I'm Richard Roper, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.
And I'm Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times.
You can't see those scenes in a movie theater,
but scenes like that and lots of other extra features
are included on DVDs.
And this is a special edition about the extra added attractions
in the fast-growing DVD segment of the video market.
We're calling the show Bells and Whistles.
If you don't already have a DVD machine,
there may be one in your future.
Its popularity has grown twice as fast as videotape decks,
the fastest-selling consumer electronic item in history.
And maybe that's because DVD picture quality is twice as good as tape.
There are already 10 million DVD machines in use,
and over the last few decades,
the number of DVDs that have been sold has been increasing.
And over Christmas, it will be the top-selling video gift item
with many models priced below $200,
and they're predicting 3 million more sales.
But the great picture and sound are not the only reasons movie lovers like them.
DVDs are an ideal medium for all sorts of extras for buffs.
For example, on the DVD of The Beach,
you can see an alternate opening to the film,
an opening which was shot but not used.
Oh! Very good.
Welcome to Thailand!
Betty Hutton starred in Annie Get Your Gun,
but the original star was Judy Garland.
On the DVD, you can see footage shot before she was replaced.
Folks like us could never fuss with schools and books and learning.
Still we've gone from A to Z doing what comes naturally.
In Snowfalling on Cedars, critics and audiences were impressed
by Max von Sydow's great summation to the jury.
The DVD includes his entire speech, complete and uncut.
What Mr. Hooks asks you to believe is that no proof is needed
against a man who bombed Pearl Harbor.
Supernova started out as a two-hour-plus space epic directed by Walter Hill.
Hill took his name off the movie.
Later, Francis Ford Coppola re-edited it,
and he used an entirely different ending.
On the DVD, you can see the deleted footage,
and this is from the original ending.
How do we put out a fire that can burn up the stars?
Data unavailable.
Life is probably too short to look at all the outtakes
and alternate endings from every movie ever made,
but when you're really interested in a movie,
it can be fascinating to take a look at some of the alternate footage.
And directors like Oliver Stone even used the DVD
as an opportunity to almost remake their films.
Yeah, Stone is on record as saying that he thinks DVD is what's going to last
and that when he's 80 years old, he may recut JFK again.
I don't know who will be the killer this time around.
I think he's added half an hour to his DVD of Nixon.
Yeah, he has, exactly.
And now I've got some favorites of my own.
It's a real treat to see some of these characters come to life again
in scenes that didn't make it into theaters.
The Austin Powers DVD has several very funny scenes
that didn't make the original version,
including this argument over a briefcase.
You're $832 short, baby.
I had to buy the case.
Ah, so in essence, I'm buying the case.
But what if I don't like the case?
It's a nice case.
No, no, it's a lovely case.
It's a fendi.
I like the case.
You did see snippets of Tom Cruise's infomercial in Magnolia,
but on the DVD, the infomercial is shown in its entirety.
Learn how to make that lady friend your sex-starved servant.
And check out the alternate ending they considered for Independence Day.
Doesn't anyone have any missiles left?
Sorry I'm late, Mr. President.
As if Independence Day had any believability to lose in the first place.
But if you think of ID4 as the ultimate summer popcorn movie,
the DVD with an entire second disc of bells and whistles
is like a big box of junior mints to go along with the popcorn.
You know, I talk to people who just devour these DVDs.
They look at all the different stuff and they even go searching for Easter eggs
and other hidden things that are somewhere around the disc.
And they really get into the movie to such a degree that you're baffled
when you're trying to talk to them because they know every single DVD.
You have to see it yourself in order to know what they're talking about.
But the point is, as you made earlier, Roger, that you've got to really like the film.
If you like the film, you really get into this stuff.
Now, for example, Three Kings, you like to take a peek behind the scenes.
Let's take a look here with George Clooney and company on the set of that thriller.
And Sean Penn talks about playing Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
It was a lot of fun.
People your own age were also just starting out.
Sean Penn's not much on doing publicity, so he must have a real fondness for that character
to appear all these years later in a documentary about Fast Times.
If we could only get him to play Spicoli at age 40, maybe that would be next.
That could be an idea for a great movie because Fast Times at Ridgemont High
introduced so many new stars.
That was like the American graffiti of the 80s.
Of the early 80s.
You can even go behind the scenes in animation,
where in a way there really aren't any scenes to go behind
because animation is all in two dimensions.
