{"id":4362,"date":"2012-02-26T21:09:57","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T02:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=4362"},"modified":"2012-02-26T21:44:39","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T02:44:39","slug":"julie-kirgo-twilight-time-2011-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=4362","title":{"rendered":"JULIE KIRGO \/ TWILIGHT TIME (2011 \/ 2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to<\/strong><\/em>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Exclusive Interviews & Profiles<\/a> \/\u00a0DVD<\/a><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

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In Part 2 of our profile of independent home video label Twilight Time, we chat with film historian Julie Kirgo, an astute and zealous film lover whose excitement for movies great, silly, and guilty easily makes its way into her prose which accompanies the colourful stills in Twilight Time\u2019s booklets.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kirgo has also contributed to DVD audio commentaries, and like booklets and featurettes on apocryphal subjects, these value-added special features among major label releases have been generally restricted to new releases, HD remasterings of top 100 catalogue films, and\u00a0select reissues.<\/em><\/p>\n

Among indie labels, however, special features are often de rigueur, and the production of relevant and edifying extras is, in fact, a craft. There are banal extras which exist as lazily conceived padding for mediocre films; badly executed and edited extras that lack the discerning, critical eyes & ears of a smart producer; and releases done right, where all the elements form a scrapbook, a snapshot, a retrospective, a documentation and tribute to a great film, a cult classic, and a beloved piece of celluloid or VHS\u2013shot fromage.<\/em><\/p>\n

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MRH<\/strong>: How did your association with home video begin, in terms of doing liner notes and commentaries?\u00a0It\u2019s an unusual career path.<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: It is. As with many, many things in my life, I kind of drifted into it.\u00a0I\u2019ve loved movies forever and I\u2019ve also been a writer forever\u2014I\u2019ve just never done anything else. In fact, one of the very first jobs that I had when I graduated from college was writing as a freelancer for the original 1979 Alain Silver\u2013Elizabeth Ward film noir book<\/a>.\u00a0I wrote many entries in there, so I was thinking about movies from a critical perspective very early on. Then I kind of drifted away from that and actually worked as a publicist at Universal at one point, and then I started writing television and did that for 10-plus years.<\/p>\n

Later\u00a0I lived in Vermont\u00a0and was a magazine editor and journalist, and\u00a0then came back to California. I was working for a while for what was then AMC (American Movie Classics) Magazine, sometimes doing think pieces or straight journalism about a costume design exhibit in Los Angeles or\u00a0interviews with people like Theodora Van Runkel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I actually met Nick Redman because of film music. He hired me to write some liner notes and we really liked working together. I worked with him on a wonderful documentary that he made about John Ford called Becoming John Ford<\/strong> (2007) while I was writing a lot about movie music for a number of different labels.<\/p>\n

I did a few commentaries – again, because Nick is quite the entrepreneur, he would set these things up and would ask me to do them – and when he and Brian Jamieson started Twilight Time, they sort of brought me on to be their historian \/ essay writer for the booklets. The two constants for me have been writing, and just a love of movies.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: One area that\u2019s always interested me is the preparation of the special features that go into a DVD.<\/em><\/p>\n

Taking for example a commentary track, it can be done very lackadaisical where the producer will gather a bunch of people together, but there\u2019s no moderator or judicial editing, so often you\u2019ll hear \u2018how cold it was\u2019 or what someone was wearing, or how someone kept doing this and that, but there\u2019s nothing substantive.<\/em><\/p>\n

From your perspective, when you\u2019re engaged to do a commentary track, what steps do you take to ensure the track is informative, entertaining, and educational?<\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: I have to say that I\u2019ve been very lucky because every commentary track that I\u2019ve done had Nick producing it, or I worked with another producer with whom he had a long-term relationship.<\/p>\n

Nick is the best in the business for this kind of thing. Basically, he wants an educated conversation, and I think he feels the conversational style is more entertaining. You\u2019ve heard these commentaries where literally these people are reading aloud from a prepared text, and those seem not so valuable to me. The tracks that you mentioned where people are just rambling on are at the other end of the scale, and seem trivial.<\/p>\n

Nick is a superb moderator. He just knows how to steer the conversation, so there\u2019s a constant flow of talk.\u00a0Part of the skill of a good commentary producer is they will choose people who will strike sparks off each other and will be interested in each other; and he will look for a way to balance the conversation.<\/p>\n

For example, he\u2019ll have some of us talking primarily about the music, and then he\u2019ll often bring me in for \u201cliterary colour.\u201d\u00a0 We did a commentary on Fox\u2019s DVD of Jane Eyre <\/strong>(1943) starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, and it was Nick leading the commentary, it was Steven Smith (who was the biographer of the film\u2019s composer, Bernard Herrmann) discussing the music, and me for the literary background about the books.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: A commentary track can also be a good resource, much like a book about a specific film or genre. When you assemble the right mix of people together, it can offer a lot of great information. The early benchmarks were made by Criterion, via edited tracks assembled from a vast array of talent.<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: I\u2019m actually a big fan of commentaries and I almost always listen to them, and one of the biggest disappointments for me in the last few years is how sparse and scare commentaries are becoming.<\/p>\n

The studios just don\u2019t seem to be interested in doing them for catalogue titles. They will sometimes port over pre-existing commentaries or interviews, or short films or things like that, but there was a period of time where wonderful supplements were being custom-made and produced by the studios, and that really seems to be a thing of the past; they\u2019re just not willing to spend the money on extras even when they are willing to put out catalogue titles.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: I really enjoyed Fox\u2019s film noir series and it was nice to see recurring commentaries by Alain Silver and James Ursini; they were great together because they knew the genre and films inside and out.<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: And again, those are two guys who had worked together before, were at ease with each other; the fount of knowledge between the two of them is huge, and particularly on that subject. They are the experts.<\/em><\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: One of the more disappointing commentators for me is Richard Schickel. He\u2019s been okay on the odd time, but often he sounds like he\u2019s sitting in an easy chair, watching the film once, and just rambling off easy facts that come to mind.\u00a0Often there\u2019s a lot of dead space, and dead space is one of the worst things you can have in a commentary track.\u00a0I understand why he\u2019s hired, but unfortunately the end results tend to be really disappointing, and you get a sense the studios that hire him are relying on his name rather than fashioning a qualitative commentary track.<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: I think there are too many people at the studios who just don\u2019t give a damn. If you are going to participate in a commentary, you\u2019d better really love that movie; you\u2019d better be fond of it; and you\u2019d better have some enthusiasm.\u00a0If you\u2019re bored, anyone can really<\/em> hear it.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: Perhaps an example of ideal commentary participants is on Twilight Time\u2019s release of The Egyptian<\/strong> (1954).Ursini and Silver clearly loved the movie, and had a huge amount of information to say because they had researched the hell out of this film.<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: Yes, absolutely, and I think that\u2019s one of the reasons why it\u2019s often hard to get a commentary that is that educative and that interesting. There aren\u2019t that many people around who are willing to put out that kind of effort. Commentaries very often pay nothing \u2013 literally, nothing<\/em> \u2013 so there are people who, if there\u2019s not a financial incentive involved, they\u2019re just not going to care. Plenty of people I know, though, will do commentaries, because they love the movies so much and they have information to convey. They have enthusiasm to pass along, and they want other people to love the movie!<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: What are your thoughts\u00a0on newer generations who aren\u2019t getting exposed to silent films, as well as stuff from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and who regard \u201cold movies\u201d as films from the nineties?<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: It\u2019s weird. It does sometimes feel as if people are unwilling to look beyond this very narrow, 10-year period in which they currently exist: their spectrum encompasses 5 years ago, today, and potentially looking ahead 5 years from now.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what that\u2019s about because there\u2019s so much that you can get from a broader view in any art form. I\u2019m talking about music and literature and painting and all of those things. There\u2019s so much richness, and it\u2019s just out there waiting to be enjoyed. We have this whole rich past, and sometimes I feel as though people are beginning to see that again, and then other times I feel really discouraged.<\/p>\n

