They Live By Night’s Bilge Ebiri got in touch with an owner of an old Barry Lyndon laser disc from the mid ’90s, and “not only is it 1.66 but it specifically says on the disc that it was transferred under Kubrick’s supervision.” He reported this yesterday.

I’m sorry to say this because I like and respect former actor and longtime Stanley Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali (whom I interviewed by phone about 12 years ago and then ran into by chance at LAX three or four years later), but his testy statements about the Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio debate during yesterday’s Warner Home Video press conference in Manhattan don’t hold up to scrutiny.

(l.) Leon Vitali; (r.) as Lord Bullington in Barry Lyndon.

I honestly think it’s fair to say at this point that Vitali is, at best, a questionable authority regarding this matter. Because what he said doesn’t align.

Boiled down, Vitali’s remarks didn’t square with the long history of past home-video presentations of Barry Lyndon (including an earlier Kubrick Collection DVD that Vitali supervised), and they argue with Vitali’s own remarks about Kubrick’s visual preferences in shooting his films and having them seen.

Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny asked Vitali about the Barry Lyndon 1.66 vs. 1.78 aspect-ratio brouhaha at the Essex House gathering, and Vitali answered as follows: “Never was it ever 1.66, it wasn’t shot in 1.66, we never released it in 1.66 in any format whether it’s film or television or DVD. It was 1.77.”

Kenny then asked where the confusion might have come from, and Vitali said the debate “comes from people who think they know and weren’t there and have something to say about Stanley all the time…I was there. And you get those idiots…truly, who think they know. [adopts orotund voice] ‘Stanley was a very philosophical guy.’ I say: bullshit.”

No — Vitali is the b.s. guy. And here’s why.

As Bilge Ebiri pointed out in Kenny’s comment thread (and which I heartily concur with), “The original Barry Lyndon DVD and laserdisc (released during Kubrick’s lifetime) actually WERE 1.66, and do appear to contain more information in the frame.”

Furthermore, says Ebiri, Vitali “seems to even imply, when he says it wasn’t even shot in 1.66, that the negative doesn’t even have this extra information in it, which is obviously incorrect, as [any] screenshot from the DVD release can tell you.”

Here’s what Vitali said in ’08 to a DVD Talk interviewer (and when you read this keep in mind that 1.78 to 1, which is the same as the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of LCD/LED/plasma screens, is just a nose hair away from being 1.85 to 1):

“The thing about Stanley, he was a photographer. That’s how he started. He had a still photographer’s eye. So when he composed a picture through the camera, he was setting up for what he saw through the camera — the full picture. That was very important to him. It really was. It was an instinct that never ever left him. What he wanted the videos to reflect was how he shot the film through the camera, what was on the original neg and what his composition when he was shooting it was. That’s what he wanted to reflect in his videos. He did not like 1.85:1. You lose 27% of the picture on 1.85. Stanley was a purist. This was one of the ways it was manifested.”

Let’s run that one again: “[Kubrick] did not like 1.85 to 1.” And yet Vitali is telling us that Kubrick’s intention while shooting Barry Lyndon in 1974 and ’75 was “never” to shoot it in 1.66, and that when it came to showing it to audiences he “never” intended to have it seen in 1.66 “in any format, whether it’s film or television or DVD”? And that he chose an aspect ratio — 1.77 to 1 — that was very close to the dreaded 1.85 to 1?

Vitali wasn’t just explaining to the DVD Talk interviewer why Kubrick liked “full picture” aspect ratios; he was also explaining why 1.33 versions of The Shining (’80) and Full Metal Jacket had come out on early DVD versions.

“After Barry Lyndon, more and more theaters were showing films 1.85 or in Cinemascope even if it wasn’t shot that way,” Vitali recalled. “[Stanley] had no control. He couldn’t go around every cinema and say ‘You show this film in 1.66’ as you could with Clockwork Orange, because then the projectors had a 1.66 mask. With multi-plexes things are different and so they only show a film in 1.85 or in 2.21, the Cinemascope. You know? You cannot put a mask in 1.66 as it should be for Clockwork Orange.”

So let’s get this straight: (a) In 1972 Kubrick wanted desperately for audiences to see A Clockwork Orange in 1.66, but he eventually realized he couldn’t win against exhibitors (particularly U.S. exhibitors); (b) he personally approved DVD versions of higher, boxier versions of The Shining (’80) and Full Metal Jacket (’87) when he was still alive, and (c) in 1999 he apparently approved a DVD of Barry Lyndon at 1.66 to 1.

And yet, says Vitali, Kubrick “never” wanted Barry Lyndon to be shot in 1.66 to 1, and he definitely wanted it exhibited at 1.77 to 1 — an a.r. that is all but indistinguishable from 1.85. Despite Vitali’s understanding that Kubrick “did not like” 1.85?

