Do We Need Yet More Films About Time Loops? A Pretty Much Pop Discussion (#80) of Groundhog Day and its Descendents

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | February 2nd, 2021

Tine loop­ing, where a char­ac­ter is doomed to repeat the same day (or hour, or longer peri­od) is a sci-fi trope dat­ing back more than a cen­tu­ry, but real­ly entered Amer­i­can con­scious­ness with the 1993 Bill Mur­ray film Ground­hog Day. Since then, and espe­cial­ly in the last five years, there have been numer­ous iter­a­tions of this idea in var­i­ous gen­res from racial police-shoot­ing dra­ma to teen sex com­e­dy. But do we need more of this? What are the philo­soph­i­cal ideas involved, and how do these change with tweaks to the sce­nario?

Mark, Eri­ca, Bri­an, and return­ing guest Ken Ger­ber dis­cuss not only the very recent and pop­u­lar for­ays into this genre with Hulu’s Palm Springs and Net­flix’s Russ­ian Doll, but also touch on Edge of Tomor­row, Repeaters, 12:01 PM, Before I Fall, The Fare, and episodes of The Twi­light Zone, Star Trek: Dis­cov­ery, The X‑Files, and Rick & Morty.

There are of course oth­er film and TV uses of this trope. For a rel­a­tive­ly full list, you can see this wiki page list­ing time loop films and this oth­er wiki page dis­cussing lit­er­ary antecedents. Also see the “Ground­hog Day” Loop page on tvtropes.org, and here’s a rel­e­vant red­dit thread.

Here are more arti­cles:

Watch the 12:01 PM 1990 short film. This bonus episode of the 11.22.63 pod­cast had a great dis­cus­sion of time loop media includ­ing the Ken Grim­wood nov­el Replay and the short sto­ry “12:01 P.M.” and its sequels. You can read the 1941 Mal­colm Jame­son sto­ry “Dou­bled and Redou­bled” online. As a fore­run­ner to the time loop idea, check out the very short 1892 chil­dren’s sto­ry “Christ­mas Every Day” by William Dean How­ells, where time does move for­ward with its con­se­quences, but it’s always Christ­mas!

We talked a lit­tle about Hap­py Death Day with its cos­tume design­er in our ep. 38 and got into time trav­el more gen­er­al­ly with Ken in ep. 22 and into “weird sit­u­a­tions” in our Twi­light Zone ep. 52. You may also enjoy Wes Alwan’s (sub)Text pod­cast dis­cussing the psy­cho­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of Ground­hog Day.

Check out the time loop movie bin­go card that Bri­an put togeth­er (with ground­hog pic­ture by Ken):

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

 

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Listen to the Never-Heard Song Written for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film, Music | February 2nd, 2021

Hol­ly­wood film scores have become bland­ly for­mu­la­ic, thanks to film­mak­ers’ over-reliance on the same kinds of “temp music” dur­ing the edit­ing process, a prac­tice that can lead to a boil­er­plate approach at the scor­ing stage. But the use of tem­po­rary music is noth­ing new. Stan­ley Kubrick left the temp score for 2001: A Space Odyssey as the film’s offi­cial sound­track, opt­ing for Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathus­tra for the icon­ic open­ing sequence over the score com­posed by Alex North.

While com­posers may now stick too close­ly to temp music, North strayed too far, Kubrick com­plained, writ­ing a score “which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to.” Anoth­er com­pos­er, Wendy Car­los, scored two of Kubrick’s films—The Shin­ing and A Clock­work Orange. In both cas­es, her orig­i­nal music was most­ly cut in favor of clas­si­cal record­ings. Kubrick described his atti­tude in an inter­view with Michael Ciment: “Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time?”

Few have argued with the results of Kubrick’s ruth­less approach, though Car­los refused to work with him again. Maybe Kubrick’s films would have been equal­ly well-received with dif­fer­ent music, who can say? But if the direc­tor found North’s score “alien,” con­sid­er what he must have thought when he heard Mike Kaplan’s lyri­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of his sci-fi epic, “2001: A Gar­den of Per­son­al Mir­rors.” Weird doesn’t real­ly begin to describe it, and it’s odd­er still giv­en that Kubrick him­self com­mis­sioned the song. After reject­ing anoth­er song­writer’s demo at MGM’s offices, he sup­pos­ed­ly turned to Kaplan, then a young pub­li­cist, and said, “I hear you write music. Why don’t you write some­thing?”

