The classic film Penn & Teller Get Killed has finally been released on DVD thanks to the “Warner Archive” program, through which Warner Bros. sells smaller catalogue titles on DVD-R media via their web site.
What I found most interesting about the release is that it is in widescreen, whereas all previous home video releases of the title—even the laserdisc—were in full screen. Since the Warner Archive program is aimed at releasing titles on the cheap, I wouldn't expect Warner Bros. to have created a widescreen transfer of the film especially for this release. Some of the Warner Archive titles (though not Penn & Teller, specifically) even include an “Important Note” on their product page: “This film has been manufactured from the best-quality video master currently available and has not been remastered or restored specifically for this DVD…release.”
When I asked about the issue on the official Penn & Teller bulletin board, another fan informed me about a recent widescreen presentation of the film on cable television. In describing this version, she explained that “what they actually did was crop the top and bottom off the 4:3 version,” then pondered whether the new DVD featured a “genuine 16:9” version.
That's a reasonable question. Conventional wisdom holds that a widescreen image offers more picture information, revealing parts of the image that are cropped out of its full-screen equivalent. Actually, the situation is more complicated than that. Understanding why requires a brief primer on film history.
Movies were historically shot in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio, about the same as that of a standard television, until the mid-1950s, when the introduction of television inspired studios to adopt the “widescreen” process as a gimmick to persuade people to watch movies in theaters instead of at home.
However, they didn't develop new cameras or film stock to achieve the wider aspect ratio. Instead, they continued to capture an image on the entirety of the standard 1.37:1 frame of film, while actually composing the shot for a smaller 1.85:1 area within that frame (wider 2.39:1 “scope” films are shot differently, an even more complicated topic about which I'll write in the future).
This practice continues today. The monitor that a director or cinematographer uses to frame his shot typically has markings on it to indicate the 1.85:1 area that will be displayed in theaters, but there is extraneous picture information above and below that area that does find its way onto the film. When a movie is released on DVD or shown on television in full screen, the frame is usually just “opened up” to expose this additional area.
So the viewer will indeed see more picture information in the full screen version than in the widescreen one, but the important point is that only with the widescreen version will he see the image as it was composed by the director and his cinematographer.
Sometimes, opening up the frame can lead to revealing mistakes. A Fish Called Wanda features one of the most famous examples of this, wherein a supposedly naked John Cleese is shown to actually be wearing shorts, which are hidden just off-screen in the properly-framed widescreen version.
If you know a little bit about film history and the way films are shot, it's not surprising that the widescreen version of Penn & Teller Get Killed reveals less of the image than the full screen version. But that's the way it was exhibited in theaters, and more importantly, the way it was meant to be seen, so I'm quite glad that the widescreen version is the one being included on the DVD.
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