simply had a lot of alternate lines from the prints circulated in the U.S. Chico especially seemed unable to say any chunk of dialogue precisely the same way from one take to the next.

In the case of Laurel and Hardy — whose major films are conspicuously and shockingly as yet unavailable on DVD in this country — there are the two English-language prints of most films. There are also versions shot for non-English-speaking territories, for which Stan and Ollie read their dialogue in other languages off an off-camera blackboard. Some but not all of the other cast members were changed for actors who could speak the language being filmed. (Boris Karloff was in the French version of Pardon Us, but none of the others.) In some cases, the non-English versions were longer, with whole sequences that appeared only in some overseas editions.

So what I'd like to see is companies releasing DVDs look at digging up some of these alternate versions and including them, perhaps in a manner that will allow us to switch back and forth. The DVD "angle" command might not do it since the alternate versions, even in the same language, differ slightly in length. But maybe, instead of or in addition to those wonderful "making of" documentaries and still galleries and audio commentaries and trailers, some DVD makers could include the entire movie again, only shot from a different camera. They especially need to do this if they're going to get me to buy Horse Feathers for the ninth time.

• Posted at 2:18 AM · LINK