There’s no indi­ca­tion that Kubrick had “MacArthur Park” in mind as inspi­ra­tion, but Kaplan chose to “emu­late the suc­cess of the quirky hit,” writes Vanes­sa Thor­pe at The Guardian. After 52 years, Kaplan’s song has final­ly been released, “thanks to a small British record label.” Thor­pe quotes Observ­er film crit­ic Mark Ker­mode, who played the song on his radio show: “Audi­ence reac­tion was utter­ly polar­ized, but I have the sus­pi­cion it will become a cult favorite. It is very ear-wormy.” It was sup­posed to be, any­way, as a sin­gle to pro­mote the film to con­fused audi­ences.

When Kaplan played the ver­sion above with folk singer Nao­mi Gard­ner for Kubrick, Thor­pe writes, he got a very dif­fer­ent response: “Although the great direc­tor liked the title, he said he could not imag­ine it becom­ing a hit. The two friends nev­er dis­cussed the song again, although they con­tin­ued to work togeth­er close­ly on A Clock­work Orange.” Kaplan didn’t take the rejec­tion per­son­al­ly, but he’s pleased it has final­ly emerged for the pub­lic to hear. “I know it doesn’t sound like any­thing else,” he says. It cer­tain­ly does­n’t sound remote­ly like any of the music in 2001.

Kubrick may not have cared for “2001: A Gar­den of Per­son­al Mir­rors,” but it does, in its way, cap­ture the spir­it of a film Kaplan calls “a meta­phys­i­cal dra­ma encom­pass­ing evo­lu­tion, rein­car­na­tion, the beau­ty of space, the ter­ror of sci­ence and the mys­tery of mankind,” a film that “required crit­ics and audi­ences to sur­ren­der to its unique rhythms.”

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Werner Herzog Discovers the Ecstasy of Skateboarding: “That’s Kind of My People”

in Film, Sports | February 1st, 2021

If Wern­er Her­zog has ever stood atop a skate­board, cin­e­ma seems not to have record­ed it. But when asked by online skate­board­ing mag­a­zine Jenkem to dis­cuss the sport and/or lifestyle, he did so with char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly lit­tle reser­va­tion. “I’m not famil­iar with the scene of skate­board­ing,” he admits in the video inter­view above. “At the same time, I had the feel­ing, yes, that’s kind of my peo­ple.” Fans will make the con­nec­tion between skate­board­ing videos and the Bavar­i­an film­mak­er’s ear­ly doc­u­men­tary The Great Ecsta­sy of Wood­carv­er Stein­er, on cham­pi­on ski jumper Wal­ter Stein­er, even before a clip of it appears.

In fact Her­zog him­self, as revealed in the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal short Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog, only turned film­mak­er after shelv­ing his own dreams of ski-jump­ing. The expe­ri­ence must have taught him vis­cer­al­ly, through those parts of the body that don’t for­get, what it means to make count­less attempts result­ing in count­less fail­ures — with a bet­ter fail­ure here and there, and at some dis­tant, ecsta­t­ic moment, per­haps a suc­cess.

Viewed at great enough length, the kind of skate­board­er who attempts a trick on video dozens, even hun­dreds of times, before land­ing it could well be a char­ac­ter from one of Her­zog’s own films, espe­cial­ly his doc­u­men­taries about men unable to stop putting them­selves in har­m’s way in the name of their fix­a­tions.

“So many fail­ures,” mar­vels Her­zog as he watch­es one such video. “That’s aston­ish­ing.” It cer­tain­ly “does­n’t do good to his pelvis, nor to his elbows,” Her­zog adds, but such is the price of ecsta­sy. For him, the obscu­ri­ty of the vast major­i­ty of skate­board­ers only com­pounds the sacred­ness of their prac­tice. This as opposed to the David Blaines of the world, whose phys­i­cal feats “are meant only for his own pub­lic­i­ty, and for shin­ing out in the media. Skate­board kids are not out for the media. They do it for the joy of it, and for the fun of it.” If Her­zog were to pay cin­e­mat­ic trib­ute to these kids, sure­ly he would make sim­i­lar obser­va­tions though voiceover nar­ra­tion. As for his instinct of how to fill out the rest of the sound­track, “What comes to mind first and fore­most would be Russ­ian Ortho­dox church choirs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Tony Hawk & Archi­tec­tur­al His­to­ri­an Iain Bor­den Tell the Sto­ry of How Skate­board­ing Found a New Use for Cities & Archi­tec­ture

“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Bet­ter”: How Samuel Beck­ett Cre­at­ed the Unlike­ly Mantra That Inspires Entre­pre­neurs Today