Look at this new collector's DVD of Fantasia.
Walt Disney originally wanted a segment based on the ride of the Valkyries,
but on the eve of American participation in World War II,
here's what the studio decided.
It was perhaps considered too Germanic a piece to be inserted in any future Fantasia.
And here's a modern generation of animation, James and the Giant Peach from 1996.
The DVD has a special feature explaining how its animation was done.
To complete just one minute of finished film takes an entire week of animating.
Put them up! Come on! Give me a best shot!
One of the neat things about all the how they did it back sage stuff on these DVDs
is that the technicians who do the special effects and paint the matte drawings
and animate the tabletop stuff and make the waves and so forth
get to talk about their contribution.
And they work all the time in the shadows of the directors and the stars,
and now they get to talk.
Now we understand why it takes 400 people to make a movie
and why some of these movies cost 80 million dollars.
Coming up next, the answer to how did they do that on a whole lot of other movies?
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There are people in there, my friend. People you don't know.
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You said you'd never turn your living room into a museum.
You swore you'd never cover your stuff with plastic.
You are not your mother.
You're perfectly comfortable living squarely in reality.
Even if you do share it with a few superheroes.
Sofamart. Make yourself more comfortable.
Neither the storm nor the boat are real in that scene from The Perfect Storm,
but they sure do look like they are.
Continuing this special show about bells and whistles on DVDs,
this segment is about how sometimes you walk out of the theater wondering,
how do they do that?
The DVD shows you how they took live action shots in a giant water tank
and blended them with computer-generated special effects.
You know, you see a little bit of a wave over here that has been added
and then on this other side here as well.
You know, we show just doing some lightning frames,
sort of like showing the monster in the background behind us.
In The Patriot, it looks like there are hundreds of soldiers
in some of the battle scenes, and here's how they did that.
So we finally wound up essentially having to get rid of the whole battle
that was being seen out the window and replace it entirely
with computer graphic soldiers and explosions that we cut from other takes.
Alfred Hitchcock didn't have computers when he made The Birds in 1963,
but moviegoers were amazed by the way he got those birds to behave so ominously.
On the DVD, there's a new documentary interviewing people who worked with him at the time.
These kids, they tied the birds to the back of their collars
and they'd be flapping and carrying on and it was quite terrifying really.
But how else could you do it?
Sometimes I know people wonder if it really helps to know the secrets
behind some of the great shots, and this is my theory.
The first time I see a movie, I don't want to know anything.
I just want to sit there and after that, then if I like the movie, I want to know everything.
Yeah, exactly. When I saw The Patriot, I had no idea that they had done that,
but now that I've seen the movie and enjoyed it, watching it on DVD,
it just enhances my enjoyment.
In the commentary track on the life and death of Colonel Blimp, Michael Powell,
the director is talking to Martin Scorsese and Scorsese says,
gee, how'd you get 150 extras in wartime?
And Powell says, I think if you look carefully, Martin,
you'll see that two-thirds of them are plaster of Paris.
Not moving around too much. Some movies just cry out for how'd they do it type DVD bells and whistles.
For example, The Matrix. When I saw it in the movie theater,
I was already thinking about that souped-up DVD version that would come out,
and sure enough, it has a terrific package explaining some of the special effects.
Each camera has a specific moment in time to fire or frame a film.
All that is taking into account the net effect, the total effect of the move.
There's a camera coming up to speed, moving at a speed, and coming off a speed.
Time traveling in the other direction, the makers of Gladiator show how they created their vision of Rome
as it was some 1800 years ago.
We can basically do anything. Given enough time and given enough money, anything is possible.
And in one of my favorite tutorials, the makers of The Sixth Sense explain the rules and clues
they sprinkled throughout the movie.
When he's out in public, like he's in a restaurant, you look closely when he comes up to the table
and he sits down with his wife, he doesn't move the chair.
Sometimes bells and whistles are more than just shiny doodads.
In the case of The Sixth Sense, they truly enhance the experience of rewatching a brilliantly conceived thriller.
You know, that's also the case with the DVD of Fight Club, a movie that I had some problems with when it came out,
but certainly there are clues and ideas in that movie that benefit from the two-disc set that they brought out on DVD.
And after I watched all those bells and whistles on the Fight Club, then I did want to go back and watch the movie again.
