A 4.19.13 quote from George Stevens, Jr. has been posted on Bob Furmanek’s 3D Film Archive site. It’s part of an intro to a definitive Shane aspect-ratio piece that will be posted soon. Here it is: “Dad’s definite preference was to have his films screened the way he shot them and framed them. He simply accepted the tradeoff to have a bigger screen in the competitive release climate in 1953.”
And yet on 3.15 Stevens, Jr. wrote me the following in an email about the forthcoming Shane Bluray, which Stevens Jr. had helped prepare: “Given the choice of having a 1:37 version placed in the center of a horizontal television screen with bars on each side, or a carefully configured 1:66 to 1 version that filled the screen, I am confident George Stevens would subscribe to the latter.”