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Internet Archive Now Digitizing 1,000,000+ Objects from a Massive Cinema History Library

in Archives, Film, History, Internet Archive | February 1st, 2021


Major motion pic­tures need the work of writ­ers, direc­tors, actors, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, and a slew of oth­er pro­fes­sion­als besides. That group also includes researchers, whose role has until recent­ly gone prac­ti­cal­ly uncel­e­brat­ed out­side the indus­try. In 2015, film­mak­er Daniel Raim brought the work of the film researcher to light with Harold and Lil­lian: A Hol­ly­wood Love Sto­ry, about pro­duc­tion design­er Harold Michel­son and his researcher wife Lil­lian. “In Raim’s doc­u­men­tary, she talks about work­ing on Fid­dler on the Roof and the film­mak­ers need­ed to know what a Jew­ish wom­an’s under­gar­ments looked like in the 1890s,” writes The Hol­ly­wood Reporter’s Emi­ly Hilton. How could she find such obscure infor­ma­tion?

“Michel­son sat on a bench at Fair­fax and Bev­er­ly near a Jew­ish deli and spoke to women who were about the right age to have been alive in that era.” One of these women “ran home and grabbed a sewing pat­tern for her to ref­er­ence. This research inspired the out­fits that Τevye’s daugh­ters wear in the num­ber: knee length bloomers with scal­loped edges.”

As yet, this pat­tern has­n’t appeared in the Michel­son Cin­e­ma Research Library, now host­ed online at the Inter­net Archive. But it may yet, as the project of dig­i­ti­za­tion and upload­ing has hard­ly begun: it was just last year that the nona­ge­nar­i­an Lil­lian Michel­son donat­ed to the Archive her for­mi­da­ble col­lec­tion of research mate­ri­als, amassed over her long career.

“After near­ly six decades serv­ing film­mak­ers first at Samuel Gold­wyn, then the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute, Zoetrope Stu­dio, Para­mount and Dream­Works,” writes the Los Ange­les Times’ Mary McNa­ma­ra, “the library filled 1,594 box­es: tens of thou­sands of books, pho­tographs, mag­a­zines and a panoply of oth­er visu­al resources. All of this had been sit­ting for five years in a stor­age facil­i­ty, paid for by friends who could not bear to see it all destroyed.” Now that the dig­i­tal archival process is under­way, you can browse the first 1,300 or so entries at the Inter­net Archive, which allows users to vir­tu­al­ly check out the Michel­son Cin­e­ma Research Library’s books on sub­jects rang­ing from the­atri­cal cos­tumes and vin­tage cin­e­ma lob­by cards to places like Japan and Paris to less expect­ed top­ics like the Amaz­ing Kre­skin and the exter­nals of the Catholic Church.

But then, a Hol­ly­wood researcher must be pre­pared to learn about any­thing, and by all accounts Lil­lian Michel­son was per­haps the great­est of them all. In addi­tion to its com­pre­hen­sive­ness, her library became a hang­out of choice for a vari­ety of stu­dio pro­fes­sion­als and celebri­ties includ­ing Tom Waits. (“I wouldn’t be sur­prised if that’s how he found some time to unwind,” says Raim, “just drink­ing tea there.”) The Inter­net Archive describes her col­lec­tion as con­sist­ing of “5,000 books, 30,000 pho­tographs, and more than 1,000,000 clip­pings, scrap­books and ephemera,” more of which will come online as time goes by. Even­tu­al­ly the site will con­tain all the mate­ri­als from which Michel­son drew vital knowl­edge for film­mak­ers like Roman Polan­s­ki, Alfred Hitch­cock, and Stan­ley Kubrick. And if her research mate­ri­als sat­is­fied those three, they’re more than good enough for us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Formula for The Coen Brothers/Noah Hawley’s Fargo – Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #79

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | January 28th, 2021

Your hosts Mark Lin­se­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Tam­ler from the Very Bad Wiz­ards pod­cast to con­sid­er the plau­dits and com­plaints heaped on this moral­i­ty-tale-turned-orga­nized-crime-dra­ma that began with the 1006 film and  has con­tin­ued through a 4‑season TV show. We delve into its elab­o­rate style, “tun­dra west­ern” set­ting, dry humor (includ­ing “Min­neso­ta nice”), speechi­fy­ing, gen­der issues, stunt cast­ing, and the role of chance in its plot­ting. Did the show go down­hill in its lat­er sea­sons, and is there alto­geth­er too much rehash involved? Yes, there are spoil­ers, but no, it bare­ly mat­ters.

