The Economics of Extras

[Michael Kerpan]

Even here, a forum where most of us crave and value commentaries and other in-depth extras, there is not a lot of discussion about them.

Heck. Lots of time there is almost no discussion of the substance of movies AFTER their long-awaited release on {insert latest and greatest format}.

[Maltic]

I'm sure most of us have even more unwatched films than un-listened-to commentaries in our collections.

Btw, I find "reviewing" a commentary can take as much effort as reviewing a film. How to synthesize a 90 or 120 minutes talk... and of course you were watching and thinking about a movie while listening.

[Maltic]

I've made a habit of buying whatever release MichaelB is on, even though I've yet to actually listen to any of his commentaries on Polish films. But I'm likely to catch the Polish cinema bug at some point in the future, and when I do, I'll be ready.

[MichaelB]

It’s funny that you mentioned the War of the Worlds commentary because I feel like that was the best extra on the release outside of the Szulkin interview on the booklet. I will admit that I wasn’t fond of that film on first viewing but you put so much info into that commentary, especially around it’s background that, like the Blind Chance reviewer, my appreciation for the film grew. Also wanna shout out Samm Deighan who’s also on the disc, her commentaries are always informative, never boring and you can tell she’s passionate about all the films she discusses.

Well, that was wholly unexpected and very very welcome - huge thanks for that! Not least because it's doubled my feedback on that commentary by 100%.

And that's very much the reaction I'm after, so I'm even more grateful.

[TechnicolorAcid]

Well, that was wholly unexpected and very very welcome - huge thanks for that! Not least because it's doubled my feedback on that commentary by 100%.

And that's very much the reaction I'm after, so I'm even more grateful.

No problem, recently got 90 In the Shade so excited to dig into your commentary. Keep up the excellent work.

[yoloswegmaster]

I get very very little feedback about my commentaries - sometimes not even from the disc producer. In fact, of the seven that I’ve submitted this year, I only had producer feedback about two of them that was more than a “thank you” on delivery, and it’s just as well that one of them was VS’s War of the Worlds: Next Century because otherwise it might as well not exist - there’ve been no reviews that do more than mention its existence, and no social media reactions that I’ve seen.

In fact, getting maybe four or five reactions of any kind at most is a typical best-case scenario, although I treasure an Amazon customer review of Blind Chance:

But also, the film commentary is worth a listen. I don't normally bother with them, but I struggled with the first 30 minutes of Blind Chance during my first viewing over 15 years ago, and now it makes perfect sense... as well as having a far more powerful impact due to understanding Kieslowski's life situation at the time of filming.

Stuff like that’s worth far more to me than a “review” that’s blatantly only sampled the first few minutes (sadly the norm).

Semi-related but I found this blog post from Sean Gilman where he talks about his experience with writing an essay for Criterion to be very interesting:

A couple of years ago, when I was writing about Throw Down for its Criterion Collection release, I offhandedly mentioned, in summarizing To’s early, pre-Milkyway Image career, that “after a series of run-ins with mega-star Stephen Chow during the making of their hit films The Bare-Footed Kid and The Mad Monk, To decided he needed to reevaluate his career and took all of 1994 off. When he came back the next year, he was determined to only make films that mattered to him personally.” I’d assumed that to be widely acknowledged, that To and Chow did not get along, and that the unhappy experience of working with Chow spurred To to reevaluate exactly why he made movies and what kind of movies he wanted to make, leading directly to the glory days of his Milkyway era. But Criterion, in their rigorous fact-checking process, asked me to cite a source for the claim, and try as I might, I could not find one. I scoured all my Johnnie To books, all my Hong Kong cinema books, googled all over the internet, but could not find a solid source anywhere. So I modified the line...

I believe that you said Indicator does this but it makes me curious to know how many other labels out there currently have producers rigorously fact-check and proof-read the commentaries/essays that are sent to them.