Big adjustment for small screen

Robert Harris, a leading film preservationist who has restored such classics as "Lawrence of Arabia" and "My Fair Lady" sums up the issue: "The message here is that the filmmakers know that a pan-and-scan version is no longer the film, so you do what you have to do to satisfy Everyman, the audience out there that wants to see pan and scan."

Even though watching a movie in widescreen format is preferable, it's not perfect on a regular TV set. Maltin tells of watching a widescreen VHS of "Lawrence of Arabia" long before the advent of DVDs.

"I put it in my machine and immediately moved 6 feet closer to the television, because it was hard to take it all in at a distance," he said, because the image was so small.

Even the director of the film, David Lean, expressed similar concerns, Harris said.

"When we were preparing 'Lawrence of Arabia' for home video in 1989, I sat down with David Lean," Harris recalled. "He looked at it in (its original widescreen) ratio on a monitor, and he said exactly what Alfred Hitchcock once said: 'It looks like a boa constrictor going across the screen. We're not using the real estate.'

" . . . The filmmakers are aware of the fact that widescreen, especially on smaller TVs, can be really problematic, because you're using only half the pixels on the TV. So where do you go? A 27-inch TV, by today's standards, is tiny," he said. "It's always a tradeoff."

(The newer widescreen TV sets handle widescreen movies better. But they have the opposite problem from older movies and most TV programming: Those differently proportioned images leave blank space on the sides of the screen.)

Harris also pointed out that elderly viewers and those with poor vision might need full-screen presentations.

"They can't look at a boa constrictor running across the screen," he said, "and it's unfair to make them do it."

Then there are people who understand that they're losing part of the movie when watching a pan-and-scan presentation. They just don't care; the image must fill their screen.

"You're never going to convince those people," Maltin said. "It's as simple as that."

Maltin, Harris and Carpenter all agreed that educated viewers deserve a choice, but they didn't refrain from being blunt about those who opt for pan and scan.

"If you really want to watch some recent film that way, you get what you deserve," Maltin said.

"They have a right to watch something upside down and backward if they want to," Harris said, "although I won't give them a choice in anything that I do for home video."

"If I had my druthers, I'd give the option," Carpenter said. "Just put an extra disc in there and give the original (widescreen) version . . . and then give the idiots their pan-and-scan version."

Ensuring that viewers know enough to make an informed decision is the key and remains the biggest hurdle.

"It's a process of education," Maltin said.

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