Criterion's January release of Magnificent Obsession: all good news (1 Viewer)

[Lord Dalek]

*shakes head*

On another note, the fact that Mr. Hare seems to be the kind of person that falls back on his own debunked solutions despite the fact that they been so clearly debunked because he is a stick in the mud, is very telling.

GO HOME DAVID.

 

[Bob Furmanek]

Thanks Billy, the fact that the studios screening room for rushes was converted to widescreen a month before they started filming is very telling...

 

[Danny_N]

Bob, you should write a book about the 1953-1954 period of transition to widescreen in Hollywood. With all the stuff that you dig up it would be very interesting. I have Carr's and Hayes' Wide Screen Movies but it's basically just a book of long lists, and full of errors. A book that is factually correct and nicely illustrated would be bought instantly by me.

 

[Thomas T]

That thread over at Criterion is so surreal. They seem to want to go inside Sirk's and Metty's heads and make all kinds of suppositions that are not supportable by the facts. Is it THAT hard to say, "Oops! Okay, my bad. You are correct"?

 

[Bob Furmanek]

I think what's not well known - or is simply misunderstood - is how quickly the transition to widescreen took place. I've read the trades on a daily basis throughout this period (Daily Variety is particularly useful) and it was very much a revolution within both production and exhibition techniques. Examination of the various studio files bear this out as well.

Danny: You must by psychic! There is some discussion going on right now about a book. After doing "Abbott and Costello in Hollywood" I swore that I would never write another one, but this is a topic which most certainly needs to be accurately documented. The sad aspect to the book you mention is the fact that it's now become the wide screen bible, and all that wrong information is getting repeated all over the Internet.

And don't get me started on the amount of glaring mistakes in his 3-D movie book, now in it's second printing. It's even worse than his widescreen book!

 

[BillyFeldman]

This is what people forget - the widescreen revolution was, as Bob states, a revolution. It came into being for a very specific reason - to combat television, which had eaten into the movie attendance in horrifying ways. The obvious idea was to give the TV audience something they couldn't get at home - bigger. A different shape. Grandeur. Yes, even for black-and-white films. I don't know any filmmaker who was working back then and who is now considered an "auteur" that would have or could have bucked their respective studios' wishes. It's really that simple. Hitchcock, for example, had a lot of control, but he also knew who was giving him that control and who buttered his bread. And that's a special case. Sirk was, as I have stated many times (and they particularly didn't like hearing this over at the criterionforum) a hired hand, a contract director making excellent films that were handed to him by the studio. It's not like today, where directors are attached to films for years and spend years developing them. These films were turned out one after another, to satisfy an insatiable need from theaters to have new product every single week. It's not like now where three pictures open in a week - back then ten pictures would open in a week, and the week after there'd be another ten. Sirk did his job and did it wonderfully. His cameraman was a contracted employee of the studio - anyone anywhere who thinks Russell Metty, in cahoots with Sirk, would do anything about framing MO that wasn't in line with Universal's new policies about widescreen is truly living in a fool's paradise, and they are welcome to live there until the end of their days, basking in their suppositions based on some phantom dream-like mise en scene of their minds. I've heard these people tell directors, "I love the way you use that space around objects and the distance between the object and the character - your mise en scene is incredible" and the director replying, "I have no idea what you're talking about - we just shot the scene." Or words to that effect - you get the idea.

 

[Danny_N]

That's why we need a new one . I've never written more than +/- 50 pages myself so I can only imagine the pain and sweat it costs to write a whole book which is based primarily on more pain and sweat of digging in archives. But it would be sad to see all this information you dug up get lost on the Internet. I hope it is going to happen, you've already sold one copy here.

 

[James 'Tiger' Lee]

I think the midunderstanding comes from people watching these things on tv and video since the early 60s

Britian was widescreen by 1955 - look at Quatermass Xperiment. Japan went scope but kept the Academy ratio for a long time instead of adopting to 1.85:1.

I'm not sure what Europe did as a rule, but Goddard and Bergman SEEM to be using Academy as late as the 70s, judging from Bergman's Hour of the Wolf

 

[BillyFeldman]

Just read through the additional two pages of posts - Bob is to be commended for remaining calm - they are now doing the dance of the waffle, so at least some are admitting that Bob's proof cannot be dismissed. They're just finding all the usual excuses why it's meaningless in this particular case. But here's my favorite line from any post in that thread:

"Do you really think Sirk was making his films for the enjoyment of the audiences?"

No, I'm not making this up - someone actually posted this statement. And I only ask - who else would he have been making them for? Himself and his cameraman? Of course they made them for the enjoyment of the audiences - because let me tell you, if the audience didn't enjoy them they would have all been box-office disasters, and had they been Mr. Sirk might not have gotten to make some of his subsequent films. These people were not free to do whatever they felt like - they answered to their bosses, the people who employed them. But, there's no reason to keep beating a dead horse. When one persistent "mise en scene" person points out the single frame where the shot is focusing on Jane Wyman, and there's a doctor behind her and only the lower half of his face is visible, and this poster keeps decrying "the doctor's face is cut off" without seeming to realize that if you open the matte all the way up the doctor's face is STILL cut off - just less cut off. If Sirk was so meticulous, why would the doctor's face be cut off at all? Why not just frame up and get all of his head in? Why? Because you're not supposed to be looking at him. I was watching an Academy ratio film last night - many times tops of heads were out of frame, hats were cut off, frames were tight. Why? Because that's the way movies are framed occasionally, because the DP and director want you to focus on the face not the hat or the hair.

 

[Bob Furmanek]

You're right Billy. In this case, even if I do find the "smoking memo" telling Sirk to compose for 2:1, they'll probably still dismiss it and claim that he ignored his employers wishes!

But research is ongoing, and I've got some pretty interesting documents which will be posted in the next few days...

 

[BillyFeldman]

I was just flipping around the dial, and TCM is showing Psycho, properly letterboxed at 1.85:1. You could pick out 100 frames where the top of someone's head is cut off, either for a shot of some duration or a moving camera shot (the problem with screencaps). In the cabin, when Gavin and Miles are checking in - there is a repeated shot of Bates behind the counter where the top of his head is out of frame. Think Hitch and John Russell framed for Academy and just let that little oversight slip by them? Of course not. It's the shot, just as framed by Hitch, who, as you know, was meticulous about the frame. Then there's the great shot of Mort Marshall, the highway patrolman - his top of head is missing completely and so is his chin - if you were to open the matte you'd get the bottom of his face but the top would still be cut off, but the shot would have lost every bit of its power. And on it goes.

EDIT: I also put on the DVD of Has Anybody Seen My Gal - I could do screencaps of at least a dozen shots that would show you heads extremely tight to the top of the frame, hats cut in half, a character on the screen listening to other characters, shown from the bottom half of the face down, and tops of heads lopped off. Oh, the director is someone named Douglas Sirk.

 

[Adam_S]

I love that the conclusion of the criterion forum thread is, "there's no right answer" and a thread lock. very amusing.

I would note, on the value of primary source materials, that say if you were interviewing Ford, in the 60s, about one of his fox films and he mentioned a nasty memo from Zanuck that he hated and then went on to trash Zanuck and his ideas, well according to that memory of Ford's you'd think he was completely right, but if you go to one of the primary source books, like the compilation of Zanuck's memos, you'd find out that Ford either didn't remember the memo accurately at all or was inventing a much worse memo than any that was actually made, meaning that his memory, or at least the story he was spinning you claiming it was an accurate memory, wasn't reliable as to what actually went on.

Because there are many auteurists out there, they would still claim that the evidence was not as reliable as the word of an auteur--and that's where the possibility of argument ends with them.

this argument is very basic. The film is supposed to be 2:1, due to the technology of the time, it was composed 2:1 but was not exposed 2:1. due to unforseen future developments, the exposed portion, never intended to be seen, was transferred and used for television airings. Since that time, other than in some (not all) theatrical screenings people have been seeing the film incorrectly, and the opinion has taken hold that this is the correct version. It is not the correct version, it is an acceptably altered version, but it is not the original way it was intended to be seen.

 

[Bob Furmanek]

Some of their regulars certainly have a problem with anybody who does not agree with them. I notice that some will even go back to my older posts and take a quote out of context in an effort to make me look bad. Pretty unprofessional behavior, if you ask me!

I just got an interesting document from the studio which I'll post later today.

And I'm still waiting for primary source documentation of the 1.37 theory...

 

[Bob Furmanek]

That's a very good point Adam. I find it somewhat ironic that all this analysis of Sirk's "mise en scene" (post June 1953) is based on information which was not intended to be seen. That dead space above an actors head is not there for some psychological sub-text. It's because the film was supposed to be matted for widescreen!

This fact is so simple and yet some people just don't get it.

 

[BillyFeldman]

See my comments above about Has Anybody Seen My Gal? a Douglas Sirk film shot in Academy.

 

[Bob Furmanek]

I didn't see that Billy, excellent point! You should post that observation on the Criterion thread...

 

[Patrick McCart]

Wouldn't MO actually be somewhere around 1.19:1 if they transferred the entire available image?

 

[Jack Theakston]

That's something that these art-boys don't seem to grasp-- if Sirk was making pictures with three feet of headroom and shadows looming over people, etc., why wasn't he doing the same for the rest of his pictures?

The people at Criterion have jumped the "absolutely Academy" ship to the "he was composing for both formats" non-sense. Non-sense in that you can't compose for two formats. You can take a fuller format into consideration, but you can't compose a close-up shot for two formats-- something's gotta give.

 

[Bob Furmanek]

From the studio files:

 

[Brandon Conway]

Case closed.