The Extras
The Extras
Warner Archive September Release Announcement
George Feltenstein announces the Warner Archive's upcoming September Blu-ray releases.
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Hello and welcome to the extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies and animation and their release on digital DVD, blu-ray and 4K or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Lard, your host, and joining me is George Feldenstein to announce the September Blu-ray releases from the Warner Archive. Hi, george.
Speaker 2:Hi, tim, great to be with you and thank you for the opportunity to allow me to speak to the folks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's always a lot of excitement to hear what's coming out in the next month, and September is right along those lines. We're a little bit later than maybe the previous month, so I know the excitement has been building, so let's dive right in. How do you want to tackle these?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the best way to do this, since it's such a diverse and differentiated slate, is to start alphabetically. So the first film I want to talk about is Julian Schnabel's Amazing Film from the Year 2000, before Night Falls. This is a very moving and important film. It was released by the Fine Line Features Division of New Line 23 years ago and I think it's kind of been somewhat overlooked and forgotten, and that's part of our mission here. So this is a beautiful new presentation and the linchpin of this whole film is the amazing performance by Javier Bardem and his portrayal of Ronaldo Arenas. I hope I pronounced that correctly. He was the Cuban poet whose memoirs and life story inspired this movie and a lot of people thought Mr Bardem should have earned the best actor Oscar for his performance and I'm hoping he gets it for another performance because he's a remarkable actor.
Speaker 2:It's a unique modern film. I know it's 23 years old but I think of it as modern, given that some of our releases go back to the 1920s. So everything is in perspective. But also in this film is Johnny Depp, and this was kind of representative of the fact that Johnny Depp was making these big budget pictures. I think they had already started doing Pirates movies by this time. But he also was wanting to contribute to more artistic films and this was definitely an art film is an art film and this is a new 4K scan off the camera negative. It's a beautiful presentation and we've been able to carry over all of the legacy special features that were on the original DVD release from New Line Home Entertainment. Not an easy task to find all of those pieces, given that New Line merged into our system about 15 years ago, so it made it not easy, but we were able to find everything eventually and hence this release. So I think a lot of people don't know this movie and if you don't, you're in for an arresting performance and a really impressive piece of filmmaking. So I heartily recommend the film. I think people need to learn about it, learn more about it, and since we're going alphabetically, we're also staying in the somewhat more recent mode. This movie is only 26 years old and I laugh about that because we were getting a lot of commentary from people saying that we weren't releasing enough movies past 1960. And we always are trying to make a balance and this month we have three films from the classic era and three films that I consider modern classic era, which means like post 1990. So the next film is from 1997, a mere 26 years old, and this is a film we've gotten an enormous amount of requests for.
Speaker 2:It's a film that was long in production. It is was intended to be an homage to the MGM musical when it was in production and it's an animated musical comedy and they actually hired Gene Kelly to be a consultant to the animated choreography and the film was called Cats Don't Dance. It was the one and only production of Turner feature animation which was to be a part of Turner broadcasting. As they entered into film production of all sorts by buying New Line Cinema, by buying Castle Rock Entertainment, and by the time this film was finished and ready for release, turner Broadcasting had been purchased by Time Warner and this fell under the Warner Bros umbrella to release. But while its theatrical performance wasn't what people had hoped, it did develop a really rapidly large and enthusiastic following on home video and, of course, on television. So we've had a lot of people send notes and make posts in various forums and on our Facebook page about.
Speaker 2:You know they wanted Cats Don't Dance, especially last month when we announced the release of Gay Parade. It was like you have another animated musical with Cats. What's happening with Cats Don't Dance? And finally we have this beautiful new master. It sounds great, it looks great and it is filled with songs, original songs written by Randy Newman. The female vocals are supplied by the late, wonderful Natalie Cole. Scott Bacula and Jasmine Guy provide the voices for the main characters. It's beautifully designed, very well written and it's very, very enjoyable. And then, to add to the fun, we put some show business themed loony tunes on the disc and I think people are really, really going to enjoy Cats Don't Dance.
Speaker 1:I did have one question about the restoration. On this one, George.
Speaker 2:Oh well, there was nothing to restore per se, but what we did was a new 4K scan off the camera negative, which we always tried to do. So it's a new, brand new master made especially for this. The term restoration sometimes gets misused and I see people referring to a new 2K master off and inter positive as a restoration, and I have some friends who do photochemical restoration who really resent that. But the main point of it is we have a standard of quality that we adhere to very carefully and I think people are going to love the way this looks. It is probably looking better than it ever has, given the tools that we now have. So it's very, very exciting. And then the next film, since we're going alphabetically. We're staying in the seas, but we're going back 64 years from Cats Don't Dance.
Speaker 2:This is Christopher Strong, the second RKO film to star Catherine Hepburn. She had made her emergence on screen the year before with the Bill of Divorcement, co-starring John Garfield. This was her follow up film in 1933, under the aegis of David O Selznick, who was the head of production at RKO at the time. But what really makes it notable is it was directed by Dorothy Arsner. Dorothy Arsner was the only very active director making films in Hollywood for the major studios who was female. There were a lot of female film directors in the early days of silence and the role of women as film directors was diminished as the industry grew and Dorothy Arsner was really the only director I know that was doing feature films for studios like RKO and MGM and with Christopher Strong you get outstanding performance by Hepburn, some amazing costumes, beautiful art direction and this is a 4K scan off the original camera negative. It's been restored. There's using the word. This is a true restoration because we were coming from the nitrate camera negative. This is one of those RKO films where the original negative survived and the audio also was restored and the presentation is quite impressive and the film is really needing to be better known, as is the story of Dorothy Arsner, and our partners at Criterion put out another one of Dorothy Arsner's films in the last couple of years Dance Girl Dance from 1940, which got a lot of attention because of a female director's perspective.
Speaker 2:We also released one of her films on DVD that she made at MGM a few years ago and hopefully there'll be Blu-rays of that coming as we revisit titles. We could only do on Blu-ray years ago, but I think people are really going to enjoy this film. We've also added some HD shorts one with the three Stooges before they became the three Stooges when they were part of the Bodville Act Ted Healy and his Stooges and that's an HD short which people will really enjoy. What's interesting about it the reason we put it on here is it's called Plain Nuts and they actually used a musical number from an earlier 1931 film called Flying High, where there are all the chorus girls, justice airplanes basically. So given that Catherine Hepburn plays in Aviatrix, in Christopher Strong, we thought that was a good tie-in. We also have the last short subject that Fatty Arbuckle made at Vitaphone, called Tomalio. It was released right after his untimely death. And then we have a buddy cartoon from Warner Brothers, also an HD, called Buddy's Beer Garden. So it kind of rounds out the whole package and I think this is a film that is worthy of rediscovery because a lot of people don't know it.
Speaker 2:Then again, since we're moving alphabetically, the next film thrusts us back into the 1990s and falls right in the middle of Cat's Don't Dance and Before Night Falls. This is from 1998. This is a Castle Rock production called Palmetto, and it's from the brilliant director, volker Schlaundorf, who made one of my favorite films of the 80s for sure, the Tin Drum. He's an incredible talent and this is a neo-noir. It is a film that a lot of people really, really like and we've had a lot of requests for it, so it seemed like a perfect addition to the Warner Archive collection, because we know our fans love noir and this is a very modern take on it, and Woody.
Speaker 2:Harrelson, elizabeth Shoe, gina Gershwin, chloe Sebigne. It's a great cast, the music is wonderful, it's beautifully shot and I think people are really, really going to enjoy this film. And then the next film that we're going to talk about takes us back to the 1930s, and this is a film that's famous more for the circumstances under which it was made and released than for the content of the movie. To some degree it's a charming, enjoyable, entertaining romantic comedy co-starring Clark Gable and Gene Harlow at MGM, I believe, for the sixth pairing. That's off the top of my head. I may have the number wrong, but they were teamed often, and this was unfortunately their last teaming, because Ms Harlow had your remit poisoning and died of kidney failure right as they were about to wrap production. And I went through the production files on this film and read about how they were thinking of refilming the film with another actress. And then it was decided they could find a way to tell the story. They had most of Harlow's scene shot and those that weren't were used with a double from the back and someone doing vocal dubbing that had a similar style, but that shouldn't overwhelm the film itself, which is a delightful story set at the race track. Gable's great Harlow's terrific. It is insane to think she passed away at 26 years of age and yet left such an impressive body of work. And for those who are looking for other Gable Harlow films that haven't made it to Blu-ray, I can assure you they're on their way.