Does that make any sense at all to anyone?

In his lament about the futility of trying to force exhibitors to show films at aspect ratios other than 1.85 to 1, Vitali also told DVD Talk that “you can’t put a 1.77 in as it should be for Barry Lyndon.”

Excuse me, but was a 1.77 aspect ratio presentation even in existence in movie theatres in 1975? 1.77 or 1.78 is a 21st Century high-def TV aspect ratio that comes very close to delivering films intended to be seen in 1.85. Speaking as a former projectionist, I know that the aperture plates available in my booth in the ’80s were either 1.33 to 1, 1.66 to 1 (I worked at a rep house that showed older films) or 1.85 to 1.

Vitali also said to DVD Talk that Kubrick “composed his shots for 1.66…but he wouldn’t be hurt by going to 1.85 if he had to do it. From The Shining and Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley had marks on the camera lens so he could see…the 1.85 lines.” Obviously “if he had to” (a) serves as a companion quote to “Stanley did not like 1.85” and (b) strongly suggests that Kubrick was averse to composing for and/or projecting in this format.

Let’s go also to a respected U.K. Kubrick site called Kubrick FAQ and the contention of dp David Mullen, who writes in response to a question about the Barry Lyndon‘s a.r., to wit:

“Barry Lyndon was released theatrically in 1.66:1, even in the U.S. since Kubrick insisted on 1.66 hard mattes being sent to the various theatres showing the film (1.85 is the common ‘flat’ widescreen ratio in the U.S.).”

The final argument against Vitali’s contention that Barry Lyndon was “never” released in 1.66 in any format is, of course, the various Kubrick Collection DVDs of Barry Lyndon. Along with two previous incarnations in ’99 and ’01, the ’07 DVD was (a) mastered and issued in 1.66, and (b) Vitali, acting as consultant and aesthetic supervisor according to his late employer’s wishes, approved this aspect ratio somewhere along the line (if not initially for the ’07 then the ’01 version).

How does Leon Vitali explain this? He obviously can’t. He’s obviously…I don’t know. I hesitate to say this, but the only explanations I can imagine is that he’s desperate to rationalize a top-down decision to go with 1.78 to 1 despite empirical evidence that Kubrick was no fan of this aspect ratio, or…I can’t even guess. But it’s very weird.

Kenny also reported yesterday that “the massive Taschen book The Stanley Kubrick Archive, edited by Alison Castle and ‘made in cooperation with Jan Harlan, Christiane Kubrick and ‘The Stanley Kubrick Estate’ has a ‘Note About Aspect Ratios’ on the contents page…which lists the aspect ratio of Barry Lyndon as…1.77. Not only that, all of the frame enlargements from Lyndon contained therein are in precisely that ratio.”

I say again: this doesn’t square with what Vitali himself has said about how Kubrick shot his films and what he wanted audiences to see, and it doesn’t square with what Kubrick himself approved. Whine all you want but it just doesn’t.

Is it the contenton of Harlan, Christiane Kubrick and Alison Castle that Kubrick was in a delusional and/or delibilitated state of mind when (as I understand it) he personally approved the 1.66 transfer of Barry Lyndon for the 1999 DVD? Why didn’t he man up and say to everyone, “Okay, enough of this 1.66 crap….I’m going to set things straight once and for all by insisting on my film being mastered at 1.77 or 1.78 to 1.” Kubrick was one of the most exacting directors in motion picture history, after all. I wonder why he didn’t do that?

Even if Kubrick was dead by the time final approvals were required for the ’99 DVD and therefore didn’t technically sign off on it, why didn’t Vitali, the keeper of the flame, insist on a 1.77 aspect ratio for the ’99, ’01 and ’07 DVD versions? Well…?

At yesterday’s press conference Kenny apparently didn’t ask Vitali about the accepted doctrine belief that Kubrick wanted to simulate in Barry Lyndon the slightly taller, more boxy-ish aspect ratios of 18th Century paintings. Because if you want to go with WHV’s 1.78 Bluray revisionism you have to toss that one out the window and onto the bonfire, right?

If you accept/believe the “Kubrick wanted to simulate the shape of 18th Century paintings” inspiration and if WHV execs are really determined to justify themselves, they should send a commando team into the Louvre after-hours this weekend to slice off the tops and bottoms of those old paintings with exacto knives. So, you know, they’ll be a little closer to 1.78 to 1.

Vitali’s revisionism feels…I don’t know, weird. Orwellian, Farenheit 451-ish. Vitali and WHV are basically saying to people like me, “We know some of you share a memory of having picked and eaten red apples out of our orchard a few years ago. Well, they were not red apples. They were green pears…pears, we tell you! And anyone who says they ate apples is delusional!”

