This opening of Risky Business clip is a reminder that as recently as the ’80s many filmmakers shot their films in an open-matte 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Even if you’re not a boxy-is-beautiful fanatic like myself, you have to admit there’s something very pleasurable about suddenly seeing all of that extra visual information on the tops of bottoms of the frames — information that has been steadfastly hidden since the forces of 1.85 fascism decreed 20 or 25 years ago that only 1.85 croppings of standard-Academy-ratio films would be offered for rental or purchase.
I don’t like acknowledging that Risky Business opened 33 and 1/3 years ago, but it did.
“Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business reflected and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture). And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits-and-zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of ‘mainstream Hollywood comedy.’ But Risky Business was a perfect brew.
“The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.
“I had an invite to a special Risky Business screening at the Beverly Hills Academy a week before the opening, but I blew it off because a girlfriend was visiting that night and things were hot and heavy at the time. I wound up catching it ten days later at a theatre in Westwood, and I remember saying to myself after it ended, ‘Wow, what I was thinking when I missed that screening?’