Check out these resources for more opin­ions and back­ground infor­ma­tion:

Fol­low @tamler. Hear him on The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life. Check out his book, Why Hon­or Mat­ters.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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How Quentin Tarantino Shoots a Film at 3 Different Budget Levels: Reservoir Dogs ($1 Million), Pulp Fiction ($8 Million), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ($95 Million)

in Film | January 22nd, 2021

Quentin Taran­ti­no has nev­er shied away from talk­ing, at length and at a rapid clip, about his process. “In anoth­er life,” Col­in Mar­shall writes in a pre­vi­ous post on the sub­ject, he might have become a “fore­most prac­ti­tion­er” of the video essay on cin­e­ma. His metic­u­lous analy­ses of not only his own films but also the hun­dreds he references–or out­right steals from–can be dizzy­ing, the rav­ings of an over­ac­tive cre­ative mind that seems impos­si­ble to rein in.

Taran­ti­no has also giv­en us sig­nif­i­cant insight into his screen­writ­ing process, say­ing “I was put on Earth to face the blank page” and claim­ing that he watch­es the entire film in his mind’s eye before putting pen to paper. He wrote Pulp Fic­tion “off and on,” Mark Seal notes at Van­i­ty Fair, “in a one-room apart­ment with no phone or fax” in Ams­ter­dam. Then he sought out vet­er­an Hol­ly­wood typ­ist Lin­da Chen, who agreed to type, and edit, the man­u­script for free.

“His hand­writ­ing is atro­cious,” says Chen. “He’s a func­tion­al illit­er­ate. I was aver­ag­ing about 9,000 gram­mat­i­cal errors per page. After I would cor­rect them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”

As a writer, Tarantino’s quirks don’t actu­al­ly seem out of place. As a direc­tor, his process would not seem to lend itself to the most dis­ci­plined pro­duc­tion. The final prod­uct of that error-rid­den script, how­ev­er, became what Roger Ebert called “the most influ­en­tial” movie of the 90s, “so well writ­ten in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zom­bie writ­ers who take ‘screen­writ­ing’ class­es that teach them the for­mu­las for ‘hit films.’” Of course, great writ­ing is an indis­pens­able part of mak­ing a great film, but so too is great film­mak­ing.…

How did Taran­ti­no go from fever­ish­ly hand-scrib­bled script to a “most influ­en­tial” film as a direc­tor? He has worked with­in strict lim­i­ta­tions, as on his direc­to­r­i­al debut, Reser­voir Dogs, with larg­er bud­gets and bet­ter sets, as on Pulp Fic­tion, and on his most recent film, the $95 mil­lion Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood. But he has always main­tained a con­sis­tent visu­al style eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able across all nine of his films.

In the video essay above from In Depth Cine, you can learn more of the sto­ry of how Taran­ti­no accom­plished his direc­to­r­i­al visions, and how that style fol­lowed him from film to film. The video gets into tech­ni­cal details like the choice of 35mm cam­eras and the light­ing place­ment. It also tells the sto­ry of how three films—Reser­voir Dogs, Pulp Fic­tion, and Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood—used their vast­ly dif­fer­ent bud­get lev­els, while all remain­ing true to each oth­er and to their writer and direc­tor’s inten­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Brâncuși Captures His Sculpture & Life on Film: Watch Rare Footage Shot Between 1923–1939

in Art, Film | January 20th, 2021

Here in the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry, even the non-artists among us car­ry dig­i­tal video cam­eras in our pock­ets. Back in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the abil­i­ty to film your own life and work, or that of your coterie, was­n’t so close at hand — unless, of course, you ran with the avant-garde. Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși did, hav­ing been brought into the artis­tic and intel­lec­tu­al scene of the Paris of the 1910s, to which he’d made his way from his native Roma­nia. He even­tu­al­ly count­ed among his friends the likes of Pablo Picas­so, Ezra Pound, Mar­cel Duchamp, Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, Tris­tan Tzara, and Man Ray, who got the inno­v­a­tive, hard­work­ing and famous­ly low-tech sculp­tor prac­tic­ing cin­e­ma.

“In the ear­ly 1920s, Man Ray, who had pre­vi­ous­ly taught Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși how to han­dle a still cam­era, intro­duced him to the movie cam­era,” says Ubuweb in a descrip­tion of “fifty min­utes of film, shot between 1923 and 1939,” that rep­re­sents “the sum total of all the images ever filmed by Brân­cuși.”

The artist “makes use of fram­ing, shad­ows, inci­den­tal light and refrac­tion in order to acti­vate the plas­tic prop­er­ties of his sculp­tures, and opens up this visu­al analy­sis to move­ment and to time.” Pieces such as Leda and the scan­dalous Princess X become the sub­jects of their own sequences; lat­er, we wit­ness “Bran­cusi’s jour­ney to Roma­nia and the con­struc­tion of the End­less Col­umn in Târ­gu Jiu.”

