Commentary Tracks - The Good, The Bad & The Unlistenable

[AndyDursin]

Yeah we've talked about that one. Insufferable. Arrow has an agenda, clearly, when it comes to that kind of thing (and I say that without harboring any grudge for them failing to send me a gratis LEGEND copy for the help I provided to them!).

[Monterey Jack]

Legend seems to be cursed all around, considering you didn't get a free copy for the usage of your interview for the Arrow release, and Paul MacLean wasn't even credited for his contributions to the Music box release of Goldsmith's score.

[AndyDursin]

Not only that but I digitized my own copy of the LEGEND TV version and spent a few hours doing that and uploading it to their server. (The TV Version narration on the disc is from my recording).

At least Indicator sent me a copy of MIDWAY and thanked me in the notes for doing the same thing for the TV Version -- even though Universal ultimately found them a copy and they didn't up using my recording. Those guys made good!

Paul is the really egregious one here though -- he pointed them towards the extra tracks and provided all kinds of information, and didn't even get a mention.

[Eric Paddon]

Julie Kirgo's liner notes in so many TT releases were annoying to go through (in "Bell Book And Candle" we have to be subjected to her being P.O'd that Kim Novak wants a life of marriage and domesticity), but the worst liner notes EVER were Criterion's for "Pickup On South Street" which repeatedly tried to apologize for the film being so anti-Communist to the point where it cheered the fact that France censored the film so that the Communists weren't the bad guys. That marked the first time I ever tore up the liner notes and threw them away.

[mkaroly]

She is one of the worst ever, IMO. I don't understand why people continue to hire her to do commentaries and liner notes.

[AndyDursin]

Did our annual viewing of A CHRISTMAS STORY and listened to the Bob Clark/Peter Billinglsey commentary after everyone else went to bed, which is very worthwhile.

I distinctly recall seeing the film when it first opened in November '83 (I was 9) then it was gone from theaters before Christmas that year. Despite getting good reviews it flopped and had no chance at playing through the holidays, which Clark specifically laments in this commentary. For a long time the movie was this undiscovered secret with a cult following; MGM actually re-released it in 1984, then in '85 and onwards it finally caught on and became a phenomenon on VHS and, later on, as a permanent "24 hour fixture" on TBS.

They discuss working with the difficult Jean Shepard, how Spielberg unsuccessfully tried to work with him after the movie came out (to no avail), some cut scenes, and shooting in both Cleveland (most exteriors) and Toronto. It's also interesting that they praise Darren McGavin and his work on the film, but Melinda Dillon is mentioned only as having been "hired off her work in Close Encounters" and there's never another sentence about her from either of them! That kind of thing is usually pretty telling.

As much as working for MGM meant the movie had poor promotion and commercial potential, it also meant the filmmakers were "left alone" to make whatever they wanted, which in this instance was a very good thing indeed.

[Eric Paddon]

A case of a bad commentary that isn't the commentator's fault but the people who chose him is Francis Ford Coppola on "Patton." The people thought it would be great to get him just because it was COPPOLA! But they didn't realize that his involvement with the totality of the production was very minimal, in which he just did the first draft of the script, got fired from the project and was long gone by the time the cameras started rolling so he couldn't offer any meaningful insights beyond 10-15 minutes worth of summarizing what he went for in his draft and acknowledging what Edmund North did later on. When he uses up that material he goes silent and then repeats variations of what he said before the rest of the way. If his insights were part of a collective effort they would have been fascinating but having him do this all by himself was just total insanity.

[Monterey Jack]

The new Ghostbusters II UHD commentary is...well, a 'bust. Nothing but Reitman, Aykroyd and Medjuck laughing at their own jokes in-between minutes-long bouts of silence. A shame, considering how informative and chatty the 1999 DVD commentary on the original film was.

[Eric Paddon]

After shutting off another bad commentary track at the two-third mark (Bryan Reesman "Marooned") I would like to offer some praise for Katherine Orrison's commentary on "The Ten Commandments." She's informative without being annoying. She knows the production history. She speaks in an easy, relaxed tone of voice and happily when the subject of the blacklist comes up in reference to an actor (Edward G. Robinson) she just gives us the basic facts and refrains from excessive shallow editorializing. I especially enjoy how she spots the bit parts of Clint Walker, Mike Connors and Gail Kobe among others.

[Eric Paddon]

The three person commentary for "Arabesque" is not offensive, it is just......boring. 100 minutes about Stanley Donen as a subversive director and hardly anything about the actual movie's production itself other than every scene is a sign of Donen's subversiveness. Zzzzzzzzz.

