“Hey, roll it, ’cause I’ll tell ya, you know, you’re listening to a guy who learned a lot about ripping off movies from watching laserdiscs with director commentary.” —Paul Thomas Anderson, from the Boogie Nights audio commentary
Okay, so I’m an audio commentary junkie. Sometimes I’ll buy a movie I don’t particularly like all that much just because it has a commentary track or other cool extras. It seems like I’m always repurchasing some movie I already own simply because the new version has extra features.
In the laserdisc days there was Criterion. The very first audio commentary track was done by film historian Ronald Haver on the 1984 Criterion laserdisc of King Kong (1933). Unfortunately, many of those Criterion tracks still haven’t made it to DVD, including Martin Scorsese’s commentaries for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, and Terry Gilliam’s for The Fisher King (all worth checking out, provided you can find a working laserdisc player).
Boogie Nights (1997; director Paul Thomas Anderson). This is pretty much everything I look for in a commentary track, so it’s really too bad Anderson doesn’t seem to want to record them anymore (to date, this is the last one he’s done). There’s a lot of cool information here, including many anecdotes about the production of the film, but the real fun for me is hearing Anderson talk excitedly about how much he loves to write material for certain actors.
ANDERSON (on actor William H. Macy): And you know, everything you write, you better know what you’ve written, because he is going to say every single word exactly as you’ve written it. And he’ll sort of look at the punctuation, find out what it means. A dash means this, an ellipses means that. You know, this is in quotes, this has been underlined, this has been italicized … He’s all about finding out what the writer means, you know, and he studies the script clearly so well that as a director you don’t really have to do shit. You just have to watch him, because I feel like I did my job as a writer, so being a director was just being a fan.
If you’re like me, when you see a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in shades, a certain five-note rhythm comes to mind. There’s no denying composer Brad Fiedel kicks things off in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) with a great main title, letting us know we’re building to something awesome here.