Speaker 2:We can't always know what's going to be ready when, because we have two or three dozen films at any given time in some state of production, so when they're ready and we can release them, they come out. So if you see something come out and you say, well, why didn't this come before? That, I know. When I didn't work here and I was on the outside looking in, I was confused Well, why would you do this when you could do that? Well, this is a business. This is how we run the business. Certain things take two years or three years, certain things take two months, and the result, either way, is a gorgeous release. So this looks terrific.
Speaker 2:It's a 4K scan for our best preservation elements, and we added a short subject on here, of course, as well as the trailer. The short subject is in high definition. It's the very first in a series of shorts MGM made to promote their upcoming releases and give a little background into how film gets to be from celluloid to a finished motion picture and it takes you very quickly through that process. And then you see people on the MGM lot. You see Jack Dawn, the makeup artist, who created all the makeup for hundreds of MGM films, including, most notably, the Wizard of Oz, gilbert Adrian, the costume designer. You get to see all those people and people like Rosalyn Russell walking in between MGM buildings and, most importantly, they tell you what the films are that are coming up and some of them never got made and some of them got made with different casts. So it's really fascinating. It's called the romance of celluloid and there was a whole series of these, probably for at least 10 years, maybe seven years, I'm not quite sure when they kind of stopped doing them. But we have made most of these available before on DVDs in the past and on some Blu-ray releases. But this one we couldn't find the film elements and we finally did because it was buried under another title's inventory. So it's an HD presentation of the short and I think people will really like it for the behind the scenes at MGM and how movies get made perspective.
Speaker 2:I also think Saratoga is notable in that you get to see the wonderful Hattie McDaniel and Clark Gable two years before Gone with the Wind. They have a very close friendship in real life and you can see the chemistry is very vital there and she's delightful in this film, as is Lionel Barrymore and Frank Morgan and Oona Merkel and Walter Pigeon. It's an all star MGM cast and a delightful film. And then the last film is one of my personal favorites, but it also comes from one of my personal favorite directors and that's William Wellman. This is Westwood the Women from 1951. And if ever there was a movie that people needed to see from the golden days of cinema that reeks of the Importance of female empowerment, it's Westward the women.
Speaker 2:Bill Wellman was the man to bring this story to the screen and we have a behind-the-scenes featurette that was on our DVD challenge of the wilderness. That's on the disc. We have the radio show, which has never been on a disc before, from Lux Radio Theatre. We have an amazing commentary by the wonderful film historian and author Scott Eiman. Scott is a tremendous human being as well as a brilliantly talented author and Historian, and we were so fortunate to get him to record a commentary for this film, which was part of our DVD release 12 years ago 11 years ago but Westward the women was one of our top is one of our top 10 Best-selling DVD titles. It has been a massive seller and it's driven me crazy that we haven't been able to bring it to high definition. And now we can. It is a 4k scan From our best preservation elements. It looks and sounds amazing. We have two hd tomm and jerry cartoons, the trailer and hd.
Speaker 2:It's a wonderful package for a wonderful movie, and I should just Not forget to note that the original story Was written by Frank Capra. It's very odd that Frank Capra would have his name appended to a film as creating this story, and my understanding is I can't say this as fact, but my understanding is that Frank Capra originally Was attached to direct the film Wild bill ended up being the one who did direct it. They were very good friends, capra and wellman, and everything I've heard from people who were in the movie and by looking at some of the behind the scenes stills, you can see that wellman was a no-nonsense guy. He was a tough guy, but he was also extraordinarily sensitive.
