Suddenly Essential

In the course of the recent Robert De Niro thriller “15 Minutes,” a police officer played by Edward Burns chases a suspect from a seedy New York hotel, across a crowded Times Square, and runs him down in a movie theater, where the chase concludes with a shootout. It’s a sequence full of thunder and action and worth all the trouble it took to film it on location, according to its director, John Herzfeld. Indeed, as he spooled the scene out in the editing room a few months ago, he noticed just one problem: It didn’t belong in the movie.

In the old days that would be the end of it. The sequence would be cut, the footage likely discarded. If “15 Minutes” were to acquire a cult following, its fans might even refer to it as the Legendary Lost Times Square Chase, like the legendary “Jitterbug” sequence from “The Wizard of Oz” or the rarely seen Linda Blair “spiderwalk” shot for “The Exorcist.” But in Hollywood’s new era, which can be dated roughly from 1998, no sequence need be lost. Herzfeld recalls the spirit-lifting moment when, as he fretted over the loss of that favorite scene, his editor turned to him and said: “Well, John, it can go on the DVD.”

Computer-generated effects, video editing and digital photography are already revolutionizing Hollywood, but the technology that may do the most to change the way filmmakers conceive, shoot and market their films is the silvery five-inch platter known formally as the “digital versatile disc.” Industry surveys suggest that no new consumer technology has taken off as fast as the DVD, which was devised in 1995 by an international consortium of 10 electronics and entertainment companies. The discs are the same size as audio compact discs and work in a similar way: The data instructing your television how to display a moving image are encoded as a stream of digital “ones” and “zeros.” These are represented on the disc by millions of microscopic pits, which are scanned by a laser beam inside the disc player and decoded. Because there is no physical contact between the player and the disc surface, the ultimate image remains almost as sharp and clear as the original recording no matter how often it is played.

In the U.S. alone more than 13 million players have been purchased since 1997 and about 100,000 more are bought each week. There is scarcely a major studio production of the last two years that has not been released on DVD and videotape simultaneously, and scarcely a video rental store in the country that isn’t turning over a larger share of its shelf space to the discs every month. Each new release seems to be packed with more supplemental features: audio commentaries by director, cast and crew; behind-the-scenes documentaries. Many include step-by-step explications of special effects by their designers, ranging from the computer-generated creatures of the latest space operas to the optical tricks that allowed Tom Cruise to leap from a 40th-floor office window in “Mission Impossible 2” and land safely on the ground. Programs that give users a choice among soundtracks or even camera angles are increasingly common.

The inclusion of sequences deleted from the finished movie, no matter how inconsequential, is almost de rigueur . The public’s thirst for such material has surprised the industry. “We’re all happy to have anything extra they give us,” says film critic Roger Ebert, who taped a commentary track himself for the DVD of a film he admires, Alex Proyas’ “Dark City.” But he believes some special features are gimmicky: “I don’t want to pick the camera angle. That’s the director’s job.” For him, as for any serious film lover, the most important feature of any DVD has to be the wide-screen format of the film--that is, it must be presented in its original “aspect ratio,” or screen shape, rather than cropped to fit the conventional TV. “That’s my basic requirement,” he says.

the sheer novelty of the format means that films made after the DVD revolution have reaped most of the benefits so far; that’s why you won’t find as much care lavished on the DVD of “Annie Hall” as on, say, “Coyote Ugly.” But studios and filmmakers are finding the popularity of the new medium hard to ignore. Directors who once battled over

the right to approve a “final cut” of their films now ask for authority over the DVD as well. Cineastes clamor for the DVD release of such as-yet unavailable films as “Citizen Kane” and the “Godfather” trilogy.

Responding to a public campaign for the DVD release of the “Star Wars” movies, Lucasfilms felt constrained to explain publicly that work on “Star Wars: Episode II” has been consuming so much of George Lucas’ time that he can’t spare any to oversee the preparation of DVD versions of the rest of the saga. “The films will definitely be released on DVD,” the statement says. “It’s just that we don’t yet know when.”

The medium has already spawned a host of new professions in Hollywood. Digitizers convert a film to digital bits and engineers write the software that allows users to skip from one feature to another at the click of a remote control. The most important and delicate task in converting film to DVD may be simply making sure it fits. “We have a new member on our team-- the compressionist,” says Robert Zemeckis, the director of such films as “Forrest Gump” and “Cast Away.” Today’s DVDs are said to carry up to four hours of video, but that’s misleading. A full-sized digital file of a two-hour movie would barely fit on 10 DVDs. Instead, films are typically compressed by removing up to 90% of the digital information and using higher mathematics to instruct the machine to display what’s missing. This tricks the machine in a way similar to how the human eye is fooled into constructing a smoothly moving image out of a procession of 24 still frames per second--the rate at which film is unreeled. But figuring out how to remove the excess bits without reducing image quality involves a unique combination of art and science.

