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.