Maybe it has to do with the idea of the Me generation: if you\u2019re thinking very much in terms of yourself, maybe you can only think in terms of the now, or of your own narrow life. I grew up imagining and fantasizing so much about the past. It\u2019s hard for me to get into the mindset of someone who never thinks about that. To me, it\u2019s baffling, because I just think they\u2019re denying themselves so much sheer pleasure.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: I mentioned to Nick this weird trend where a lot of classic films tend to be released on a physical medium in Europe, particularly in Spain. Spain has a lot of classic Fox films that aren\u2019t available here at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Soon after, I was having coffee with a friend who writes for one of the major publications in Toronto, and I asked him about Touch of Evil<\/strong> (1958), which is available as a limited Blu-ray in Britain, along with Silent Running<\/strong> (1972), and I asked if he thought the films would be coming out soon in North America. His response was \u2018I don\u2019t think so,\u2019 because Universal\u2019s Blu-ray of Psycho<\/strong> didn\u2019t do well at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

I thought \u2018How is that possible?\u201d unless it\u2019s one of those films that\u2019s come out so many times on home video that all the people that want it already have a copy, and they\u2019ve just drawn lines and said \u2018You know what? Enough. I\u2019ve got the movie, and I\u2019m happy with that.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s as though the constant re-releasing and reissuing of the same titles has backfired, and what we\u2019ll have are limited releases done by independent companies in various territories. Not only are the studios staying away from obscure stuff, but they\u2019re cutting back on the major classics, and just focusing on the Top 10 or Top 100, which is even more bizarre.<\/em><\/p>\n

Just announced this week is Olive Films release of a 3-disc set of Bernardo Bertolucci\u2019s uncut 1900<\/strong> (1976) on DVD and Blu-ray. Paramount released a 2-disc edition in 2006, after which it soon went out of print. Olive\u2019s done a fine job mining previously unreleased titles from Paramount\u2019s catalogue for the past few years, but why wouldn\u2019t Paramount want to handle what\u2019s clearly a propriety production in a deluxe special edition?<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: I frankly don\u2019t understand it, but I think it\u2019s a situation that may be lucky for labels like Twilight Time because these are things that we will be interested in releasing.<\/p>\n

With a film like Mysterious Island <\/strong>(1961), wouldn\u2019t you think that that is the most obvious candidate? There they have that wonderful restoration department at Sony, run by Grover Crisp, and the film’s got Ray Harryhausen, Cy Endfield, Bernard Herrmann; it\u2019s got every Saturday matinee indicator hung all over it, and you would think it\u2019s such an obvious choice, but they just didn\u2019t have faith in it as a Blu-ray release. Luckily, that meant we could have it for a limited edition release.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: In the early days of DVD, Sony released their films in stunning dual layer transfers, or as flipper discs with optional widescreen & full screen transfers, and then they started to do something really dumb: replace certain titles like And Justice For All <\/strong>(1979), Mackenna\u2019s Gold <\/strong>(1969), and The Odessa File<\/strong> (1974) with full screen-only editions. With the Harryhausen titles, you had Mysterious Island<\/strong> badly cropped to 1.85 on DVD, and then there were those special editions of It Came from Beneath the Sea <\/strong>(1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers<\/strong> (1956), and 20 Million Miles to Earth<\/strong> (1957) from 2007 which offered colorized versions that I can\u2019t imagine anyone wanted, although I suspect Harryhausen felt it might give the films second lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the constant reissuing of the same titles by several studios, and\u00a0combi-packs of the same film on 3D-BRD, Blu-ray, DVD, and a Digital Copy, or a DVD and Blu-ray sometimes packaged with a sampler CD that packs 4 cues from an album they still have to buy. I don\u2019t know who these designer releases are supposed to serve, and yet more money is spent on these single-title sets \u2013 in mastering, packaging, promotion, distribution \u2013 and not titles that have never touched DVD.<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: I think it\u2019s very unorganized, and one of the problems lies up in the studio executive offices: it\u2019s a revolving door, so there are few people who have been able to stick to the job over a period of years.<\/p>\n

