Criterion announces first Blu-ray titles - Page 18

My name is Peter Becker. I'm the president of Criterion. Thanks for
taking the time to write in.
 

You're right to call the Criterion schedule a juggling act, and
juggling this year's schedule has been more challenging than any since
laserdisc days. I understand some of the frustration you're feeling
about the balance of new and classic titles, especially in the later
2009 Blu-ray schedule. Making the Criterion schedule is always a
series of impossible compromises, and in the end, some people, some
years, are going to end up unhappy. Clearly this was not a good year
for you. I'm sorry about that. I know it may not solve anything, but I
thought you might appreciate a quick look at some of the factors that
came into play with this year's schedule.
 

For what it's worth, we've spent much more time on classic film this
year than our announced schedule shows. The single most time consuming
and expensive mastering project in the history of the company was
Kobayashi's THE HUMAN CONDITION -- that is, until we started work on
Rossellini's War Trilogy, which is still not finished. We had
originally hoped to have the Rossellini set ready for October release,
then November, then December. Ironically the easiest of the masters,
the 2007 restoration of ROME, OPEN CITY, is the one that is giving us
the most trouble. PAISAN, which has never been available in a
watchable video version, has taken us three straight months of digital
restoration, an amount of time and an expense that will probably never
come back, but the film will finally, for the first time, look good --
still damaged, but with a beautiful black and white image that will be
a revelation to anyone who has ever seen the old tapes and 16 mm
prints that are still in circulation. Our tech director is about to
make his third trip to Italy on this project, just to try to
straighten out the last master, next week.
 

You also mention STAGECOACH. We never announced it for December, but
it's true that we had hoped to release it then. Again mastering turned
out to be more complicated than we anticipated. The original negative
of the film is lost, and we have been evaluating a number of different
elements. We are now working closely with UCLA's restoration team to
evaluate all available elements and create a new HD master, starting
from scratch. The bad news is that it's taking a long time. The good
news is that in the time we've been working on the master, we've had
the opportunity to unearth some interesting supplemental materials, so
the edition will be all the better for it. That said, it's frustrating
that it didn't come out -- the cover's been on the wall of our office
for weeks now, and we're looking forward to making it a part of the
collection.
 

Those two big classics that we've been hard at work on were never
announced, which helped to give disporportionate weight to the
contemporary releases of this fall/winter. I can understand why you
would think we were stepping back from classics in favor of more
contemporary films, but in fact, the opposite has been true. Our
Blu-ray schedule has been heavily weighted toward international
classics with THE SEVENTH SEAL, PLAYTIME, WAGES OF FEAR, THE THIRD
MAN, REPULSION, 400 BLOWS, THE LAST METRO, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES,
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. And when you throw in our DVD schedule with Z,
JEANNE DIELMAN, 2 OR 3 THINGS..., HUMAN CONDITION, MY DINNNER WITH
ANDRE, the Imamura box, Painlevé, etc., I don't think we pulled any
punches or spared any expense where classics were concerned.

Integrating Blu-ray production into our workflow has been challenging
in its own right. Adding an existing DVD upgrade is about equivalent
to adding a new DVD production to the schedule, at least where our
technical team is concerned, and that is where our capacity is most
constrained. New Blu-rays released day and date with the DVD editions
are marginally more efficient, and many of our customers are avidly
urging us not to release DVD-only editions anymore, but each
simultaneous release we do is one more DVD catalog classic we aren't
revisiting that month. Right now we're struggling to bring our Blu-ray
capacity up from one to two a month to three or four. As our capacity
increases, it will be easier to keep a balance, but in the meantime
it's an inexact science.
 

The other title that you say you were expecting, but which we didn't
officially announce for December, is CHE. It's coming, and as you can
imagine there's a wealth of great content getting developed. We wanted
to be ready for December, but Steven Soderbergh needed time to
reconstruct some deleted scenes, and we were also able, in what we
think is going to be a controversial coup, to persuade Che biographer
Jon Lee Anderson to do commentaries on both films, but he also needed
more time to prepare. In short, it became clear that if we delayed the
release a month we would be able to make a much better set. That's a
trade we will always make, even if it means we don't get the benefit
of sales in the holiday season, and we think that's the kind of
decision our collectors would want us to make.
 

To touch briefly on some of the other things you mention: more Eclipse
is a goal for us too. Again, this is a capacity issue. Each disc in a
set represents multiple passes for our QC department, and when we're
working on large-scale projects like Rossellini, HUMAN CONDITION, or
the Imamura box, that has a tendency to cramp our capacity to handle
multi-disc Eclipse sets at the same time. Still, we're proud of what
we've been able to do in Eclipse this year, but we are definitely
looking forward to getting more out next year. As for "two-release
months," by which I assume we're referring to December, I've already
mentioned that we intended to have STAGECOACH and CHE ready for
December as well but we delayed them to make them better rather than
sooner. That said, when one of the two releases is a 25-disc set,
that also factors in. I'm sorry you don't like the Kurosawa box idea,
but we felt that his centennial was an important opportunity to draw
attention to his monumental body of work, and so far we've had some
very positive feedback from people who have not been as diligently
collecting his work as you have.
 

I don't expect anything I've said will change your mind about our
slate, but I hope at least you'll know that we have no desire to
dismiss your concerns. We do value feedback from our customers,
especially longtime supporters like you, and we hope we'll earn your
loyalty again in 2010.
 

All the best,
Peter Becker

We currently have THE THIRD MAN replacement cases in and we will be receiving the rest come November. The cost for a replacement case is $5, which includes shipping. If you would like to go ahead and purchase an upgraded case for THE THIRD MAN simply make a payment of $5 to the email address [email]store@criterion.com[/email] through PayPal, providing your mailing address and item needed in the message field, and we'll send it out to you! If you prefer to receive [it and other] cases together, I would advise waiting until we have all cases available and then making the payment of [$5 each] through Paypal.