"But it's a Brian De Palma movie!"
I felt a little geeky hissing that to the slack-jawed manager of the Park Plaza Cinema on Hilton Head Island. Not that it takes a degree in cinematography to understand that if a movie like The Black Dahlia doesn’t fit right on the screen, you do something to rectify it, generally something that takes place in the projection booth (although sometimes it’s as simple as readjusting the curtains on either side of the screen).
“Our screen isn’t big enough,” was the manager’s response when I stormed out of the cubicle known as a “theater” to report that The Black Dahlia wasn’t being shown in its correct aspect ratio.
The screen isn’t BIG ENOUGH? You can watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPod these days. How about a little anamorphic-lens action?
A full third of the information of the movie was lost, trailing off either end of the screen into raggedy-edged, out-of-focus black wastelands. Only the middle of the opening credits could be read; too bad Jennifer Jason Leigh wasn’t in the movie so at least we’d get one full word to guess by.
What was worse, perhaps, than the theater manager not knowing or caring that this was either annoying or a sin, depending where you stand on the continuum of cinephilia, was that the audience sat there complacently as well, not even noticing that anything was wrong.
What is it that people see and absorb when they see a movie by a thoughtful director where a third of the information is missing? And why don’t they react when TV images are stretched inappropriately to fill the new cinema-wide plasma screens, making everyone look fat and unnatural?
I’m here in South Carolina doing a few book signings at the Hilton Head Health Institute, and Movie Nights are the only times the clientele get off the training wheel and into the “real” world, partly to see a movie, and partly to see if they can do that without buying popcorn. Another of the group came with me to see the DePalma movie, and the minute I sat down, I jumped up to complain about the projection, and when nothing could be done about it, I wandered into The Guardian — or An Officer and a Gentleman in the Coast Guard — figuring that if they cut off part of Ashton Kutcher doing the Richard Gere thing it wouldn’t matter so much. The woman who stayed behind watched The Black Dahlia, or maybe, in this case, The Gray Dahlia.
Afterward, I asked what she thought of it.
“It was okay,” she said, “but I didn’t really understand all of it.”
Because she didn’t really see all of it.
Back in 1991 when I reissued CITIZEN KANE, a friend in Cincinnati went to see it at the local Loew’s octoplex. Of course, they ran it 1.85 to 1. When she complained, she was told that “those old films can’t run properly on our modern, state-of-the-art equipment.” Now she was really angry at being patronized by some punk-ass kid. He condescendingly gave her passes and she left. This happens all the time, even here in L.A., and is not ever going to change; even when I do complain, as I did two weeks ago when the same thing happened at IDLEWILD, I get a bored, “Yeah, we’ll look into it,” and all I can do is hope that it will indeed be rectified, since nobody else seems to care anymore.