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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A conversation with the Criterion Collection's Peter Becker, the man who created the ultimate DVD versions of "Grand Illusion," "This Is Spinal Tap" -- and "Armageddon."
Mar 23, 2000 | This year the National Society of Film Critics, in an unprecedented move, gave its best picture award to a pair of movies: "Topsy Turvy" and "Being John Malkovich." But just as unusual was the four-way split the society came up with for its film heritage award, created "to recognize extraordinary achievements in film preservation and restoration:" the theatrical release of the rediscovered camera-negative print of "Grand Illusion" and the newly preserved director's cut of "The Third Man," the video and DVD releases of the original version of "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (long thought lost to fire) and the cable broadcast of an expanded version of Erich von Stroheim's truncated epic "Greed."
The Criterion Collection -- the New York company known for its primo laser discs -- has issued all except "Greed" on DVD. Unlike other classy cultural providers that couldn't react to the marketplace and eventually disappeared (remember Command Records or Atheneum books?), Criterion deduced in the mid-'90s that DVD would swallow up laser and be bigger than laser ever was. In the fall of 1997 the company announced plans to launch a DVD line in early 1998 -- and, two years later, has released 66 titles in the fast-growing format.
In an age when home viewing is the norm for fans of classic art films, Criterion has whet appetites for optimum picture quality and stylish and intelligent packaging. As a pioneer in laser, Criterion introduced stay-at-home movie-lovers to the delights of letterboxing and audio commentaries -- things few top-of-the-line DVDs from any company now go without.
The producers of Criterion DVDs haven't just followed the trail they blazed in laser disc -- they've broadened it. They've taken advantage of the new format's flexibility to gather even more materials that augment rather than merely hype a movie. These include both the obvious and the esoteric -- from the original coming-attraction trailers to pithy background talk by filmmakers and scholars, rarely seen documentaries and deleted footage, displays of script pages and source material, interactive essays and even original mini-documentaries of backstage stories.
Yet there's no library mold on the Criterion Collection. It's frisky and gleefully eclectic. This is one art company that will prize a benchmark "mockumentary" as highly as any auteur masterpiece -- and imbue its disc with the same giddy sense of rediscovery. Criterion's double-sided "This Is Spinal Tap" disc contained separate commentaries on the movie by both the band members and the filmmakers, and beyond that tossed in lost scenes that were as funny as the ones kept in the movie, including more with Billy Crystal and his mime-staffed catering service and a hysterical additional sequence with Bruno Kirby, the Sinatra-obsessed chauffeur, who spends an evening with the band and winds up stoned and singing "All the Way" in bikini underwear.
The three-disc set commemorating Terry Gilliam's nearly buried "Brazil" is the ultimate in jazzy reconstruction, including the 94-minute studio cut; a 142-minute "final final cut" edited, for the first time, just the way the director wanted it; and a video documentary on Gilliam's nightmarish fight to release the movie his way -- written and narrated by Jack Matthews, whose column for the Los Angeles Times provided the forum in which Gilliam and his studio antagonists took their stands.
Robert Towne once called Jean Renoir "the greatest filmmaker" and said of "Grand Illusion" that "it's difficult to extract technique" from a film so large and so full of love, irony, wit, reality -- life. It's a measure of Criterion's desire to balance form and content that its producers voted "Grand Illusion" to be the symbolic first entry in its DVD line. Criterion, along with the French film company Canal Plus, can take credit for reactivating the abandoned quest to find and restore the original camera negative. And along with Rialto Pictures, Criterion helped put glorious new prints of "Grand Illusion" into American theaters last summer.
The director of the Criterion Collection, Peter Becker, and its CEO, Jonathan Turell, are the sons of William Becker and Saul Turell, who were partners in Janus Films -- the art house distributors who from the late '50s through the 1970s combined good taste and savvy snob appeal, importing contemporary European classics films for budding American cinephiles, and in the process making the names Bergman and Fellini passwords into higher movie culture on every major campus in the country.
During its laser disc days, I wrote liner notes for 10 Criterion productions, less for the modest fees than the opportunity to play a part in the creation of a home-viewing world that echoed the art houses of the '50s and '60s. But when I interviewed Becker by phone recently (he called from his office in Midtown Manhattan), it was the first chance I'd had to talk to him extensively about the company and his plans for it. On the two-year anniversary of Criterion's entrance into DVDs, we discussed its experience packaging films as different as Ozu's "Good Morning" and the rather less-acclaimed movie that was the subject of my first question.
One Salon reader in the Table Talk string called "How to build a quality DVD collection" wrote that he was "inclined to say the best way to build a superior DVD collection is to get whatever Criterion has released. Well, except for 'Armageddon.'"
The answer to that person is "Thanks" -- but also, "to each his own." There are always titles in the collection that people single out. We're just beginning to get across the idea that we're a collection, and when you do that you're always going to get people who say, "How could you include this or that?" Part of the joy of following a collection is to take part in the controversy.
Specifically, with "Armageddon": You'd be silly to overlook blockbusters as a genre and leave them out of a film library. They drive so much. They drive tastes and shooting styles and visual references that appear all over the world in commercials and on TV as well as on movie screens. They're part of a huge cultural cross-pollination. And special effects are one of the most important aspects of a certain kind of contemporary filmmaking.
The opportunity we had to explore the effects in "Armageddon" was extraordinary. These guys dug a 400-foot hole in the middle of a Hollywood sound stage. It was a mammoth project and a great thing to be able to chronicle. One may choose to say, "What an enormous amount of money to spend on so frivolous an enterprise." But it occupies an important position on the spectrum of contemporary films.
Michael Bay, who made "Armageddon," is one of the most masterful directors of that kind. He's managed to develop a certain style and energy in shooting that is consonant with what people seem to be looking for in these huge blockbusters. He's an articulate exponent of what he is up to, and he is refreshingly candid. He's not going to sit there and try to convince you that his and Ingmar Bergman's intentions are one and the same. He's trying to make a wild ride and he's trying to show you how it's done.
