Finally, a high profile filmmaker has spoken out against the crime of television pan & scan broadcasts of feature films. In the latest issue of the DGA (Directors Guild of America) Quaterly director Steven Soderbergh outright attacks networks such as HBO, AMC, and Showtime for cropping films shot in the 2.40:1 ratio to fit high definition wide screen TV”s (typically 1.78:1) or worse, cropping them to a 4:3 ratio for standard definition viewing. “It’s [expletive] lame to watch Jaws— a film that uses the 2.40 ratio as well as any ever produced— in the wrong format on HBO.” Soderbergh goes on to describe HBO as the “poster child for stupidity.” Apparently,the filmmaker placed a call to someone at HBO with pull to make sure that the Oceans Films were not toyed with. The network he attacks the most however is AMC. He gets mad at AMC for advertising films in a letterbox format then airing them in pan & scan. This is odd since they embrace the letterbox format for all of their original programing, yet don’t appear to show the same respect for the films they broadcast on their network. In his final statement Soderbegh states “As directors, we can decide to fix this, quickly, or let it continue down its gangrenous path until there is no longer any distinction on TV between movies and television.”
I’ve been waiting so long for something like this to happen. I have complained for years about how the networks butcher a film’s composition for the sake of “fitting it” to a smaller screen (I own many films on DVD and gladly watch them in the 2.40:1 ratio on my tiny 13″ television in my bedroom). AMC isn’t the only culprit though. Some have gotten a little better by at least cropping a 2.40:1 format film to a standard 16:9 instead of a 4:3, but it is still unacceptable. I have to agree with Soderbergh about HBO being a “poster child for stupidity” though. I’ve only used HBO once when I went to college and my school offered it so they wouldn’t have to create separate movie channels. Die Hard happened to be starting and what I saw just angered me. They ran the film in 4:3 except for scenes where the shot was too wide. That is when they switched to the 2.40:1 for the necessary cut and then back to 4:3. I couldn’t understand. If they have the film in 2.40:1 why not just air it that way? I was actually really happy when I saw Oceans 12 on USA in the original ratio, but then I never saw any movie air that way again. TV networks are very aware that almost everyone owns a wide screen TV at this point. Almost all original television programming today is shot in with a 16:9 ratio in mind. So why would they continue to air films in 4:3? I guarantee that if I put out a survey asking people how they would want films displayed on TV and explained how aspect ratios worked that this whole mess would be solved in a week. As Soderbergh states, it is up to the filmmakers and producers to make this right.
Do you agree that television networks need to stop messing with film aspect ratios?