Chris @ SAE
TWILIGHT TIME, new limited edition DVD label, launches with release of John Huston’s 1970 thriller, The Kremlin Letter
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (December 14, 2010) — The new DVD specialty label, TWILIGHT TIME, launches an ambitious slate of limited edition classic films with an initial offering of John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter (20th Century Fox, 1970) on January 25th, 2011. In line with TWILIGHT TIME’s innovative limited series concept, just 3000 units of this and following releases will be produced, aimed at the collector/classic film aficionado market. At a retail price point of $19.99, titles will be available exclusively online through www.screenarchives.com, the nation’s largest independent distributor of specialty soundtracks.
The January 25th debut of The Kremlin Letter will be followed by a new release on the last Tuesday of each month, with a potential ramp-up to a monthly pair after a six-month trial run. Currently on the schedule: director Richard Fleischer’s cult favorite noir melodrama, Violent Saturday (1955); the aviation thriller, Fate Is the Hunter (1964); the surprisingly down-low Pat Boone musical, April Love (1957); and the legendary The Egyptian (1954), directed by Michael Curtiz, and starring Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, and Gene Tierney.
TWILIGHT TIME is the brainchild of 30-year Warner Bros veteran Brian Jamieson and filmmaker/music restoration specialist Nick Redman. In his long tenure at Warner Home Video, Jamieson initiated and oversaw countless legacy restorations, including the films of Stanley Kubrick, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Redman, a film historian and Oscar nominee for his 1997 documentary, The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage, is also a prime mover behind Twentieth Century Fox’s pioneering series of limited edition soundtracks. This program, spearheaded by Fox Music executive Tom Cavanaugh since 1993, has seen the restoration and release of hundreds of classic film scores, earning industry-wide recognition, sturdy consumer support, and high praise from film music fans. The flourishing limited edition model for Fox’s soundtrack releases is the inspiration for TWILIGHT TIME.
“In the 1990s,” Redman says, “Fox was the only studio looking to exploit its deep-catalogue music assets in this way. Under the supervision of Tom Cavanaugh, the program was so successful that now every studio has a limited edition soundtrack program. Now Fox is taking the lead again, by taking that limited edition model to DVD.”
Jamieson adds, “Fox is embracing the opportunity to optimize the film enthusiast’s dream, providing long sought-after collectible and fully restored titles, in their original aspect ratios, through the Twilight Time label, all manufactured to the highest quality available, and at a very affordable price.”
Fox Home Entertainment executive Dave Shaw has green-lighted licensing for an initial 20 titles, with more in the offing as the limited edition approach takes hold. Unlike the notorious movies-on-demand offerings currently on display, each TWILIGHT TIME release will be a DVD (not a DVDr) properly pressed from a restored transfer supervised by Fox’s head of Assets Management, Schawn Belston, another longtime lynchpin of the studio’s catalogue restoration program. Each will be accompanied by a collectible 8-page booklet complete with original essay, stills, and poster art. And—continuing the ongoing Fox tradition of synergy between movies and music—each TWILIGHT TIME DVD will offer, whenever possible, that extra most coveted by cinemusic enthusiasts: an isolated score.
According to Redman, the isolated score “synergizes Fox Music's ongoing CD restoration program with the new limited edition Fox Classics movie series, and it offers an added bonus to DVD buyers—both those who are already film music fans, and those who perhaps will become score aficionados as a result. One of Twentieth Century Fox’s great legacies is its music—and here is a way to bring that rich history to the DVD consumer.”
With its emphasis on films featuring stand-out scores from exemplary composers—Violent Saturday by Hugo Friedhofer, Fate Is the Hunter by Jerry Goldsmith, and The Egyptian by no less than two giants, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman—it’s no wonder that film music specialist Craig Spaulding of Screen Archives wanted to throw his hat into the ring with TWILIGHT TIME. But he’s also a fan of the limited edition model, and sees business potential in expanding it from soundtracks to DVD.
“We’ve been in business since 1975,” Spaulding says, “We’re a Mom-and-Pop business, but when we send out an email blast to our customer base, it goes to 30,000 people. And I can tell you, they collect more DVDs than they do audio. The potential niche for Twilight Time is bigger than the niche for soundtrack releases. And since we’re selling the label exclusively, it’s a no-brainer. The audience will have to come to us to get it.”
TWILIGHT TIME will be focusing its initial efforts on bringing out heretofore unreleased-on-DVD films from the 1950s and 60s: what Redman calls “Fox's Cinemascope period, those gorgeous widescreen entertainments that had it all—beauty, glamour, drama.” But, he adds, “We will also be selectively tackling the earlier years—the 1930s and 40s—and sampling every genre, presenting, hopefully, something for everyone.”
Jamieson notes that “these films are revered by true cineastes and film buffs. They complete the ‘void’ in their collections. This is niche marketing in the true sense of the term: identifying a certain consumer demographic, and then satisfying their needs. Twilight Time will be serving both the collectible drive of film enthusiasts, and, in a larger sense, the cause of cinema literacy.”
A genuine devotion to our cinematic heritage is the heart of the matter for both TWILIGHT TIME founders. “Our label is called Twilight Time,” explains Redman, “because that is what we are facing: the sun setting on the world of physical media. But before all the light ultimately fades over the horizon, we aim to make Fox’s legacy shine as brilliantly as possible for as long as we can.”
 |