Any way you cut it Warner Home Video got it wrong. They could have easily stayed with the 1.66 a.r. from the DVDs, and they blew it off for no good reason. Maybe they wanted to satisfy the donkeys out there who don’t like looking at windowbox bars on the sides of the 1.66 image…I don’t know. But this is one of the worst calls ever made by WHV. Mr. Kubrick liked his films to be framed on the high and full side. Leon Vitali damn well knew that and therefore didn’t stand in the way of the ’99, ’01 and ’07 DVD versions running at 1.66. Then he changed his mind, or allowed it to be changed…whatever. This needs to be fixed.

Thanks to a 5.20 Criterion Forum posting by “Gregory”, we have a few comparison shots showing the 1.66 aspect ratio on the DVD vs. the 1.78 aspect ratio on the Bluray. (The latter adds a sliver of information on the left and right sides.) You can shrug and ask “what’s the biggie?” but this is corporate vandalism, pure and simple.

Sampling of Criterion Forum comments: (a) “Christ, the cropping destroys the composition…what happened, where was Leon Vitali?”; (b) “You know what I love about all of the endless Kubrick aspect-ratio controversies? That the films still look absolutely fine in just about every ratio they’ve tried”; (c) “For virtually any wrong presentation of a film, there are inevitably lots of people to whom it looks absolutely fine. What’s the relevance of that? Can you give one good reason why they should go against Kubrick’s established preference, rather than doing the same thing they did with the Lolita BD?”; (d) “Barry Lyndon [is] just about the only one of Kubrick’s post-1960s films about which there’s no doubt whatsoever — the aspect ratio should unambiguously be 1.66:1.”

Sitting in the shade, my chair against a plaster-and-brick wall, canopy overhead, a frutti de mare salad on the way, a gentle breeze, briney aroma from the canal, the battery fully charged and the wifi performing…well, tolerably, this was the most perfect writing experience I’ve known in a long time.

Every time I see a photo of Lady Gaga, I say to myself, “Oh, yeah, right…that‘s what she looks like.” Because whenever I’m not looking at her photos I kinda forget. All I can ever remember is a sort of opaque severity. Bleached (or shaved?) eyebrows, ultra-sharp cheekbones, alabaster skin, eyes out of Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis. The truth? Her features are striking but her face isn’t really “there.” That’s why it keeps disappearing.

Cover of latest Italian Vanity Fair…I think. I saw it this morning on a stand.

If I were to run into Eminem on a street I’d spot him like that, but not LGG. I mean, if she didn’t have bodyguards and an entourage with her, which I’m sure never happens. If she didn’t have an out-there personality and a pronounced sense of avant-garde style and the singing-dancing talent, of course, she’d be…I don’t know, some kind of sad Edward Hopper-type figure. She’d be a clerk behind a window at the DMV in a Michael Mann film.

The Telegraph‘s Richard Eden reported last week that Peter Fonda, exec producer of the anti-BP doc The Big Fix, used the term “high-powered rifles” while saying that he’s urging his grandchildren to revolt against President Barack Obama.

Fonda, in Cannes to promote The Big Fix, was speaking metaphorically but nonetheless managed to sound as if Captain America has evolved into a wacko tea-bagger or NRA wing-nut of some kind.

Fonda’s disdain for Obama is probably rooted in the case made against the President in The Big Fix, which is that O has more or less coddled Big Oil since the disastrous gulf oil spill of 2010 and his people have idly stood by while BP has paid out on only one of many dozens of spill-related citizen lawsuits.

Here’s my 5.17 Big Fix review.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #34 the night before last — she in LA, me in Paris. Mostly about the second half of the Cannes Film Festival. I’d just come back from dinner and had to get up four and a half hours later. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

This kind of thing wasn’t available when I was last here in ’07. The farther into the city you get, the weaker the Venice “air.” The only decent reception, really, is when you’re adjacent to the Grand Canal, and even then it’s spotty. It’s that laughing Mediterranean mentality, but you have to roll with it.

In a 5.23 Some Came Running entry, MSN critic Glenn Kenny said my agitated posting about Warner Home Video’s jacket-cover statement that their brand-new Barry Lyndon Bluray has been masked at 1.85 was on the unwarranted and

hysterical side. No, it wasn’t. Not as it turned out. It was pretty much dead-on.

Glenn Kenny’s snap of his high-def screen showing (he says) a 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio image from the Barry Lyndon Bluray.

Yes, I hadn’t seen the Bluray due to obvious limitations (i.e., being on the fly in Europe) but the jacket copy, which I ran a screen-capture of, declares what it declares. Kenny initially said the Lyndon Bluray is masked at 1.66; he later reneged because, he said, the Lyndon Bluray is actually masked at 1.78 to 1. If this is true then the WHV jacket copy is wrong. And yet 1.78 is (a) pretty damn close to 1.85, and (b) delivers a significant cropping of top-bottom material that had been viewable on the 2007 Barry Lyndon DVD.

