julian_craster

DVD 'Extras' - a waste of time ?

Who says DVD 'extras' ruin the magic of movies? I think they make them shine even brighter
by Mark Ravenhill
Monday November 13, 2006

From The Guardian
Mark Ravenhill: Who says DVD 'extras' ruin the magic of movies? | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film

Curse you, DVD "extras". I don't like you. I don't want you. I don't need you. But I always watch you.The pattern is always the same. I buy a new DVD of a TV drama or film, get it home, put it in the player and then I'm asked to choose between: the drama of my choice and a huge list of outtakes, scenes with no music, scenes with added music, scenes backwards and upside-down, and epic "making of" documentaries, which often play at far longer than the original and seem to have been made on a budget no bigger than the £10.99 I've paid for the disc.

"Waste of time," I think. "I shan't be watching you," and I cut straight to the action. Sometimes months can go by. Sometimes I can watch the drama several times. But one day I will be overcome by curiosity and decide to look at the "making of" extra - a collection of talking heads and re-run scenes from the film I've just watched. "Rubbish!" I'll think. "Won't be watching any more of them."
Two months later, I'll find myself at 2am working through every extra on the disc including the "hilarious" outtakes in which the cast can't say "banana" without corpsing. When the disc is completely exhausted, I feel as disgusted with myself as if I had eaten a pack of custard creams in one sitting while contemplating the emptiness of a godless universe. (It has happened, but not in the past week.)
So now I find myself in my local HMV, comparing DVD boxes and looking for the one that promises: "No extras. Just the film. Much better, and wastes a lot less of your time." But there are depressingly few. While the rest of the economy only seems to be suffering from the very mildest inflation, house prices and DVD extras both seem to escalate wildly from year to year. "Includes seven hours of extras," says the sticker on the box, menacingly, and I see a whole working day vanish into the slot of my DVD player.
I was pleased to see Sir Michael Caine recently come out against the DVD extra. Sir Michael, it seems, thinks they are spoiling the magic of the movies. I'm with him on opposing the "extra" - they're spoiling the magic of my sleep patterns - but I can't agree that they spoil the magic of the movies. Far from it. I think they make the magic shine brighter.
Our fascination with what goes on behind the scenes at the movies goes back decades, long before the advent of the DVD extra. It probably began with the early Hollywood silent films, whose stars were carefully screened from their public. I remember from my 1970s childhood the lengthy "making of" documentaries that often accompanied the release of major films, shown on terrestrial TV as cheap fillers funded by the film business and often little more than extended promos. And TV has been obsessed with bleepers, bloopers and outtakes for the past 30 years.
None of this has ever diminished the "magic" of the drama itself. From the age of four, we all know that everyone on screen is pretending; that the spaceship is a model, that the dinosaur is CGI. And we love the double-think; the mental game we play with ourselves, wondering how they do it, while at the same time feeling a quickening of the pulse and a tightening of the throat as the tension mounts.
The bigger the fandom, the more hunger there is for the curtain to be pulled back; for someone to reveal the workings of the machine. Take Doctor Who, one of the few subjects on which I could achieve a respectable score if I ever I faced John Humphrys in the Mastermind chair. I joined Who fandom in the 1970s, when it was just starting to take off. We Whovians were hungry to piece together the narrative of the 14 years of episodes there had been up to that point, as well as to debate the inconsistencies that different script-editors had left over the years. We wanted a complete, consistent, otherworldly universe. But at the same time we started to collect every last detail of every bit-part actor, props buyer and photocopier of scripts ever involved in the show. Our fascination with the fiction and the facts sat happily together, feeding one other.
There's one fictional world whose fans show little enthusiasm for "extras", and that's Ambridge. Last week, Radio 4's soap celebrated its 15,000th episode, with 56 years of sudsy farming under its belt. There has been plenty of fan interest. Archers addicts have debated Tom's sausages, Neil's chickens and Pat's yoghurt. The listener blogs and websites are busy.
But here the obsession is all about continuing the fictional world beyond the quarter of an hour a day that is broadcast. There's no real interest in the actors, the writers, the making of the show. Maybe because radio drama uses a different, non-visual, part of the brain. Maybe because an Archers fan - and you can count me in - is older than your average sci-fi or superhero fan.
Our lives are inconsistent enough. We want the magic of pretend, the total escape into fiction. We'll leave all the "extras" for the kids.

Chris B

Hi All
I think the extras on a lot of the region 1 dvds are excellent, there are a lot of vintage short subjects which if you are running a cinema evening go to make up the support programme before the main film is shown. I am not keen on the making of and all that sort of thing but the trailers are good because the old trailers are a work of art and well worth watching. I'll grant you that the extras on region 2 are pretty abysmal thats if there are any on at all.

ChristineCB

In the recent MUST LOVE DOGS, one of the out-takes is an 8-minute sofa conversation between Daughter Diane Lane and Father Christopher Plummer. I ended up echoing the director's intro to this deleted scene: "It's my favorite scene we filmed for the entire movie, but when we were putting it together, it wasn't part of the story."

What the scene shows is a actress who is enchanted with this senior actor, whose ability to talk about his life actually appears to captivate the actress, not just the character. A remarkable scene. The film's so-so, but that one out-take is mostly what I remember.

But for most DVDs, those extras don't add anything to me. One of the movie channels is often pairing a standard version of a film on first-play, then immediately afterwards, they play "the enhanced version", which is letterboxed and has the black-bar at the bottom filled with subtitle-text, detailing some anecdote about the scene above, or the actors, the stunt, whatever. That's the best enhancement I've seen, and wish I could view that repeatedly, rather than clicking over to the Director's Commentary.