I was greatly pleased to find buried under a ton o' email last week the following response from somebody who has actually worked in the trenches of the video industry at a company not unlike Kino International, which I dissed in an earlier 'blog entry (scroll down to the eighth paragraph) for releasing The Piano Teacher in an edition that failed to completely please me. Here's the reply, followed by my own responses.

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I can't speak for Kino (nor have I seen The Piano Teacher DVD), but having worked in the independent home video industry, I can tell you that you hit the nail on the head when you said "Top-Ramen poor". That's exactly it.

I should backtrack a little. Simply put, for small companies like Kino and such, the motto is "Take what they give you." There are always examples: For one foreign language film, I knew there was a readily accessible NTSC other-region DVD (a bare bones one, at that) that looked good and that we needed to compete with. We contacted the licensor and asked what we could get from them along the lines of a new transfer. As the production date approached, we never heard back from these people. Pissed? You bet I was — but outside of flying to the film's country of origin and stealing the transfer myself, we were screwed.

For another foreign-language DVD, we were offered a making-of documentary with English subs. Great, we'll take it. Then the owner backtracked: Oh, that'll be several thousand dollars. Bye, bye documentary. As for the transfer itself, it looked about the same as what I imagine The Piano Teacher looks like: a PAL conversion with burned-in subs. They sent us the Region 2 disc, with its beautiful 16x9 transfer, and I asked, "Why can't we use this?" We could — if we paid for subtitling it, which can cost up to $10,000 and is a long, arduous process. And we had a street date to meet. Yes, we could have delayed it in the interest of quality, but the marketplace being what it is, you've got to avoid coming out against big hits (and I don't just mean blockbuster hits, but also other arthouse releases).

Besides, this also depends on whether or not those who run the companies actually care enough about the quality issue. Many of them do know a bad-looking transfer when they see one, but it seems they don't really care. I know one who doesn't like watching scope films letterboxed and still doesn't understand the concept of 16x9. Telling them they should shell out some significant money for a good-looking transfer of a title that may, at best, sell a few thousand units is pretty much pointless. If you know the film is going to do well and you have a promise from a major sale or rental chain to pick up the disc, then it could happen. But for that obscure foreign film that played for one week in New York and L.A.? Forget it.

Something that most DVD consumers don't understand is that arthouse companies do not have the distribution that others do. Wellspring (hey, remember their initial DVD releases?) owns a huge consumer catalog that they stock with their own product, along with having the rights to stuff like Deepak Chopra and that other guru guy with the big beard (I don't know his name but you should know what I'm talking about). That stuff sells a shitload of units, not to mention some choice titles like Ran. They can get their titles into Musicland, Best Buy and Circuit City. For others, it's a struggle.

Sure, Criterion is a small company, but they happen to be a small company that owns Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal, Grand Illusion, and many other classics in the U.S. Those films pay for the rest and they pay for those expensive transfers, too. Synapse and Image deal with exploitation and genre films, always proven moneymakers, so the Musiclands and Best Buys are clamoring for their stuff. I know what some of those transfers cost, but I also happen to know that they can make it back in the long run. If your catalog isn't nearly as enticing, then don't expect to get Musicland on the phone.

So anyway, that's just scraping the surface. Suffice to say, it sucks. And this is by no means meant to be an attack on you or your statements, but on the situation that these companies are in. Absolutely, The Piano Teacher should have been a better disc than it was. I've seen it in a lot of major chains (after it got rated, itself a pricey situation) so I'm sure it did well for them. But that's not always the case. I've seen major retailers buy discs with bad transfers and I've seen discs with excellent transfers and good supplements not sell a whiff. Again, you take what you can get.

Home video: Watch what you want, when you want, and then complain about the transfer on the Internet.

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OK. All that said, I just want to clarify that I'm not one of those nuts who refuses to buy a beloved movie just because it's not on DVD in a 16x9 transfer, or who won't watch older movies unless they've been remastered to (tinny) 5.1 stereo just because they want all of their speakers firing all the time.

But here's the thing, dammit. If The Piano Teacher was created with a discrete 5.1-channel sound mix — which is a different animal from the standard Dolby stereo configuration, known in DVD-land as Dolby Digital 2.0 — then we should get that sound mix on the DVD. Otherwise, the package is incomplete. It's my hope that, the next time Kino International, or any small-distrib equivalent, has to negotiate a North American theatrical/home video deal, they make sure that the elements for a 5.1 sound mix are included in the package.

I guess I shouldn't have rubbed Kino's nose in the outstanding output of The Criterion Collection, since it's well-known that releases like, um, Armageddon pay the way for stuff like the
Carl-Theodor Dreyer boxed set. One thing that does surprise me in the above is the suggestion that some of these titles only sell in the "few thousand units" range. I would have thought that 5,000 units would be the floor, but I guess I'd be wrong. I was shocked to hear a couple of years ago how few copies something like Kenneth Anger's films sell on VHS — it kind of made me despair for the future of avant-garde film collections on DVD, a format that requires a heftier initial investment than videotape.

So I acknowledge that heroic effort takes place on a near-daily basis in the DVD industry, particularly among the smaller players but also at the studios, where similar, bigger-money problems rear their ugly heads. I'm grateful every time a stellar disc of a beautiful-but-not-so-commercial movie escapes from the vault in which it would have laid mouldering if not for the efforts of connected fans or admirers in the industry.

And of course it should go without saying that I prefer any crappy widescreen version of The Piano Teacher that Kino can provide to the alternative, which is no release at all. Even if I do have to shell out $30 for the thing.

[As usual, if you use any of the links above to buy a movie from Amazon.com, Deep-Focus.com gets a kickback.]

Comments

"DVD Bizzer Responds"???

Bryant, now you're writing like Snoop.

Posted by: Sharon at February 16, 2024 06:49 PM

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Posted by: Bryant at February 18, 2024 08:55 PM

It's unfair to say that Criterion can afford to have principles only because it gets major releases. It is true to a certain extent--the Brakhage set would not be possible if it were the only kind of release the Criterion made--but it leaves out some essential points: first, the company is founded on the principle of doing the best they can for the films that they release.

Keep in mind that Criterion does not in fact own the rights to any films at all (which is not true of Kino, I believe). All their films are licensed or are public domain. Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal, and Grand Illusion all had to be negotiated for. Nor do they do their own transfers. All the transfers are done by other companies. In fact, it might be better to think of Criterion as a distribution/production management/quality assurance company.

Most important of all, the people in charge of Criterion are very much committed to the quality of their releases. This might in part be because they are a strictly home video company, as opposed to New Yorker Films, which very much has a conflict of interest in releasing their films on dvd. More than anything, however, this is probably due to the fact that the reputation of the company relies more than anything on the quality of their releases, whereas Kino's reputation has more to do with distributing films that might not be otherwise distributed, and restoring films for theatrical rerelease (they do a great job of this, btw).

Posted by: Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa at February 21, 2024 07:19 PM

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