Kenny initially offered what he believed was visual proof — i.e., pics of the Lyndon Bluray off his high-def TV — that the high-def version of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1975 classic version is presented at 1.66. He later amended this to say his TV had been incorrectly calibrated and that 1.78 was the correct aspect ratio.

At no time did Kenny even comment on, much less get into, Kubrick’s reported intention in using a 1.66 aspect ratio to approximate the aspect ratio of 18th Century landscapes.

Portions of my e-mailed response to Kenny went as follows:

“What do you think & feel about WHV essentially waving this off, not only ignoring the fabled 1.59 aspect ratio that mubi reader Tyler Williamson claimed was captured but also dumping the 1.66 that the DVD had? This is important and (I feel) fairly malignant shit. How is this not a kind of desecration? Explain that to me.

“(1) Based on WHV’s decision to publish proof-read copy that says the Barry Lyndon Bluray is masked at 1.85, I was IN NO WAY using an invalid basis for alarm. Bluray jacket-copy is no small or casual matter. Do you think some WHV intern just types it out? Jacket copy is vetted and vetted and vetted again. So why did you more or less say “there goes Wells again, getting it wrong”? That wasn’t right, Glenn.

“(2) Unless your high-def isn’t correctly configured” — which turned out to be the problem — “your own visual proof of a 1.66 aspect ratio does NOT make the case. When I watch a 1.66 film on my 50” Vizio, there are window-box bars on either side of the image, and these are clearly not there on your screen shot. [As noted, Kenny updated this and explained the apparent truth of the matter regarding a 1.78 a.r.] The image extends all the way to both sides, comprising a dead-to-rights 16 x 9 image filling every square inch of your Brooklyn screen. Right now, your Some Came Running shot of the opening image of the cow-pasture duel is lending credence to my concern about a 1.85 image.”

In his updated posting, Kenny extended apologies “to you all and particularly to the BluBrew people, but none to my frenemy Mr. Wells, who went off even more half cocked than I, what with going from box copy rather than the disc itself.” Again — how the hell was I supposed to watch the Bluray on a properly calibrated high-def screen in my sixth-floor Paris apartment? Vetted jacket copy was what I had to work with.

Kenny concluded by saying that “as disagreeable as 1.78 is, it still isn’t 1.85.” But 1.78 still represents a significant top-bottom trimming of Williamson’s 1.59 or the ’07 DVD’s 1.66 image, and is clearly a dismissal of Kubrick’s reported interest in wanting Lyndon to approximate the shape of 18th Century paintings. Isn’t that the crux of the matter?

“This story isn’t over yet,” Kenny concluded. “As it happens I’m interviewing Leon Vitali, a keeper of the Kubrick flame, tomorrow” — today, he meant — “and this issue will be on the agenda.”

And Vitali, who worked with WHV on the earlier Kubrick DVDs and has presumably been (and is being) compensated for his efforts, is going to bite the hand that feeds?

It was announced yesterday that Columbia will distribute Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s long-gestating film about hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden. Until the Navy Seals finally got him on May 1st, Boal’s script, which he’d been working on since ’08, was, I gather, a procedural without a payoff.

In other words, before Osama bin Laden was killed it was an indie-type thing. But with bin Laden dead, Amy Pascal (a big Hurt Locker fan) and the Columbia guys are down with it. That’s pretty much the deal.

Filming will begin in the late summer and open in the fourth quarter of 2012. Meaning that Biggy-Boal’s Triple Frontier, a Paramount project announced in the summer of ’09 with Tom Hanks reportedly confirmed for the lead, won’t roll until sometime in ’13 for release in ’14…right?

What’s so amusingly “despicable” about my having tweeted last week that I was glad I’d seen Terrence Malick‘s The Tree Of Life but that I’m “not sure if I’ll buy/get the Bluray,” as New York‘s latest “Approval Matrix” chart has it?

I was merely saying I wasn’t sure if Tree, which seemed to meander and even get a bit doodly after the first levitational 40 minutes or so, would stand up to repeat viewings.

Yes, others wrote that it almost certainly would stand up and that they looked forward to subsequent viewings, but I wasn’t sure. I was thinking at the time, rightly or wrongly, that I’d more or less gotten it all in one sit and that a second viewing probably wouldn’t turn my head and open up my pores like the first one had. Primarily because much of the second half focuses on the dysfunctional rage and gloom brought about by Brad Pitt‘s hardhead, disciplinarian, spottily-affectionate dad.

I grew up with a functional-alcoholic version of this guy, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend repeated sessions with him at home. It was that simple.

On top of which there’s a reason why movies and plays have depended upon a narrative through-line to engage and hold the audience’s attention. I’m just average common too. I’m just like him and the same as you. So due respect to the Approval Matrix guy, but I don’t care how many years Malick worked on The Tree of Life. That’s his deal, not mine.