How much is a word worth? In the case of "It", the answer is $50,000, and that in 1920s dollars! That's how much Paramount Studios paid to "Madame" Elinor Glyn, to use her clever idea of giving polite society a way to talk about sex appeal: By assigning it an innocuous name!
Glyn, described in the Film Historian's Commentary track as, "A hack writer for Cosmopolitan Magazine", also got a cameo appearance out of the deal; portraying herself in the film. Cosmo also got some "product placement" in the film -- before that concept had even been invented!
Read moreMovies and Television work because the brain WANTS to see continuous motion. If you look at a sequence of still photographs, each changing just a bit from the photos before and after, and all flashed fast enough in front of your eye, your brain will blend them together into moving imagery -- an effect called Persistence of Vision. You will no longer see the separate photographs. You will see "A Movie"! This trick, which goes back to the invention of moviemaking, works only if the images really are flashed past the eye fast enough. The question, then, from the very beginning was, "How Fast is Fast Enough?"
Read moreIn the early 20s, Carl Laemmle, Senior's, Universal Pictures was a DISTINCTLY 2nd tier studio. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" would change all that, but not without a struggle!
It was Lon Chaney, himself, who pushed for the picture to be made; only to run into road blocks and indifference. The general consensus was, Hollywood Studios of the time were incapable of producing such a massively staged, period piece.
Read moreMuch of the visceral excitement of Home Theater -- whether for movies or music -- comes from the proper rendering of Bass frequencies. Unfortunately, setting things up to ACHIEVE awesome Bass is complicated -- almost to the point of being a Black Art!
But take heart. As with many such complicated things, there's always a place to begin! And with Bass audio, that means understanding why you need to include a Subwoofer in your speaker configuration, and learning how to select a Crossover Frequency to drive it.
Read moreHere's a film so hilariously bad, it's a wonder it has not made it to shiny disc before! Seriously, it must be RIGHT up there on ANYONE's list of the Worst Films Ever Made. Olive Films saw their chance, and released it on both SD-DVD and Blu-ray.
This cheesy, British, sci-fi outing was Written, Produced, and Directed by American Cy Roth, has American Anthony Dexter as its star, and goes to great pains to try to feature American accents throughout in the dialog. Indeed, it's very much as if the Brits were ALREADY trying to distance themselves from it!
Read moreMovie discs, be they SD-DVD, Blu-ray, or UHD, have many advantages: Superior picture quality and access to the best audio tracks, for example. They are also permanent: Not subject to the temporary nature of Studio content licensing contracts, which can leave you in the lurch when the “streaming” content you thought you had "purchased" suddenly stops being available!
But that doesn't mean discs are entirely free of annoyances! And right at the top of most anybody's list of complaints would be that most movie and TV show discs try to FORCE you to watch commercials before you get to see your show!
In this post we will discuss the mysterious and frustrating world of Prohibited User Operations (PUOs, or sometimes, confusingly, UOPs).
Read moreIn the midst of the Great Depression, the hugely successful team of George and Ira Gershwin set out to do something absolutely new: New both for them AND for music. They contracted with the Theater Guild to create the first, "folk opera"; to be based on the 1925 novel and 1927 stage play, "Porgy", by DuBose Heyward. George Gershwin composed the music. The Libretto was produced by Heyward. And the Lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin.
It would take 50 years for it to come to be!
Read moreOne of the biggest, conceptual changes introduced with Blu-ray discs (and continued with UHD Blu-ray discs) was the idea the Studio could include computer program code -- software -- ON the disc, which would load and run whenever you played that disc, and which would CONTROL that playback. No longer would disc playback be strictly limited to the "user interface" features implemented by each, different, Blu-ray player! So long as the player could run the on-disc software, the DISC could invent its OWN user interface! There was nothing like this for prior, SD-DVD discs.
This on-disc software would be written in a variant of the Java programming language to be called "BD-J" (Blu-ray Disc Java). The expectations for how Studios would use BD Java were truly grand -- to begin with. All sorts of fancy features were proposed to "enhance" the customer value of these discs. The actual result has been rather a mixed bag. In particular, some Studios seem to be most keen on how BD Java can be used to make a disc really difficult to copy -- something which has NOTHING to do with the customer’s experience.
In this post I'll talk about BD Java, and how it relates to the perennial complaint: My disc player won't let me do Resume Play on my movie!
Read moreGeorge Axelrod's 1952 play was a major, Broadway success, and pretty much all of Hollywood was eager to cash in on it. So much interest was expressed, the Hays Office took the unusual step of announcing, even BEFORE anyone secured the rights, that THIS material could NEVER ever be made into a film!
The problem was, the play is about a middle-aged everyman who has an adulterous fling while his wife and child are away on summer vacation, and then feels very very guilty about it in very very humorous ways. But one of the fundamental provisions of the Production Code was that adultery could NEVER be treated as a subject for comedy or laughs!
Read moreMost Home Theater setups these days will include some variant on Surround Sound speakers. Indeed, a major factor in the enjoyment of modern movies at home is the ability to hear an "aggressive" Surround Sound mix as it was INTENDED to be heard: With key sounds originating from specific points all around you, and with blended sounds, such as the musical score, filling the entire sound field.
In this post I'll discuss the two most common ways people screw this up, and how to avoid doing that!
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