Picture Perfect

E.T.'S index finger lights in an orange glow as it lifts to touch Elliott's forehead. The extraterrestrial's right eye squints and his cheek rises in sadness. The spaceship's illumination casts a moonlike aura around his head, while his glowing red heart shines a light on Elliott that suggests another celestial body, the setting sun.

When creating E.T., Steven Spielberg selected every shade of light, every crease in the extraterrestrial's skin, with extraordinary care. But if you want that kind of movie-theater detail, the only way to get it is to play a laser disc, a.k.a. video disc: a 12-inch silver disc that can hold a two-hour movie on its two sides, looks like a compact disc and is, like a CD, read by a laser beam. The laser-disc version of E.T. almost seems like a different movie from the one available on video tape. Tree branches are etched on the screen; the frogs Elliott sets free look like real amphibians.

And there's the sound. On disc, the quality is that of a digital CD. VHS tape, even with hi-fi, can't come close. Moreover, discs, unlike tapes, will not deteriorate with each play. And you can jump anywhere you want on a disc, even program it to play and replay the same scene without pause. If you are serious about collecting movies, this is the format.

Not so long ago, the conventional wisdom about video discs was that they were about to join eight-track audio and quadraphonic sound as audio/video fossils. In the late Seventies, the developers of DiscoVision, the ancestor of the 12-inch laser disc, relinquished hope and abandoned the name, since neither discs nor players were selling well, while VCRs and tapes for rental were becoming as commonplace as TV sets. When RCA's SelectaVision, featuring stylus-operated VDs, bit the dust, its much-publicized failure nearly carried laser discs with it to the grave. Part of the problem may also have been that early laser discs were sloppily manufactured, causing them gradually to decay—a problem known as laser rot. No one seemed upset over the coming demise.

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The Wicked Witch of the West crooks her fingers in anger: "I'll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too!" Except when viewed on a movie theater's screen, she has never looked so greenish blue, and Dorothy's Technicolor ruby slippers so red, as in Voyager's release of "The Wizard of Oz." After her digitally remastered cackle, the witch disappears in a puff of orange smoke. But push a button on the remote and replay the scene, and you hear—as on many Voyager laser releases—a simultaneous commentary. The film historian Ronald Haver points out that if you look carefully, the smoke actually begins rising before the witch ever makes it to the right spot. The mistake stayed in the film because, in a second take, Margaret Hamilton herself caught fire and was hospitalized. Throughout the movie, Haver explains special effects, the changes the screenwriters made in L. Frank Baum's story and other bits of trivia. Press the button again and Haver is silenced, leaving it all up to Dorothy.

The laser-disc obituaries that were being written in the early Eighties might have come true had it not been for the Japanese company Pioneer. It clung to the possibilities of a format dubbed LaserDisc and brought out generation after generation of increasingly sophisticated players, which resemble CD players with gargantuan trays.

A band of growing loyalists kept buying the evolving machines and the discs—attracted not just by the picture and sound quality but by discs' other possibilities, including the separate audio tracks. But it was mainly in Japan that laser discs really took off. By 1988, more than 30 manufacturers were making players in Japan, with 1,750,000 in Japanese homes by the end of that year.

In the United States, although 60,000,000 VCRs are in use, industry spokesmen put the number of households using the laser machines between 140,000 and 180,000. But U.S. video-discplayer sales have gradually begun to grow, for several reasons. One is that nearly every video store began demonstrating its televisions with laser discs, because they offer greater resolution and finer color than VHS. That was particularly important as screens grew in size and clarity. The laser disc can produce more than 420 horizontal lines of resolution, compared with only 330 for broadcast and fewer than 250 lines for VHS tape. But what finally made the difference for disc was that Pioneer, living up to its name, began to make laser players that could play both video discs and compact discs: One machine could be hooked up to combined audio and video systems and serve them both.

That meant that for just a little bit more money, fans could hear Michael Jackson's music with the digital sound of CD and see him on screen, as well. So successful was this idea that last year, other manufacturers began to join in creating multidisc players (some manufacturers call them combi-players) that could double as laser and CD players. One hundred thousand of these machines were sold in 1988. New companies entered the software business, most notably the European giant PolyGram with an extraordinary collection of classical concerts and opera (more than 100 discs will be in its catalog by the end of this year) and an impressive array of pop-music videos on discs of all sizes.

As options have grown, so have the number of formats and gimmicks. The 12-inch video discs spawned other sizes. There are the five-inch and three-inch mini audio CDs, of course, but also eight-inch video discs with shorter selections and a curious hybrid five-inch disc that generally holds one five-minute pop-music video and 20 minutes of audio. (There has been a concerted effort by some companies to pass the aura of success from CD to video by calling these five-inch discs and others CD video.) The new machines took them all on, leaving the ordinary CD player seeming a crippled option in the new audio/video age.

By now, these machines are in their second or third generation, and they are impressive, indeed, offering digital memories that allow special effects and slow motion on all discs. Most of the newest high-end multidisc players offer a jog wheel (even on the remote control) that allows precise control of the image. A twist of the dial and the jets of Top Gun race across the screen at eight times the normal speed. Twirl the center ring and they can amble frame by frame. Sony and Yamaha have energetically joined Pioneer's laser universe with machines offering similar functions.

Philips, a co-inventor of the entire technology, has also just become the only non-Japanese company in the player business with its own high-end entry—a $1300 machine whose performance begins to rival the precision Pioneer has already achieved in its extraordinary $2000 model LD-S1 player. The LD-S1 can't play CDs; its aim is solely the perfection of video—which, at least by present standards, it achieves. But the Philips machine, like the Sony and Yamaha machines pictured on our opening spread, can also do it all; it even includes a universal remote that can be programed to run ten pieces of audio and video equipment, along with state-of-the-art outputs for audio and video.

While sales of VCRs are slowing as they saturate homes and dealers' shelves, attention in the electronics world is now shifting to laser players and their software. Later this year, some multidisc players are expected to sell for less than $500, speeding acceptance of the form. The prices of discs, now generally about $35 (less, for many movies, than the price of tapes), are also expected to drop. Nearly all estimates for laser-disc business in 1989 were double those of 1988—which was itself an exceptional year. U.S. Video Source, the country's largest mail-order house for laser discs (800-USA-DISC), had $3,200,000 in sales in 1988, compared with $450,000 the year before.

There are now 70 to 80 new releases on disc every month. Not every disc is well made, but given the format's inherent superiority to tape, optimism is rampant—and should be. Just about the only disadvantage discs have is that they have to be turned over or changed every 30 minutes to an hour, causing a break in the film. But Pioneer has even addressed that problem with its LD-W1, a $1700 player that can sequentially play two discs on both sides in two trays.

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Cary Grant is standing alone, the flat, brown expanse of dry fields cut by the ribbon of an old highway. He expectantly turns each time a car approaches from a point near the edge of the screen—only to see it disappear into the horizon. When the crop duster roars at him out of the sky and chases him through the barren fields marked by barbed wire, the expanse becomes horrifying. There's no place to hide.

The only problem for you, the home viewer, is that if you're not watching Voyager's version of North by Northwest, the edges of the picture are cut off. The perspective is no longer Hitchcock's: Cary Grant takes over the screen and the fields shrink. Hitchcock, like nearly every other director, shot movies for a screen that was wider and less high than that on a TV set. As a result, a movie shown on TV—along with most VHS and Beta (concluded on page 144)Picture Perfect(continued from page 96) tapes—is "panned and scanned," its dimensions changed, its focus shifted, sometimes with extra movement added as technicians desperately try to capture the important elements the director had put together in a single wide-screen picture. What is often seen on TV would horrify the original director. A scene with two characters may be edited to show just one of them; an expanse of mountains may be cut to reveal only a single peak.

The makers of video discs have dealt with this problem by a process called letter-boxing. The result is unsettling at first: The picture appears as a wide band across the center of the TV screen—the shape of an elongated movie screen—with black bars above and below the image, creating a shape that preserves the entire picture in its original proportions. Not every video disc is letter-boxed, but, as on Voyager's scrupulous North by Northwest, it has become the preferred form within this small market. There are even re-releases planned of some films, restoring them to full-screen proportions. Letter-boxed versions are now replacing old releases of Star Wars, The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind.

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"We are now approaching the Futurama," proclaim the titles on the screen as black-and-white films of crowds waiting in line slowly shift to color. "To help us get a glimpse into the future of this unfinished world of ours," intones the narrator, "there has been created for the New York World's Fair a thought-provoking exhibit of the developments ahead of us—the greater and better world of tomorrow that we are building today." Portentous proclamations in this 1939 General Motors film invite us to travel into the future—the "wonder world of 1960," where cars look like bubbles, cities are Utopian settings of parks and quarter-mile-high skyscrapers, and elevated sidewalks guide happy pedestrians to their destiny—to "a future that can be whatever we propose to make it."

The future of laser disc is not, perhaps, as breath-taking as this vision, created just before the outbreak of World War Two. It appears on a Voyager disc of "ephemeral films"—industrial and educational short films from 1931 to 1945. As the disc itself proves, though, standard movies will be only part of the laser-disc future. Laser discs are already used by the Army, the Navy and the Air Force for flight training and education and by industry for giving manufacturing instructions and teaching assembly. Voyager has even developed Macintosh software that will allow the computer to be connected to a disc of 1600 paintings at the National Gallery of Art and call up any succession of pictures on a television screen in a high-tech slide show. And 35,000 images from the Louvre will soon be available.

Voyager also plans to release discs devoted to cities, which will permit the viewer to take varied walking tours of Vienna or Paris, for example. In more sophisticated, future interactive discs, doctors may even practice surgery the way pilots can now practice flying prowess. The technology already exists for creating laser discs that record as well as play back. So, in a decade, some say, the VCR will be obsolete. Martin Greenwald, the president of Image Entertainment, Pioneer's rival distributor and manufacturer, believes that "laser is the pinhole in the wall through which the light of the future is coming." E.T., phone home.

A Connoisseur's Guide To Video Discs

The Voyager Company (1351 Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica, California 90401, 213-451-1383) takes its name from the spacecraft. Like the Voyager, the company is small in size but not in ambition. The list of more than 50 titles from its Criterion Collection series—titles including King Kong, The Producers and It's a Wonderful Life—could constitute a basic film library. But aside from presenting classic films, the discs set technological standards for the industry. The shades of light and dark in Citizen Kane, the bright Technicolor swashbuckling of Scaramouche, the digitally remastered sound of A Hard Day's Night are unmatched in home video. The outer limits of laser achievement are, not coincidentally, in two science-fiction films: 2001, which was mastered under the watchful eye of its director, Stanley Kubrick, and Blade Runner, whose somber, detailed images seem etched on the screen. Voyager's best discs include supplementary material, interviews, essays, stills and trailers—and, in many cases, a second sound track of commentary by film historians and critics. There are also such offbeat ventures as the radio dramas of Orson Welles, a survey of computer animation and "ephemeral films" from 1946 to 1960, which include Dating: Do's and Don't's (1949), about how to handle that goodnight kiss. The prices of Voyager discs are high—as much as $124.95 for the three-disc 2001—but so is their achievement.

Films: Here, all is taste. Aside from the Criterion discs, any viewer may want to sample the digital score of RoboCop, see the animators' love of color and detail in Cinderella, watch the antics of BeetleJuice or find out what makes suspense so effective in black and white in a fine remastering of Psycho. There's a letter-boxed Dr. Zhivago and an MCA Frankenstein with censored footage restored. We're partial to the epic pace of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring—a two-part tale of jealousy and revenge that on disc can seem like a late-night reading of a great novel.

Opera and Classical: Opera and laser disc seem made for each other. The subtitles, the close-ups and the special effects in Jean Pierre Ponnelle's video version of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (PolyGram), for example, remove vestiges of pomposity and mystification and turn this opera into an erotic, intimate drama. There's also a lively Barber of Seville from Glyndebourne, Ingmar Bergman's irrepressible Magic Flute (both available from Pioneer) and, for ambitious viewers, Pierre Boulez conducting Patrice Chereau's production of Wagner's Ring cycle (PolyGram) from the Bayreuth Festival, in which the Rhine maidens become prostitutes and the operas become knotty allegories.

Pop: Here disc sizes and options proliferate. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker goes for broke—a 12-inch disc of special effects, concert performances and Claymation drama. Kiss's Gene Simmons, on Exposed, leads the viewer on a tour of his pleasure palace, breaking for videos and concert performances. The five-inch CD videos mix a single video selection with other straight audio cuts—by groups including the Moody Blues, Bon Jovi, L.A. Guns, Scorpions and Rush. And there are fullsized discs presenting Joe Cocker, Barbra Streisand, the Manhattan Transfer and Bob Dylan.

A Video Standard (Reference Recordings, Box 77225X, San Francisco 94107) is a $60 disc that's in a category by itself. It provides a set of test signals for audio and video systems, with instructions on how to optimize monitor performance and set up sound systems, and it also includes a miniature education in video technology, showing, for example, how film is transferred to video.

The Laser Disc Newsletter is a 12-to-20-page monthly that reviews nearly every disc released. The author, Douglas Pratt, has also written The Laser Video Disc Companion. Sample copies of the $25-a-year newsletter are available from Suite 428, 496A Hudson Street, New York 10014, 212-242-3324.