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.

[dwk]

David Cairns on working with various labels

[beamish14]

David Cairns on working with various labels

Gold Ninja likely pays in a handful of Tim Horton’s coupons

I really wish Kino would invest more in quality control instead of bullshit commentaries from people who don’t know what they’re talking about

[MichaelB]

I've occasionally edited commentaries with unarguable problems like factual errors, and sometimes the commentator is able to re-record, This isn't always possible if they originally did it in a studio, so in those cases I have to re-edit what I've been given, which sometimes involves deleting the offending section altogether. And of course this does rather depend on me spotting the flub in the first place - I don't have time to go over it sentence by sentence and independently fact-check everything.

Although I'm very pleased with the fact that I managed to rescue a commentary that Arrow was seriously considering writing off – the problem was that this was a commentary debutante who sounded incredibly nervous and hesitant in the first few minutes, which I suspect is all that Arrow listened to. But she really knew her stuff (she was hired as a genuine expert on that specific film, not as an experienced general-purpose commentator), and the commentary improved massively later on, so I ended up deleting much of the opening hesitancy and replacing it with non-scene-specific stuff from elsewhere that could survive the move, and I think it turned out really nicely.

Talking of re-edits, one of my favourite commentators to work with - and one of my favourite commentators full stop - is Nora Fiore (aka The Nitrate Diva), who has not only totally mastered the challenge of cramming a track with shot-specific information while also keeping it light, witty and engaging, but she's even more of a perfectionist than I am, sending me additional snippets right up to the mastering deadline.

She was particularly conscientious over Japanese name pronunciation in Tokyo Joe, which I remember vividly because it was such a delightful contrast from what is sadly all too common, whereby a commentator just pronounces the name according to their own alphabet, often totally mangling it in the process. American commentators and French names are particularly fingernails-down-blackboard here - I once had someone who managed to mispronounce literally every syllable of Le deuxième souffle, and I imagine I don't have to tell you how the last word ended up! (I tried to fix that by transplanting correct syllables from elsewhere, but I had to give up in the end.)

Although even if you're conscientiously determined to get it right, you still have to compromise occasionally - on Face to Face, I bent over backwards to pronounce Swedish names as correctly as I could (consulting the Forvo pronunciation website so often that I gave it a shout-out at the end), but I drew the line at an authentic Swedish pronunciation of "Bergman", which sounds more like "Beryman" with the "y" being so faint as to be almost inaudible. A bit like the name "Potemkin" (which should by rights be "Potyomkin"), the incorrect version is so universally accepted outside the person/battleship's native country that it sounds wilfully eccentric doing it correctly in the context of an English sentence.

In fact, I was somewhat fazed the other month when Peter Strickland asked me something about "Shaataantongoo", and it took me several seconds to realise that he was pronouncing Sátántangó correctly – appropriately enough in his case, since he lived in Hungary for many years and has a Hungarian wife and bilingual kids. But I'd honestly never heard it pronounced correctly before, and in the case of that particular title, I'd argue that "Satan Tango" is perfectly acceptable since that's what it means in English, so even though I now know how to pronounce it correctly, I suspect a namecheck in a future commentary might still fall back on the familiar version.

[ChunkyLover]

I really wish Kino would invest more in quality control instead of bullshit commentaries from people who don’t know what they’re talking about

Yep. I’ve started to roll my eyes when I see some of the “usual suspects” listed on Kino releases.

[MichaelB]

They've never asked me back, interestingly (my sole Kino commentary was The Round-Up three years ago) - although by the same token I've never proactively pitched anything to them or even suggested that I might be available and willing.

In fact, I rarely do pitch for commentaries, the one exception being Left, Right and Centre for Indicator because I felt that I was unusually qualified to do it (as a credentialed Launder & Gilliat/Alastair Sim expert who's also a lifelong British politics junkie) but that the disc's producer probably wouldn't be aware of this upfront.