Sent this morning: Hollywood Elsewhere to Eyes Wide Shut dp Larry Smith, who oversaw the 4K digital restoration of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1999 film and is therefore the guy to blame for the notorious teal-tinting. (Message sent by way of Smith’s manager, Hillary C. Cook.)
Hillary,
Please forward this to the honorable Larry Smith, BSC. It’s about his having supervised a new 4K UHD mastering of Eyes Wide Shut, which Criterion will release just before Thanksgiving.
I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but it appears as if Larry’s teal-tinted remastering of Eyes Wide Shut is an abomination — an affront to God, and especially to the memory and honor of The Great Stanley K., whose ghost is almost certainly fuming, seething, punching the refrigerator.
Larry must pay for this terrible folly.
Please read this HE story, dated 10.25. And this follow-up.
Gary W. Tooze of DVD Beaver assured me this morning that his Eyes Wide Shut screen captures are accurate:
“I’ve been doing DVD Beaver for 25 years… and those Bluray captures [have been rendered] the same way for a decade and a half…The Eyes Wide Shut images are Bluray caps — not 4K UHD caps — and they are accurate. I’m sure the truth will come out eventually.”
Today I shared the following with a fellow who knews a few things about motion picture restoration and Bluray masterings:
HE: “I saw Eyes Wide Shut theatrically three times and have watched it on Bluray five or six times, and it was never infected with the teal virus until, to go by recent frame captures posted by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, the Criterion 4K Bluray came along.
“This is truly rancid stuff. That’s right — Larry Smith is apparently in the grip of Criterion evil. The word ‘shameful’ isn’t strong enough.
“In the realm of transferring visual values from celluloid or DCPs to the digital Bluray format, what could possibly be more reprehensible and malignant than to change the color scheme in the direction of teal and orange?
“What could be more hateful and infamous than to flat-out vandalize the visual aesthetic of the director (and in some cases the DP) of this or that film?
“This isn’t an unfortunate aesthetic decision — it’s a CAPITAL CRIME.
“If I had my way in this wicked world, all the criminals behind the teal vandalizing of all the victims of this appalling Criterion scourge (Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Night Moves, Sisters, Teorema, Eyes Wide Shut) would be dragged before the court in chains, just like Charlton Heston is dragged before Cedric Hardwicke in The Ten Commandments.
“I am a voice in the wilderness who truly believes in the purity of original visions.
“I was going to say that I am, in a certain sense, a kind of John the Baptist in the Robert Ryan sense of that term, but that would be going too far. But I’m truly alarmed that so few who know this realm are speaking up.
“If by clapping my hands three times I could criminally indict the Lee Kline cabal and force them to stand trial in a Bluray remastering version of The Hague, I would clap my hands three times.”