Speaker 2:All of that comes through in this movie and the actress, denise Darcel, who mgm tried to turn into a Movie star. She never quite achieved that stardom. She was a very major performer in battleground, which we put out on blu-ray about five, six years ago, and she was most recently seen in our release of dangerous when wet with ester williams and for nanda llamas. Um, I had the pleasure of meeting her Many years ago. She was active in the classic Hollywood Community. I think she attended early tcm film festivals. She was a lovely lady and she really holds her own against Robert Taylor, who is one of everybody's favorite leading men and thankfully he was very prolific and we have a wonderful cinematic legacy of his, even given that he his life was cut short by lung cancer and it was a horrible situation to lose him relatively young. But all of his films I find quite interesting and some of them are downright brilliant.
Speaker 2:This is one of them and I think people are really going to enjoy this and all six of the movies we have coming out september 26th and, most importantly, we're hard at work on the october releases and the november releases and december releases and there are going to be some big surprises and people who are complaining.
Speaker 2:Where is such and such? Because people love to complain. That's what the internet was built, for I knew that when we released these six films, people who love the older classics would complain about the newer ones, just as in the past few months, when we were focusing on more vintage classics, people were Complaining that we weren't releasing anything after 1960 or 70. And of course, all this was in the works and I would just Shake my head and say you know, we just can't please everybody, and that's a truth. We're never going to be able to have every release, make every person happy, but we aim to make our consumers happy and to do right by the library and make things available in the best possible condition, and we're hard at work on a bunch of things that I think are going to make people really happy.
Speaker 1:Well, that does lead me to one question I did have kind of along along the lines of that topic and I know that recently, you know, you released the current TV series, like you know, ongoing ones like Big Bang Theory and Blu-ray, or Lucifer on Blu-ray and some others. But have you released newer films like this on Blu-ray that have been as recent as the 90s and 2000s before?
Speaker 2:Actually we released more recent films than before Night Falls. We released a mighty wind on Blu-ray many years ago, several years ago, something we also released that was just kind of filling in a hole, that somehow it never got a Blu-ray release. That was Starsky and Hutch and people were saying what? But I have to clarify that basically the business has changed, at least in the United States, where anything that was a new to format Blu-ray release not a 4K, but a Blu-ray release that had never been released before in the format. I think the last time something didn't go through us for feature film was maybe 2016.
Speaker 2:We are designated to release the new to format library titles that are remastered and offer the best possible quality that Blu-ray has to offer. So I think that explains it. We have tried to be as broad as possible. We are the Blu-ray catalog arm of the company and have been for many years now, at least in the United States and Canada. So it is with great pleasure that I'm delighted to spend this time to talk with you, tim, and I'm looking forward to when we do the real big show and you've watched all these discs and you've seen them and we can have a straightforward conversation about each one, and I will be very anxious to hear what you think of all these discs.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm excited to see some of the newer ones and I know that it's controversial for some people who don't appreciate as much of the newer stuff because I remember seeing when night falls and I remember seeing Palmeira in the theaters, so I'm looking forward to rewatching them again, seeing them on Blu-ray, and then, of course, all the classics from the 30s and 40s and 50s as well. So, as always, george, it's a pleasure to have you come on and I'm really glad we had you on today to explain a little bit too about how you put together the older and the newer and what the thinking is behind that. So I think that's important for everybody to know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is because we're a very small team trying to do our best and we want people to know that we hear what people are saying and I feel really good about where we're going and I know there are going to be some things that will happily surprise a lot of people in the months to come, as well as next year.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to it, along with everybody else. So thanks, george.
Speaker 2:Thank you, tim, it's been great.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks again to George Feldenstein for coming on the podcast to go over the upcoming September releases from the Warner Archive. I will post more information on these releases on our Facebook page and in our Facebook group called the Warner Archive and the Warner Brothers Catalog Group. So look for all of those links in the podcast show notes. And just as a reminder, george and I will be reviewing the August Blu-ray once they are released. So look for that podcast coming soon and we hope to have a special guest joining us for a review of one of the August titles. So there's a little tease for you to see if you can guess which title that might be. Whether you are a first-time listener or a long-term fan of the show, don't forget to follow or subscribe at your favorite podcast provider. That way you won't miss any of our upcoming podcasts. Until next time you've been listening to Tim Mellard Stay slightly obsessed.