The other day I was telling Ben and Erik how I still feel awkward composing for widescreen. I was speculating that with the growing standardization around widescreen (e.g., HD format), maybe kids in the future will be making art on 16 x 9 format drawing pads and find the proportion totally normal.
Anyway, every once in a while I drop in on former Xena director Josh Becker's website (beckerfilms.com). This guy is even more curmudgeonly than me. The site is like a long rant about how films have gone downhill since the 50's. He even hates widescreen, seeming to prefer the 4:3 format. His interview with Quentin Tarantino (having just directed Reservoir Dogs) turns into a commentary against widescreen and is pretty amusing:
J.B. You shot the film wide-screen.
Q.T. Yeah. 2:35 ratio.
J.B. That's posed problems for filmmakers since it began in the fifties. There are certain things that are naturally wide-screen, but a lot of stuff just isn't.
Q.T. I thought wide-screen was perfect for this movie. When people think of wide-screen they'll think of westerns, or of...
J.B. ..."LAWRENCE OF ARABIA"...
Q.T. ...Or deserts, or Death Valley. I think wide-screen makes things more intimate. It's so big and takes you so close. It takes you inside the people, inside their space.
J.B. But if you do a close-up you have two-thirds of the screen empty.
Q.T. But I think that's great.
J.B. Although you say you have a theatrical release, the life of a movie these days is on video. What do you do with your wide-screen?
Q.T. I don't give a damn. I don't even remotely care about the video release. As far as I'm concerned this has got two lives that are important for me: theatrical release and laser disc which will be letter-box. Forget the video.
J.B. Fritz Lang said that the only thing wide-screen was good for was snakes and high school commencements.
In a section on screenwriting structure, Becker takes another jab at widescreen:
In the 1950s the movie business began to fall apart. With the looming threat of TV (mainly shot live in New York at that time), Hollywood, with a predictable lack of foresight, went into a total panic. Instead of saying TV is just like movies -- actors saying lines on sets recorded with a camera -- so we'll just make TV shows here in Hollywood, too (which is what ultimately occurred), the moguls decided that movies should be bigger, longer, and wider. Thus came the glut of wide-screen, sword-and-sandal epics. As Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, told David Brown, the head of the story department, "I want stories that are wide, not deep."
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