These days, it seems Steven Soderbergh is in the news for everything except making movies.
Of course, there was the ugly and widely publicized cancellation of “Moneyball”, and now in the “In My Opinion” column in the latest issue of DGA Quarterly, Soderbergh has written a very candid, funny and scathing piece on HD channels that butcher widescreen films.
Non-aspect ratio nerds take note, this might be Greek. In particular, he speaks about films in 2.40:1 that are blown up or chopped to fit the 16:9 ratio of current television sets. Soderbergh is certainly no stranger to varying formats and composition so he knows what he’s talking about, and how important it is to the feel of the film. He shot in the “golden” Academy ratio for his WWII throwback “The Good German.” He mixed a variety of film stock, styles and elements to widespread acclaim for “Traffic.” And for last year’s “Che” even switched compositions, from 2.35:1 for Part 1 to 1.85:1 for Part 2 (of course all of four people caught this).
Soderbergh brings a refreshing director’s perspective to this long standing issue, however he keeps it very accessible, and the best part of the piece is his report card on how premium HD channels are showing movies. MGM HD, IFC HD, Sundance HD and HDNet Movies (chaired by Marc Cuban who is financing Soderbergh’s current run of low budget, digital films through Magnolia Pictures) score an “A+” while Showtime gets a solid “B.”
From there it gets ugly. HBO, who Soderbergh describes as a “poster child for stupidity”, scored a “D.” Soderbergh himself once got someone with pull to call the cable channel on his behalf to ensure the ‘Ocean’s’ films were not hacked. Awesome. But it’s AMC that scored the lowest with an embarrassing “F-” for running ads for movies in letterbox format and then showing them panned and scanned. This is made even more baffling, as their own original series like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” are shown letterboxed. So enraged by their hypocrisy, Soderbergh wishes to “expel the channel from the universe.” Yikes.
The filmmaker closes his piece by urging his colleagues to consider the matter seriously, and when possible, to negotiate how their film will be shown on television. He says the best time to do this is during negotiations when the studio “wants you the most,” and not to wait until post-production or later. The most well known of this kind of agreement, is Woody Allen’s deal with UA for “Manhattan.” Wishing to preserve Gordon Willis’ cinematography (and to perhaps make it difficult for the film to be seen, as he famously hated it) the broadcast rights for the film required the preservation of the 2.35:1 format. This was a big deal, as FCC regulations at the time did not permit any part of the screen to remain blank and it was commonplace for films to be panned and scanned for television broadcasts. So until regulations changed, the film was shown with grey bars on the top and bottom of the screen.
There is so much more great stuff in Soderbergh’s piece, that we urge you to take a few minutes and read it. The site for DGA Quarterly appears to be down, but you can read Google’s cache for the article right here. It’s heartening that one of America’s foremost contemporary auteurs isn’t afraid to take these channels to task for slacking on their responsibility to filmmakers and their work and audiences who are paying premium bucks to get these movies streamed into their homes. Someone should seriously give this guy a regular column.
When not pissing off Sony and HD movie channels, Soderbergh is putting the finishing touches on his forthcoming whistle-blower comedy “The Informant!,” which stars Matt Damon and opens on September 18th. After that he may or may not get back into production of his musical “Cleo” and he’s also got another, currently untitled, Spalding Gray documentary in the works that could conceivably come first, as last we heard, all that needs to be completed is the editing.