Sydney Pollack was a noted director and actor, as his obituaries noted, but he also was an advocate for DVDs. In particular, Pollack — who died Monday at 73 after a fight with cancer – was one of the few Hollywood filmmakers who publicly championed seeing movies in their original widescreen format on DVD.

His message wasn’t just a rant, though. He also sought to educate viewers, as he did on one of the extras on his DVD for The Interpreter, which I covered a few years ago:

“If I package toothpaste and told you you were going to get half the toothpaste in the tube, you probably wouldn’t buy it,” he says in the five-minute segment. “And yet people continually think they’re getting something better with this,” he says while pointing to a pan-and-scan image that fills a TV screen. “There’s half an image here.”

In a sample scene from the widescreen version of the film, a repairman replaces a broken lock at a crime scene while a policeman stands next to a door where star Sean Penn is about to enter. Pollack switches to the pan-and-scan image to show that only the repairman is seen.

“I’m making a plea for my colleagues and myself, who spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell you the story in the best possible way visually,” Pollack says. “And then someone else has to come in and cut the edges off of all that and pan and scan it. So you’re not seeing what story we tried to tell you.”

Thanks to Sydney Pollack for helping to tell the whole story. 

Speaking of DVDs, today brings the first-season release of the 1960s TV show The Invaders, which I wrote about in Sunday’s paper. If you’re not familiar with the show but liked The X-Files, be sure to check it out. It was one of the later show’s influences.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under DVDs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.