These End­less Col­umn pas­sages, as art crit­ic Blake Gop­nik sees them, show “Brân­cuși obsessed with how his soar­ing sculp­ture comes to life in the open air.” From all this footage Gop­nik gets the sense that Brân­cuși was “less inter­est­ed in mak­ing fan­cy muse­um objects than in putting new kinds of almost-liv­ing things into the world,” and indeed draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from the liv­ing things of the world: “In one of the clips, Brân­cuși turns his cam­era on a pac­ing hawk, which comes across as a close, nat­ur­al ana­log to the many ‘birds’ he cre­at­ed as sculp­tures.” Anoth­er “shows one of his stone pedestals, which meant as much to him as the sculp­tures set on them, sup­port­ing a live flap­per doing an ecsta­t­ic dance” — cap­ti­vat­ing evi­dence of his inter­est in forms of life beyond the avian.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Film of Sculp­tor Auguste Rodin Work­ing at His Stu­dio in Paris (1915)

Man Ray’s Por­traits of Ernest Hem­ing­way, Ezra Pound, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­er 1920s Icons

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­terBooks on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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David Lynch’s Projection Instructions for Mulholland Drive (2001)

in Film | January 15th, 2021

David Lynch is known for being per­snick­ety about deliv­er­ing the cor­rect view­ing expe­ri­ence to his audi­ence, as he con­sid­ers the cin­e­ma a sacred place. In a doc­u­men­tary short a few years back, he explained, “It’s so mag­i­cal, I don’t know why, to go into a the­ater and have the lights go down. It’s very qui­et and then the cur­tains start to open. And then you go into a world.”

How­ev­er, the cin­e­math­eque is also the space where direc­tors have the least con­trol. They can hope that each print that goes out has been print­ed cor­rect­ly (espe­cial­ly dur­ing the days of film), or that the sound is clear and/or loud enough, but, in a wide release, hope is all direc­tors can do most of the time. There are excep­tions: Stan­ley Kubrick over­saw the rere­lease prints of his films. And Alfred Hitch­cock demand­ed that there would be no late seat­ing for Psy­cho-—a tac­tic that worked to the film’s advan­tage.

This card (above) from David Lynch came with every print of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve that was sent out to the­aters. “I under­stand this is an unusu­al request yet I do need your help,” he writes. Lynch asks that the vol­ume be raised 3db and that the image be giv­en a tad more head­room.

John Neff, in a post on the Face­book Lynch­land group, explained the card: “The vol­ume request was because when we heard it in the Direc­tor’s Guild The­ater for the cast and crew screen­ing, David thought it was too qui­et. The pic­ture head­room request was because of the orig­i­nal TV aspect ratio. These con­cerns have been addressed in all for­mat releas­es since the orig­i­nal DVD release.”

Mul­hol­land Dri­ve was orig­i­nal­ly shot, or rather, the first half of the film was shot as a tele­vi­sion pilot for ABC, so a 16:9 (1.78:1) aspect ratio was expect­ed. But when the stu­dios passed on the pilot, Lynch fin­ished the film as a stand­alone fea­ture. Cin­e­mas matt pro­jec­tions at 1.85:1, cut­ting down on the head­room. (None of this effects the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive, which is stan­dard 35mm.)

Lynch sim­i­lar­ly cares about home view­ers. The first direc­tor-approved box set of his short films came with a sim­i­lar, Lynch-cre­at­ed cal­i­bra­tion video so you could con­trol the col­or and the white bal­ance. And one of the rea­sons fans keep wait­ing for a prop­er Blu-Ray release of Lost High­way is that Lynch has yet to over­see a prop­er trans­fer. When Kino Lor­ber released theirs in 2019, Lynch took to Twit­ter to tell fans to skip it: “Dear Twit­ter Friends, A Blu-ray of LOST HIGHWAY will be released very soon. It was made from old ele­ments and NOT from a restora­tion of the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive. I hope that a ver­sion from the restora­tion of the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive will hap­pen as soon as pos­si­ble.”

As far as I know, he has not weighed in on the cur­rent prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with HDTVs, but Tom Cruise has been tak­ing care of that. And what­ev­er you do, do not watch Mul­hol­land Dri­ve on your iPhone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

David Lynch Explains How Sim­ple Dai­ly Habits Enhance His Cre­ativ­i­ty

David Lynch Being a Mad­man for a Relent­less 8 Min­utes and 30 Sec­onds

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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