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Issue Date: December 7, 2003
DVD
Raiders of lost archives
How these sleuths find the bonus footage.
By Jeffrey Ressner
Hidden between Lake Ewok and Lucas Valley Road at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, Calif., sits a large blue barn surrounded by tall oaks. Yes, it's charming, bucolic, serene. But enter this quaint farmyard structure and behold a hall of cinematic wonders.
Like the massive warehouse at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the building is filled with iconic props from George Lucas' blockbuster movies: spaceships, bullwhips, droids, even the Ark itself.
This is where Laurent Bouzereau comes in. The 41-year-old French émigré belongs to an elite group who assemble bonus content for oversized editions of movies on DVD. These "cinematic sleuths" are responsible for gathering everything that was involved in the making of a film and pulling cool footage.
For his latest project, "The Adventures of Indiana Jones," Bouzereau spent hours inside a humidity-controlled, 65-degree vault at the Lucasfilm Archives, digging through boxes upon boxes of movie outtakes and other rarities. Inside were early special-effects tests, rehearsals with director Steven Spielberg and star Harrison Ford, and screen tests.
"I was sure I'd seen everything shot for the Indy movies," says Bouzereau, a self-described "film geek" who has worked on a number of Spielberg films and organized extras for "The Birds," "The Last Picture Show" and "American Graffiti." "But there were things in the vault even I never saw."
In the past, home video divisions paid little attention to what was locked away in storage. During the '80s, films were released on videocassette with little more than a few previews of other movies to rent at Blockbuster. But DVDs, with their lavish extras that illuminate or explain, were different almost from the start.
Since they went on the market in 1997, DVDs have exploded. Industry analysts expect 2003 sales to top $15 billion, vs. less than $10 billion in total box-office ticket sales. One reason, according to some marketing studies, is added value: About a third of buyers check out bonus features before they decide to purchase a DVD, and 25% say the bonus features are extremely important.
It is possible that today's hipper audiences have stopped thinking of film simply as the movie itself. They are a generation raised on 24-hour cable channels, chat rooms and cinema studies courses. To them, movies are a vast cultural happening where abandoned sequences, marketing campaigns and backstage trivia are all as much a part of the experience as the score.
With so much at stake, every studio in town is carefully mining its archives for scrapped material. So the line of special features on box sets continues to get bigger and bigger in what seems like a game of can-you-top-this? Exhibit A: "Alien Quadrilogy" -- nine discs and a total running time of 58 hours.
Obviously, older movies won't have as many extras; footage deteriorates or is mislabeled. For years, Republic Pictures, a studio that produced '40s B movies, kept some of its treasures in moldering cardboard boxes in an attic, covered with rat droppings and dead insects. Among the items were correspondence between the head of the studio and its stars, and contracts signed by Roy Rogers and Orson Welles.
In recent years, studios have made more of an effort to maintain these gems, but, sadly, "a huge amount of ancillary materials was thrown away on a routine basis," says DVD producer Michael Arick. He tracks down obscure footage in dusty garages and musty basements of former movie-house projectionists who obsessively collected rare reels as a hobby. "If a title is 40 years old," Arick says, "it's very difficult to find stuff."
Occasionally, directors themselves had the smarts to preserve leftover scraps from the editing room. "The only reason anything from "The French Connection" survived is that I'd given some material to the motion picture academy library," says William Friedkin, who won an Oscar for directing the film. His keen foresight can be credited for the addition of seven previously unreleased scenes on the crime classic's DVD. Friedkin says there's historical value to including special features, comparing the material to Dutch Master exhibitions where sketches and early drafts of an artist's work are displayed so people can see how the artist worked up to his final paintings. "In the same way, alternate takes and deleted scenes can give you greater insight into the minds of the filmmakers," Friedkin says. "Hopefully, it will help people who teach and study film, both now and in future generations."
Besides all the scholarly stuff, he concludes, "they're marvelous to watch."
The Adventures of Indiana Jones: The new collection has five features that explore every facet of the trilogy's making. Above, an audition with (yes) Tom Selleck for the lead role, and star Harrison Ford lashing out backstage.
West Side Story: Left, a shot from a cache of 8mm home movies filmed on location by actor Bob Banas (who played Jets gang member Joyboy) that appears in a bonus documentary. Below, Robert Wagner visits wife Natalie Wood on the New York set.
The Lion King: The Platinum Edition includes footage from the Disney animation team's trip to Africa and a start-to-finish look at production. "We used everything we found," says Andy Siditsky of Buena Vista Home Entertainment. Jonathan Taylor Thomas' reading of Young Simba's lines influenced an early sketch, center. Right, the finished character.
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DVD Extras: Not on the menu
By Paul Bond
Judging from some recent DVD releases, you might get the impression nothing is left on the cutting room floor. But often there's a bit more to that "special edition" that fans won't ever see. Here's a look at what you're missing:
DIDN'T MAKE THE CUT
Bruce Almighty. 45 minutes of various takes of deleted scenes. "Jim Carrey specifically said, 'These I like, and these I don't,' " says Ken Graffeo, vice president of marketing for Universal Studios Home Video.
It's not all that uncommon for stars to play god when it comes to rejecting outtakes. Costuming photos and audition tapes are popular extras, for example, but some actors are horrified at the idea of audiences glimpsing their imperfections. MGM's home video marketing director, Amy Zwagerman, won't tattle on who turned down similar scenes for the "Sure Thing" DVD.
The Ring. The usual outtakes and bloopers. Have you seen the tape (anywhere)? No? Well, no one else has, either. The closest you'll come on the DVD is a 15-minute short film, "to maintain the mystique of the movie," says Kelley Avery, head of home entertainment at DreamWorks.
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. A featurette in which random folks in Times Square are shown scenes of the animated couch potatoes and asked to impersonate them. "It was hilarious," says David Anthony, president of Metropolis DVD. "But we got the mandate: 'Sorry, it's nixed.' "
Poetic Justice. Hours of documentary footage, including rehearsals with Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson improvising scenes. "We also have Tupac golfing [on location at a beach] and doing wild and crazy stuff," says producer Paul Hall.
LOST FOOTAGE
The Magnificent Ambersons. Orson Welles' never-released original cut -- perhaps the most famous example.
From Here to Eternity. Frank Sinatra's original screen test. People are still trying to track it down. "We even checked with his daughter," says Columbia TriStar's Michael Stradford. "Nobody we know of has it."
The Godfather. Francis Coppola's makeup test with Marlon Brando at his home. The legendary black-and-white videotape shows the great actor applying shoe polish to his hair and inserting tissues in his cheeks as he "pantomimes a study of the Don," says American Zoetrope VP Kim Aubry. "We've been searching for this holy grail of Zoetropiana for two decades."
Rambo. The fabled alternate ending. "We don't know if it really exists," says Glenn Ross, Artisan's president of Family Home Entertainment. "We've only heard that one does."
All this, of course, only scratches the surface of undelivered material. As Peter Staddon, senior VP of marketing at Fox Home Entertainment, puts it, "I'm reticent about giving too many examples; then I'll have a petition on my hands asking for another DVD because those 'cheap bastards' at Fox didn't do it right the first time."
In other cases, intended extras fell through. Take "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle:" The plan was for Drew Barrymore to host a pajama party attended by Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz and others, with highlights of the bash to be included as an extra. No such luck. "Everyone was up for it," Stradford explains, "but we couldn't get the schedules together."
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