You do get these rarities like Grover Crisp, who\u2019s been at Sony for a while, and Schawn Belston at Fox; these are guys who are in charge of Assets Management, and they\u2019re the ones who are giving us these beautiful transfers.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons they\u2019re able to do such a good job is because they\u2019ve been in those positions for some time. In the executive suite, it\u2019s not always the case, and so you get differing philosophies about what\u2019s important, and it makes for a lack of continuity.\u00a0 There\u2019s often no consistent drive to look at and utilize all the wonderful titles potentially available in deep catalogue.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t across the board, but there are too many people who are more interested in business than in the films. Of course, this has been the eternal argument in Hollywood – Art vs. Commerce, and \u2018How do you keep a balance\u2019 and so forth – but I think that the balance has tipped so far over to business and the bottom line that many studios have lost sight of the value of their catalogue, and they treat it sometimes very cheaply. For people who love movies, it\u2019s really, really<\/em> frustrating.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: Do you have any thoughts as TT is approaching its first year anniversary?<\/em><\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: For me, it\u2019s been an absolutely wonderful opportunity and a ton of fun, so I feel like I\u2019ve been very, very lucky. We\u2019ve done remarkably well, but I think we can do better. The hardest thing is letting people know that we exist, and that if there\u2019s some beloved movie they\u2019ve been looking for, they might try looking for it from us. We can\u2019t put out too many things at once, but we\u2019re now up to two titles a month, which seems amazing and wonderful.\u00a0 It\u2019s been an incredible adventure\u2014I hope we get to keep at it.<\/p>\n


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KQEK.com would like to thank Julie Kirgo for her generous time and candor.<\/em><\/p>\n

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More information on Twilight Time’s releases is available at Screen Archives Entertainment<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

All images remain the property of their copyright holders.<\/span><\/p>\n

This interview \u00a9 2011 \/ 2012 by Mark R. Hasan<\/em><\/p>\n

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ALSO AVAILABLE:<\/em><\/p>\n

In Part 1<\/a> of our profile of home video label Twilight Time, we interview producer \/ co-founder Nick Redman, and discuss the company’s mandate, and the shifting trends as aging studio catalogue titles are increasingly being left to indie labels to distribute, and keep alive.<\/p>\n

RELATED BLU-RAY and DVD REVIEWS:<\/em><\/p>\n

Egyptian, The<\/a> (1954) \u2014\u00a0Fate is the Hunter<\/a> (1964) \u2014\u00a0Flim-Flam Man, The<\/a> (1967) \u2014\u00a0Fright Night<\/a> (1985) \u2014 \u00a0Kremlin Letter, The<\/a> (1970) \u2014\u00a0Left Hand of God, The<\/a> (1955) \u2014\u00a0My Cousin Rachel<\/a> (1952) \u2014\u00a0Mysterious Island<\/a> (1961) \u2014 Picnic <\/a>(1955) \u2014<\/em> Rapture <\/a>(1965) \u2014 Roots of Heaven <\/a>(1958) \u2014<\/em> Stagecoach<\/a> (1966) \u2014 \u00a0Violent Saturday<\/a> (1955) \u2014\u00a0Woman Obsessed<\/a> (1959)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Return to<\/strong><\/em>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Exclusive Interviews & Profiles<\/a> \/\u00a0DVD<\/a><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to:\u00a0Home \/\u00a0Exclusive Interviews & Profiles \/\u00a0DVD . In Part 2 of our profile of independent home video label Twilight Time, we chat with film historian Julie Kirgo, an astute and zealous film lover whose excitement for movies great, silly, and guilty easily makes its way into her prose which accompanies the colourful stills in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[1124,1125,709],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-18m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4362"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4362"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4379,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4362\/revisions\/4379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}