Criterion publicist to Scott Mantz: “Before we set up your Zoom interview with Eyes Wide Shut dp Larry Smith, we need you to give us your solemn oath…”
Mantz to Criterion: “Sure, whadaya need?”
Criterion to Mantz: “We want your promise that you’ll never mention the word ‘teal’ during your chat.”
Mantz to Criterion: “Teal? Me?”
Criterion to Mantz: “We’re serious, Scott.”
Mantz to Criterion: “Worry not! I’m your boy. I don’t think I even know what teal means.”
Remember that scene in Broadcast News when Albert Brooks‘ Aaron explains that William Hurt‘s Tom, while being “a very nice guy”, is the devil? We have a similar situation here. Mantz obviously doesn’t have hooves and horns and a long spiky tail, but…
HE to Mantz on Wednesday afternoon, 11.19: “I’m watching your 30-minute chat with Larry Smith, and you don’t even mention the obvious teal-tinting on Criterion’s EWS 4K Bluray. Unless I wasn’t paying attention, you don’t even MENTION it!! Nobody has ever had any problems with the brightness levels, as Larry mentions. It’s the fucking TEAL poisoning!”
[Note: Yesterday I shared my negative reactions with Mantz and, just to be sure, asked if he mentioned the word teal and/or asked Larry to comment about teal-ing. Scott ghosted me, of course. HE to Mantz: “I’m going to reasonably interpret your silence as confirmation that you never uttered the word.”]
“Larry says ‘the theatrical blues were the theatrical blues…we didn’t mess around with any of the main [color] structure’….bunk! That’s precisely what Larry and his ignoble Criterion cohorts have done. The vivid blue iron gates in that envelope-handover scene have been changed to somber subdued teal.
Robert Harris’s HTF review: “Are the blues deep rich blues? No. They do lean toward a teal.”
“Early on Larry says the film wasn’t color-timed or fine-tuned before it was released because of Kubrick’s untimely passing. Oh, yeah? I spoke to EWS producer Jan Harlan a few months (or was it weeks?) after EWS was released, and he was very deeply involved. He really cared.
“But Larry is telling us…what, that Harlan didn’t try to finesse the color as best he could before the film was released in ‘99?? Nobody stepped into the color-correcting breach after Kubrick passed on March 7, 1999? (EWS was released four months later — 7.13.99.) I don’t buy that. Nobody does.”
Larry also says that EWS “was too grainy,” a condition that he presumably remedied. And yet in his Home Theatre Forum review of the 4K Criterion disc, Harris writes “grain haters need not reply.”
