Home Video: 
Indispensable, yet still needing improvement

From the introduction of the Sony Betamax to the explosion of cable television to the current surge in the popularity of DVD, home video has been the biggest boon to the motion picture industry since the addition of sound.  Through this marvelous innovation, movies once lost to the past are seen again and again.  Filmmakers are influenced by new visions and ideas previously unavailable to them.  Creative artists are granted a new way to be compensated for their work, often for years and years after their creation takes shape.  Yet, despite the leaps and bounds this technology has enjoyed of late, this wonderful concept is still not without its flaws.

Home video has so changed to motion picture industry that the industry itself admits that they cannot survive without it.  Projected revenue from home video sales and rentals and cable television broadcast rights are factored into production budgets for current films, sometimes dictating whether films get made.  Films such as the sequels to F/X, Stuart Little and Final Destination owe their existence to the success of their predecessors on home video, not theatrical box office performance.  The Disney Company has found a new means of creating revenue by producing sequels to many of their animated classics, in addition to new animated films, that are marketed directly to home video, appealing to children, as well as parents eager to add to the power of their electronic baby-sitter.  Cable television networks such as Bravo and The Sundance Channel provide an outlet for low-budget, independent filmmakers to have their work seen, where in years past, such movies would only be seen in the art house theaters of the largest cities.

Actors and actresses, as well as directors, producers, composers and screenwriters, all pad their bank accounts even fatter with the residuals from home video sales and rentals.  This goes for everybody in the industry, and not just for the Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks and Jim Carreys of the world.  For instance, just this past week, I heard radio personality Robert D. Raiford of the nationally syndicated John Boy & Billy Show remark on the air that he had recently received a check for residuals from his appearances in minor films The Program and Carrie 2: The Rage, films in which he had appeared as long as ten years ago.  Such a revenue stream gives new meaning to the term, “the gift that keeps on giving.”

Home video also provides a much more lucrative outlet for films studios decide are not worthy of a theatrical release than airline showings, once the only other choice available.  Actions stars such as Jean-Claude van Damme and Sylvester Stallone have both seen most of their efforts lately going direct-to-video, and doing fair business once these films get there, and Keifer Sutherland remained a hirable actor through his work in several direct-to-video independent films before returning to higher-profile work in television.  Many stars even owe some their fame to home video, as Jackie Chan, Chow-Yun Fat and Jet Li all became known to American audiences primarily through their exposure in Hong Kong action pictures available in our country only on home video or at film festivals in large cities. 

Most importantly, home video allows new generations to see works from the past that were all but impossible to see before.  Of my generation I ask, how many movies made prior to your fifteenth birthday would you have seen were it not for home video?  I would wager that more than 90% of all movies made before 1960 would never been seen by human eyes again were it not for home video.  Before home video, only film students at universities with prestigious film studies programs such as New York University or UCLA would have access to the works of Truffaut, Renoir, Eisenstein, etc.  In the bad old days, one would be forced to stay up for the 1:00 AM late show on his local television station in order to catch a scratchy, degraded print of Casablanca, Citizen Kane or Psycho, interrupted by commercials for used car dealers and psychics or public service announcements.  Now, I can get all of these movies, and more, from Blockbuster or Movie Gallery, or even from NetFlix or Number Slate, internet DVD rental services.

Self-taught film students such as myself also find the abundance of bonus footage included on most current DVD releases priceless.  Through audio commentaries by directors, photographers and actors, we learn about the logic and thought processes behind the way shots are written, staged and shot, as well as stories about how those shots came about.  Scenes edited out of a film’s final cut are often included, and we are able to see for ourselves why such scenes weren’t vital to a film’s pace, or even why they should’ve remained.  Even things that seem so trivial as trailers and television advertising spots offer insight into how movies are marketed and what elements studios think will draw audiences to the film.

All that having been said, it remains true that home video is still not a perfect medium.  While we are closer than ever to being able to recreate the theater-going experience in our homes, we’re not quite there yet.  On a regular basis, movies are still being presented to us in forms other than those in which they were intended by filmmakers.  Thank Heaven that Ted Turner’s colorization movement died the death it deserved, but other means of altering movies from their original form remain.  Movie viewers themselves have faults, too, as many remain uneducated about the advantages of proper image formatting over the hackneyed picture ratio they are accustomed to seeing on television screens.

Basic cable television networks, most notably cable “superstations” such as Atlanta’s TBS SuperStation and Chicago’s WGN, continue to alter films for broadcast.  Movies are compressed for time by ever so slightly speeding up or slowing down the projection.  Dialogue is dubbed, scenes are cropped and entire sequences are clipped in the interest of broadcast schedule, decency standards and advertising time.  Broadcast networks have sliced and diced movies for as long as they’ve been televising them, and this practice has not been scaled back by much in later years.  At least with the ever-increasing competition from cable, broadcast networks feel compelled to present high-profile telecasts with limited commercial interruption and less content edited out, but due to language and nudity constraints, leaving movies intact is all but impossible.  The competition from cable also prevents broadcast networks from airing older films much at all, as the newer films must be constantly aired to draw the younger demographic for which advertisers strive.

Movie channels are not without fault, either.  American Movie Classics, an outlet of which I took great advantage in gaining exposure to classic movies from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s several years ago, has become almost unwatchable of late, succumbing to financial pressure and beginning commercial interruption of their broadcasts, and reducing the number of widescreen presentations.  Pay services like HBO and Showtime aren’t much better, relying more and more on original programming than feature films, and rarely, if ever, showing theatrical movies in widescreen format or features from farther in the past than about 1970.

The battle for supremacy in our homes between widescreen, or “letterbox,” format and full-screen continues.  Letterboxed VHS tapes were an extreme rarity before the mid-90s, but the explosion in popularity of DVD has resulted in the biggest advance for the widescreen format since the introduction of home video technology.  The widescreen format’s victory, however, is not complete.  A bigger advocate for the superiority of widescreen format than me you will be hard-pressed to find, but I acknowledge there are instances where full-screen presentations are more appropriate.  Films made before the early 1950s were primarily shot in an aspect ratio almost exactly that of a television screen, and therefore do not suffer from a full-screen presentation on a television.  Smaller televisions, less than twenty-seven inches, also do not offer an image large enough or clear enough to justify a widescreen image. 

Studios once had the perfect solution in their grasp, offering the widescreen format on one side of the disc while offering the full-screen version on the other, as the data capacity of the DVD disc is such that providing both formats does not tax the disc’s capabilities.  Unfortunately, such practice is waning, as more and more studios are releasing both formats separately, supposedly offering consumers more choice, but actually complicating our choices needlessly.  Where as recently as two summers ago we could walk out of Blockbuster knowing that the DVD we held would contain the format we prefer, now we must carefully inspect packaging on the shelves before making our rental selections.

Love it or not, home video is here to stay.  It has now left our living rooms and ventured outside, into the back seats of our minivans and SUVs.  We take it with us in our laptops and PowerBooks.  Even airplanes no longer project celluloid on the front of the passenger compartment, relying instead on mini-VHS and DVDs displayed on miniature monitors for their passengers’ entertainment.  As technology improves and becomes more affordable, it becomes easier and easier to enjoy a theater-like experience at a viewer’s convenience, and while it should never, and hopefully will never, replace the theater-going experience, it is a wonderful companion to those who enjoy movies.  Long may it glow in our darkened homes.

Larry Smoak
February 5, 2003

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