[Eric Paddon]

And now I have just endured a painful commentary from the other end of the spectrum. When they get the bright idea to get a surviving actor from a film made more than a half century before to join in and they can't recall a single meaningful anecdote. "Man's Favorite Sport?" (1964) they brought in co-star Paula Prentiss and even her husband Richard Benjamin as well to join in and she can't come up with a single notable recollection on her own, which forces the expert commentator to have to keep pressing on and on and the problem there is that this is an overly long comedy to begin with at 120 minutes that you just have that "uneasiness at a bad dinner gathering" feeling wishing you could make your exit.

[AndyDursin]

I don't often like commenting on the commentators -- I typically will just mention who's doing the commentary -- but there's a huge difference between someone like Tim Lucas (who writes an actual essay and does serious research when doing a commentary) or Kim Newman (I know Eric didn't like his Barabbas talk but he's one of my favorites, often very funny and extremely well-read) -- and the typical "historian" hired by boutique labels. Bryan Reesman's tracks are some of the most mundane out there, I don't know why he keeps getting hired other than he's "in their system" because he keeps getting work from multiple labels (reminds me of some of the people who used to write liner notes all the time!). Daniel Kremer is another oft-employed talker but he does more "phone reading" than anyone, and Peter Tonguette is another frequent commentator who seldom has much to offer.

As I've said many times before, some of these guys are only using Wikipedia -- I realize some of these films are old, but you could still go to the library or buy a press kit off Ebay -- and mostly spend the commentary firing off IMDB credits. They could hire an AI text-to-talk bot and accomplish the same thing.

I think the commentaries are there -- at least with the boutique labels, who don't seem to have as high a rate of QC on them as a commentary from a major studio release -- primarily to give "value" to the disc, and sometimes just to say they're there. But they are not always useful -- especially the "historian" ones, and especially lately. The recent track on THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL actually opens with the two guys apologizing because they admitted they don't really know the movie and couldn't find much information on the movie because everyone is dead. By which point it's like -- why are you even there?

[Monterey Jack]

I think the commentaries are there -- at least with the boutique labels, who don't seem to have as high a rate of QC on them as a commentary from a major studio release -- primarily to give "value" to the disc, and sometimes just to say they're there. But they are not always useful -- especially the "historian" ones, and especially lately. The recent track on THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL actually opens with the two guys apologizing because they admitted they don't really know the movie and couldn't find much information on the movie because everyone is dead. By which point it's like -- why are you even there?

At this point, just hiring fans of the movie would be more edifying. Imagine Quentin Tarantino recording a track for Blow Out, which he cites as one of his favorite movies? Yeah, it might devolve into "This is AWESOME!" fanboy gushing, but it'd be more honest, and, frankly, entertaining.

[Eric Paddon]

Honestly, there are things where I *know* I can do a better job than some of these people. I did my own commentaries for every episode of "Battlestar Galactica", plus some select episodes of original Trek and Twilight Zone to share with friends and I found there were several key things needed before you begin.

1-WATCH the program first before you record your commentary. I am so sick and tired of people who are reacting to something that they may not have looked at in years and end up becoming too surprised by what they're seeing or who then get easily lost by what's unfolding because their memory isn't as good as they thought.

2-Try and find a copy of the shooting script if its available. In this day and age thanks to Script City and other venues that's not as difficult as it would have been in earlier years. Having a sense of how things changed in the final version is always very helpful.

3-When it comes to cast members, instead of just reading off their IMDB listings, if you know an actor for something you've seen and know them well for, talk about that instead.

4-Also, any person doing commentary tracks should take out subscriptions to Newspapers.com because that is an absolutely essential reference data base for finding contemporaneous newspaper accounts and interviews related to production history or a film's release. Some of the stuff that appeared my have been just studio driven PR, but they can often be the only insights we have left available to us for something old. I have heard some commentators clearly take advantage of this since a commentary for the 1934 DeMille "Four Frightened People" quoted from some contemporaneous newspaper accounts during production and release that clearly came from Newspapers.com.'

5-Any person uttering the historically inaccurate phrase "McCarthy blacklist" should be banned from doing a commentary again!

[Monterey Jack]

4-Also, any person doing commentary tracks should take out subscriptions to Newspapers.com because that is an absolutely essential reference data base for finding contemporaneous newspaper accounts and interviews related to production history or a film's release. Some of the stuff that appeared my have been just studio driven PR, but they can often be the only insights we have left available to us for something old. I have heard some commentators clearly take advantage of this since a commentary for the 1934 DeMille "Four Frightened People" quoted from some contemporaneous newspaper accounts during production and release that clearly came from Newspapers.com.'

This is one of the things I loved about reading the liner notes in FSM's CD releases over the years...they were obviously heavily researched, often quoting from newspaper reviews and magazine articles of the day. Hell, the reason I discovered the excellent "Parker" novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) was due to the liner notes from FSM's release of Quincy Jones' terrific score to The Split, which went into detail about the character and the small handful of film adaptations of Stark/Westlake's work.

BTW, this cue is a banger: