Mr. HUGHES. Mr. Scorsese.

STATEMENT OF MARTIN SCORSESE, FILM DIRECTOR, ON BEHALF OF THE DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA, INC., LOS ANGELES, CA Mr. SCORSESE. I would like to thank the committee for allowing me to be here today to try and demonstrate how we feel about this. I am a filmmaker. I make movies, and I am here today because of that; but also really because, I must admit, I actually am more of a film lover and, in a funny way, I would rather be watching a movie than making it.

There is a lot that goes into making films. There is so much that goes on afterwards and for so many years, 40, 45 years, films have meant so much to me in their original form. You have to remember that more than half of the films produced in this country before 1951 have been lost, destroyed, or have deteriorated beyond repair. Those that have survived need to be preserved. And that is one problem.

But the other problem we are discussing here today is the less obvious threat that endangers our true film heritage, and that is the slow, insidious erosion of the integrity of our cinema through deliberate, material alteration by producers, distributors, broadcasters, et cetera-in terms of economic gain.

And I am here on behalf of the Directors Guild of America to speak in support of H.R. 3051, the Film Disclosure Act. I believe that this bill would help to educate the public about this threat by requiring films that have been altered to be labeled as such.

I am also here to represent the interests of the public whose right to know exactly what they are seeing on the screen has been routinely violated-this has been done without their knowledge, and I feel they need to know about it.

I am a storyteller. The medium that I use to express myself is the movies. Today, I will try to show you what we are losing when films are shown on television and to use an example as evidence of the need for the Film Disclosure Act. First, we will take panning and scanning.

Since 1953, most-many-practically every American film_and films from abroad have been made in a wide screen process of one form or another, and you just saw an example of it here. When they are shown on television, they are always cropped. So in very many cases, you are losing as much as 50 percent of the original image. Yet these films have no label warning viewers that what they are seeing has been recomposed for television. And the process is what you just saw here, panning and scanning.

Now, let me explain. This is a perfect image for wide screen right here. I am the camera, and we have a perfect wide-screen image. But for television it is just not going to fit.

So let us say you are speaking first. We go to the center of the screen; we just show that section. A comment is made on this side. The camera then optically pans; electronically, there is a pan to this side showing this section of the screen. Then we have a voice on this side. There is an optical cut to this side of the screen. So now you have introduced isolation-an electronic pan which was not in the original film, and an electronic cut which was not in the

original film-and I propose that these techniques give new information. They redirect the film in a sense.

Now, this drastically change the original; part of the original image is lost, new information is added, and the attention is shifted from one section of the screen to the other. Wide-screen formats, such as Cinemascope and Panavision, let directors use the width of the frame for dramatic effect. In our first clip, a director, Mike Nichols, in the film "The Graduate," made in 1967, conveys his young hero's alienation from the adults around him by placing him and them at either end of the frame.

OK, here you saw Dustin Hoffman pacing nervously back and forth from one extreme edge of the frame to the other while Bancroft sits very cool on that stool, controlling the situation.

But the original composition was obviously so extreme that the panners and scanners were forced to choose between showing one or the other character instead of both at the same time. And here is the pan-and-scan version that is usually shown on television.

For the most part, Hoffmann is cut out of the shot. As a result, Bancroft spends most of the scene listening to his disembodied voice or apparently talking to herself.

Another example, I think one of the worst examples of panning and scanning can be found in the film "Advise and Consent" made in 1962. It was filmed in Panavision. The film deals with the American political process and shows the actions and reactions of various politicians to the President's appointment of a candidate to Secretary of State. Here, a Republican Senator, played by Edward Andrews, attacks the President's nominee, and the Democrats retaliate.

Now, let's look at the same thing panned and scanned the way it was shown on TV. Now, you hear someone speaking, but you don't see him. We also lose Walter Pidgeon there on the left. He will come back in-here he is.

Now, someone is still talking in the background. We don't know who it is and what he is doing. We still haven't seen the speaker. Another conversation is-and now you get a glimpse of him back there. Now we finally get to see him talk.

Here is a good example of an optical or electronic cut coming up, because we lose the speaker again. You see, we lost him. Now, here is the cut. See, that is originally the same frame, and look at the bad composition.

Now, remember Charles Laughton coaching from the sidelines? Watch this. Well, he is gone. Now, another example of incredibly bad composition that it creates: Look at those people falling out of the bottom of the frame, because he-Andrews is on the left of the frame. You see, he is missing. Here he is again. That was originally all one image.

Anyway, the film's celebration of the give and take of American democracy can be clearly seen in the wide-screen version, but it is just as clearly missing in the other version we just showed you where both Democrats and Republicans are cut out with equal abandon.

One of the most disastrous instances of cropping can be seen in the pan-and-scan version of William Wyler's 1959 biblical epic, "Ben Hur." Everybody knows the most spectacular sequence in that

film was the chariot race-something great in American theatrical advertising history. Gen. Lew Wallace wrote the book in the 19th century. Then the play was put on and, of course, in the 19th century the big moment on the stage was the chariot race. It is probably the most breathtaking action sequence ever filmed.

Painstaking care went into this production. It cost millions of dollars. It took over 5 months of rehearsal and filming just to complete this sequence. And though this actual chariot race only lasts for 11 minutes of screen time, it is what everybody remembers about this film, which, I believe, won 12 Academy Awards.

I want to show you six shots from the race, and by comparing the wide-screen version with the pan-and-scan version, you can easily see what gets lost. This is the letter-box version first. Now, the pan-and-scan version as shown on TV.

Now, what I want to do is take a closer look at just two shots. The first one is the shot of the bronze dolphins because each lap around the circus was indicated by the pulling down of one of these nine bronze dolphins. You only see-notice the composition with the framing on the left-nine dolphins.

Now, in the pan-and-scan version of this particular shot, the composition is completely gone. You only get about six dolphins.

The next image I would like to show on this is an actual shot of the race itself. You see about eight horses here. There are about eight of them in the letter-box version and in the pan-and-scan version that is shown on television, you get about five of them.

Now, all of the work that went into the filming of this incredible sequence, all the excitement and all the spectacle of the race has been lost. This is the pan-and-scan version. Letter-box version. The original. The original. The original. And a pan-and-scan. In a funny way, it is almost as if you are looking at the film through binoculars.

And this is the original. The pan-and-scan again. It is sort of like the panning and scanning is really enlarging details. And here is the original again. The original again. And now, interestingly enough, the recent videotape edition of this film released by Turner Entertainment acknowledges this inadequacy by zooming out from the pan-and-scan image to the actual full letter-box image just as the chariot race is about to begin. We'll show you that clip. This is the pan-and-scan and here is the point at which they believe that the audience at home will change the channel and turn their set off.

Well, although this practice has been going on since wide-screen films have been shown on television the past 35 years, Turner and the others have insisted that the public won't stand for letter-boxing. However, they decided to use it here and in some other video versions of wide-screen films, notably the wonderful musical "It's Always Fair Weather" directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, which uses tricks in the dance sequence.

I believe it shows that it is certainly appropriate and that letterboxing won't hurt the film in the video marketplace. It is a very complex issue, because at the same time Turner Entertainment is doing an incredible amount of work in the restoration and preservation of their film library, working with the archives, and we greatly appreciate this because they have made available over the

past few years films that have hardly been shown on television for 30 years.

But this leads to the next issue, which is colorization. Panning and scanning shows quite clearly how crucial information is simply cut off. But with colorization, the opposite seems to be true. The information in the form of the color has been added, but color doesn't add to the underlying information in the black-and-white original. The kind of information which colorization obscures is mainly visual, and as a result, it is hard to put into words exactly what gets lost.

The black and white original has a broad range of visual detail in both darker and lighter areas. When color is superimposed over this, less detail is visible, and it is sort of like looking at the original through a layer of smog, and this smog sort of flattens the image.

One of the most dramatic scenes in Frank Capra's wonderful film, "It's a Wonderful Life," is the Pottersville sequence, in which Jimmy Stewart gets to see what things would have been like if he hadn't lived.

Can we run that sequence in black and white?

On the original black and white, cinematography consisted mainly of shadowing, low-key lighting, and very, very, sharp, deep focus which created a dark, gritty, tough world of crime and corruption. Let's look at this scene in color. Let's show this example because it shows it at its best.

All of the signs look great with the addition of electronic color, but you can see that no matter how pretty it looks in color, it doesn't have the nightmarish quality that you get in black and white. For one thing the colorized version is a lot brighter. Everything seems to be bathed in light. And the nightmare has become kind of like a daydream. The extreme blacks are mellow and the color makes things look almost cheerful.

Let's look at just two scenes more carefully. Let's look at the scene where Jimmy Stewart is running on the grass here. You can see just the "Keep off the grass" shot. What is impressive to me here is the nightmarish sense of Stewart's panic.

Look at the color version of this. The stubble on his face is gone. The panic seems to be missing.

Another shot. Here Jimmy Stewart's eyes are very important in terms of the confused expression. Now, look at the color version. See the candy-like color of the marquee lights behind him? It takes away from the panicked look in his eyes and it just isn't as powerful.

The next point is time compression and lexiconing. For me, time compression is one of the most insidious practices, because it is so hard to detect. A CBS News report explains what it is and how it works and gives us a dramatic example of what it looks like.

You know, I work very closely with my actors when I make my pictures, and I must say we have some fun, but a lot of the time it is very difficult. We go through hell to get these performances, and what is most disturbing about this practice is that it really changes the performance of the actors. You know, for example, Bogart's famous line, "Here's lookin' at you, kid," I believe it loses

the softness, the tenderness, the emotion of his reading when it is time compressed.

You can also see the difference between the two versions in the editing of the film. There is a cut from Bergman to Bogart which takes place much earlier in the time-compressed version. You see the accelerated movement of Bergman's head. She covers her eyes. The hat covers her face. Philosophically, is there really a need to do this? Why don't we forget about these time slots and show the movie at its original speed until it finishes? That is how I feel about it, and I know many of my colleagues do also.

I was very surprised to get a letter from one of the cable companies asking me if I would mind the lexiconing and time-compression of "Goodfellas" when it is shown on cable. Now, I remember when cable started, the idea was, since you were paying for a service, you would be able to see these movies uncut in their original time length, maybe not necessarily letter-boxed, but at least uncut, and untime-compressed, the way it is seen normally in a theater. That was the advantage of cable networks or syndication. That is what I thought, and now I am beginning to discover that compression can be used in many cases without the public knowing it.

Of course, I refused to allow them to time-compress the film. Time is limited and I would just rather describe, rather than show, some of the things that have been done by cutting films to squeeze them into a time slot. I know they claim that lexiconing and time compression would change this, but this again deals with the spirit of integrity of what we are talking about.

I remember watching Otto Preminger's "Laura" in Los Angeles one night a few years ago. I knew something was wrong when I noticed that they cut the scene in which Laura, whom everyone thought was dead, returns-to the surprise and relief of the detective who has been investigating her murder. Los Angeles audiences were neither surprised nor relieved until she unexpectedly showed up later alive in the film.

Back in the early days of feature films on television, "The Fighting Seabees," a 100-minute war movie, used to be squeezed into an incredible 45-minute time slot for the early show in New York. The editing of the film was so drastic that it ended while the Japanese were still winning the war.

I remember seeing "Citizen Kane" for the first time on the Million Dollar Movie with the "March of Time" sequence cut out. But not many people would notice that.

The Million Dollar Movie also showed an Astaire-Rogers film, "Swing Time," made in 1936, but they cut out whole musical numbers such as the waltz in "Swingtime." Apparently, these can be more easily cut without messing up the narrative.

Another example is more recent. The same thing happens to Milos Forman's film "Hair" which was cut by nine musical numbers when it was syndicated for television broadcast.

Another example I remember in the late 1970's, with a film called "The Victors" about the Second World War, a stellar cast, maybe 12 people-George Peppard, Albert Finney, Jeanne Moreau, and Eli Wallach among them-and it was shown on one of the networks in New York and across the country. It was advertised in TV Guide. All those names were there.

64-867 - 93 - 3