Today’s savviest filmmakers know that more damage can be done to a movie by a bad transfer than by any chemical disaster in a film lab. Even before Zemeckis’ latest films are in the theater, his on-staff compressionist is working with his producer and film editor to make sure he understands which elements of the image must be preserved in the conversion process, and which are expendable. “These guys can make a yellow movie pink,” says director Gore Verbinski, who spent the day before the recent premiere of his Brad Pitt-Julia Roberts vehicle “The Mexican” camped out at the video lab overseeing the film’s digital remastering. “In video transfer you can manipulate the image much more than you can when you’re working on film.”

Still, for many filmmakers, the complexities of managing the transfer are a small price to pay, compared to the DVD’s value as an archival medium. This attribute has given birth to a cottage industry of producers who carry the burden of finding and arranging the supplemental material that documents the production of a film and expands on its creators’ vision.

“I see it as chronicling the creative process,” says Mark Rance, a leading independent DVD producer. A graduate of MIT’s film school, where he specialized in cinema verite, Rance learned the business of assembling documentary material at the Criterion Collection, a trailblazing developer of special-edition laserdiscs that now produces high-quality DVDs. After leaving Criterion, he established his own production company, 3 Legged Cat, in a warren of cluttered and busy rooms overlooking a Westwood office courtyard.

As he speaks he patrols the compound, keeping an eye on three or four projects at once. From one digital console an engineer is working on the DVD for M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Unbreakable.” Because Shyamalan does not favor commentary tracks (“He wants the work to stand on its own,” Rance remarks), the slack will be taken up by a special documentary feature on comic book art, amplifying and implicitly commenting on an important thread of the plot. On a monitor in the next room, another editor has Tom Hanks repeatedly bobbing to the surface of a roiling tank of water, menaced by a computer-generated aircraft engine. It’s the plane crash sequence from “Cast Away,” with every digital element deconstructed and explicated in a voice-over by the film’s special effects team. Editing done, Rance orders it sent to Fox Pictures, which produced the film, for approval.

Unlike literature, music or painting, he argues, film suffers from a production process that leaves behind few creative artifacts, other than the work of press agents. “The motion picture is probably one of the least archival art forms. Promotional material is often all we have.”

The DVD has changed that by giving filmmakers a virtual warehouse for almost anything they choose to save--or say--for posterity. The opportunity to document every moment of a film’s production and to woo critical opinion by articulating a creative vision has captured the attention of young filmmakers, including Paul Thomas Anderson, director of “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia.”

“Paul contacted me about documenting ‘Magnolia’ even before he finished the script,” Rance says. “He was thinking about preserving that moment when the film belongs to him and only him, before everybody else gets their hand on it.” The result was “The Magnolia Diaries,” a 74-minute documentary that chronicles everything from the earliest pre-production meetings on the sprawling film to the post-premiere letdowns. Part of the two-disc DVD release of “Magnolia,” the documentary gives the viewer a remarkably intimate feel for Anderson’s creative and personal habits, from his penchant for tinkering with dialogue on the set to his chain smoking.

Anderson is one of a cadre of young directors exploring new ways to exploit the medium’s exceptional capacity to expand on or amplify their characters or plot lines, often by mining material from their research, writing or pre-production. One of the acknowledged masters of this novel art is David Fincher, director of “Seven” and “Fight Club.” To enhance the authenticity of “Seven,” Fincher had designers and photographers create handwritten notebooks and grisly photographs that supposedly belonged to the film’s serial-killer villain. Most were seen only fleetingly on screen. But a viewer can navigate to a special section of the DVD with a click of a remote and examine them as if they were physical artifacts of a bad dream.

While preparing the forthcoming “Blow,” in which Johnny Depp plays the real-life cocaine runner George Jung, director Ted Demme recorded interviews with Jung behind bars as well as a series of vignettes in which his actors talk about their relationship with him, in character. Then he edited the material together and saved it for the DVD. “The movies we make as directors are going to live forever as DVDs in people’s households,” he says. “So this was something I wanted to work extremely hard on.”

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NONE OF THE FEATURES NOW ASSOCIATED WITH DVDS MIGHT HAVE reached the general public were it not for an earlier, more experimental, medium--the laserdisc.

Although laserdiscs and videotapes appeared together on the consumer market in 1978, the former never caught on with the general public. About the size of music LPs, laserdiscs were expensive to buy and rarely available for rental. Unlike videotapes, they could not be recorded on at home. Because they carried only 30 to 60 minutes of video per side, they had to be flipped over in mid-movie. They could be easily spoiled by warping or by a deterioration of the glue that held them together, known as “laser rot.”

By 1998 only about 2 million laserdisc players had been sold in the United States, compared to 85 million video cassette recorders.

Some notable directors, however, embraced the laserdisc enthusiastically. Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker renowned for his devotion to the history and culture of his art form, recorded the first known commentary track, a conversation between himself and the legendary British director Michael Powell for the Criterion issue of “Black Narcissus,” the classic color film by Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Morgan Holly, a laserdisc and DVD producer whose parents founded Criterion, recalls spending two days at Francis Ford Coppola’s archives in Northern California while preparing the videodisc for the director’s 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” “We went through all his memorabilia, down to the photos that had influenced the look of the film. He gave us every frame of film he had exposed.” The “Dracula” laserdisc set, which retailed for $125, even included an interactive editing workshop in which viewers could choose among alternative takes of certain scenes (a feature replicated in the recent DVD “special edition” of “Men in Black”).

“There’s a generation of filmmakers who grew up using laserdiscs as supplementary education to film school,” says DVD producer Alita Holly, Morgan Holly’s sister. “I’ve met a number of directors in their 30s and 20s who grew up listening to director commentaries on disc, and because of that they do think today about how their film is going to live on in plastic.”

For lovers of the laserdisc, the DVD’s arrival on the consumer market in 1997 was at first bad news. In its early days, the compression process often resulted in badly compromised picture quality. “Compression is a destructive process,” says Peter Becker, Criterion’s president. “There’s no way around that. You’re throwing away information, and it has to be done with great care.”

Eventually, though, recording engineers learned new tricks of the digital trade that overcame the inherent compromises made in DVD transfer. These included how to implement low-resolution parts of a film, such as the credits, with as few digital bits as possible in order to have plenty to spare for the most demanding photographic images. Once the engineering got good enough to encourage the major studios to plunge into the DVD market in 1998, the laserdisc market collapsed. All that remained, aside from collections of gleaming platters in the homes of enthusiasts, was a nascent tradition that the work of almost every filmmaker was worthy of being documented and annotated.

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DIRECTORS HAVE EVOLVED ALMOST as many approaches to the potential of the DVD as there are variations on the “special edition.” Some, like Shyamalan and Peter Weir of “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” oppose any audio commentary, by themselves or others. Zemeckis does not believe in so-called “directors’ cuts,” in which filmmakers restore sequences that were deleted, often for sound artistic reasons, before the theatrical release. “The movie is what I wanted to say,” he remarks.

On the other hand, Zemeckis loves admitting viewers behind the scenes of the elaborate yet seamless special effects characteristic of his films, even if that betrays a certain amount of his inspired sleight of hand. “When I was a little kid, I was fascinated every time on ‘The Wonderful World of Disney’ when Walt Disney took you behind the scenes in the animation world and showed you how the magic was done,” he says. If a scene’s power to enchant a viewer can be undermined simply by showing how it was created in the lab, Zemeckis reasons, “then I’m a failure as a filmmaker.”

Some directors fill their DVDs with production artifacts, turning over the storyboards on which they sketched out sequences and camera angles, their shooting scripts, costume drawings and set designs for interactive perusal by fans at home. They sit for hours of interviews, rehashing production catastrophes and arguments with their screenwriters--or seizing the opportunity to secure the judgment of history over shortsighted studio henchmen. Among the features that makes Criterion’s three-DVD set of Terry Gilliam’s Orwellian 1985 comedy “Brazil” a model of its kind is the inclusion not only of Gilliam’s authorized 142-minute cut, but the controversial 94-minute version that Universal Pictures prepared over his objection and released to television. Criterion says Gilliam endorsed the inclusion of Universal’s cut, which is accompanied by an unsparingly critical commentary track by a film professor. “If nothing else,” says Becker, who produced the set, “this was going to be a really interesting study of how editing can fundamentally change a film.”

Reconstructing both versions was a three-year project. DVDs produced from now on shouldn’t require so much time and effort. Thanks to their awareness of the DVD format’s demands, Alita Holly says, filmmakers are documenting more and more of a picture’s production. “Studios are starting to realize that you have to start early in the process to get the stuff you need. They know that ultimately the afterlife of the movie is going to be that little plastic disc.”

Even those who were at first antagonistic toward the new medium are now seeing the light. The most famous denunciation of DVDs, for instance, came when young director Kevin Smith (“Clerks” and “Dogma”) delivered a succinct and profane opinion on the 1998 laserdisc of his film “Chasing Amy.” By the time the movie was re-released on DVD, his views had changed. Which is why the DVD release includes a video clip on which he sheepishly recants his initial opinion: “If you hear somebody on the commentary track say ‘- - - - DVD,’ that ain’t me. I would never say bad things about a format that will probably last for years. It’s just crazy talk. When you hear it, just disregard it and don’t mention it ever again . . . please.”