Coming up next, we've talked about a lot of things that are on DVDs, but there are things that only DVDs can do.
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What is it?
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More than 50 big-name stars made cameos in Robert Altman's wonderful Hollywood satire, The Player.
But if you can't remember exactly when Jack Lemmon played the piano, the DVD has a handy feature called Go to My Scene.
All you do is click on an actor's picture and you're there.
That's an example of one of those cool extras you like to show your friends when you're spinning through your DVD collection.
Like this medley of wacky moments on the set of Armageddon.
Yo, Houston, what's going on?
Maybe he was the wrong choice for this mission.
IMTA!
You can catch it, Thugstix!
Now, the X-Men DVD includes a very cool animated storyboard outlining the train station fight sequence.
The Casablanca DVD has a fascinating documentary in which we learn about one of the most famous final scenes ever.
Now that an end to the film had been discovered, the only way to resolve Casablanca's love affair became clear.
If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
And that, of course, is Lauren Bacall, who does the narration on the documentary, just adding to the texture of it.
When a DVD provides a fresh look at a classic like that, it's almost as good as JD Salinger writing an introduction to the next printing of Catcher in the Rye.
A mind-boggling concept.
Another bonus that most DVDs offer is subtitles in more than one language.
In fact, some of the Hong Kong action classics are subtitled in eight or nine languages.
Here's another bonus.
Even when the film is in English, it often has subtitles in English, which makes them great for the hearing impaired.
You can even use the subtitles to settle bets.
For example, people have watched Casablanca for years, wondering exactly what Peter Laurie says here when he tells Bogart about the letters of transit.
Letters of transit, signed by General Bigel.
Did he say they were signed by General de Gaulle?
How could that be?
De Gaulle was the enemy of the Nazis.
Okay, let's click on the English subtitles and see what he said.
Letters of transit, signed by General Bigel.
Aha, the English subtitles say de Gaulle.
Okay, let's see what the French subtitles say.
Letters of transit, signed by General Bigel.
And that to me almost qualifies as an Easter egg because it's a secret thing that most people will never figure out,
which is that the subtitlers couldn't agree on what Peter Laurie said.
DVDs also let you listen to the same movie in different languages.
Here's Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
In English, Spanish, and French, she's not in Kansas anymore.
I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
I think we're not in Kansas anymore.
We don't have to be in Kansas anymore.
And some discs allow an easy comparison between the screenplay and final film.
Here's an example from Taxi Driver.
I realize now how much she is just like the others, cold and distant.
Now not everybody is going to want to do a line-by-line comparison of a screenplay, but it's great if you're doing a class assignment
or learning how to write screenplays or studying acting
because you can see a little better what kinds of personal styles and spins the actors are adding to the words.
And I love the subtitle thing because Marlon Brando is sort of famous for doing mumbles and lines like this.
How would you love to have the subtitles with him?
One of the best-known bells and whistles on DVDs are the alternate audio tracks.
This is where you can hear the director, the actors, the writers or crew members describing a movie one shot at a time.
For example, Dennis Hopper relives the making of Easy Rider.
It starts out going into what I call John Ford Country, Monument Valley.
Even critics get in the act. I did a commentary on Dark City, the science fiction epic.
What Proyas does throughout this stretch of the film is not to do a lot of tracking or panning or zooming,
but to cut from one static set up to another.
That was hard work. It took about eight hours to record that track,
although sometimes it sounds like actors just do it in real time,
walking in, sitting down in front of the TV, opening up the mic and with a case of beer right there handy.
Yeah, I'd say so. In fact, the classic example of that is in Boogie Nights.
It's a brilliant spoof almost of these audio commentaries.
You've got audio tracks here that seem maybe a little bit sloppy or maybe they're just really entertaining.
Mark Wahlberg, for example, keeps complaining that he's got to be somewhere as his cell phone keeps ringing.
And John C. Reilly might be playing that drinking game himself.
He seems rather lubricated as he rambles on to director Paul Thomas Anderson about Burt Reynolds.
He was so much older than everyone else in the movie for most of the scenes that he was doing,
except for like Bob Ridgeley and Philip Baker Hall.
He really, he rose to the challenge, you know. He was kind of like, he didn't, he was really out of his element.
And leave it to the members of Spinal Tap to stay in character as they provide commentary about that landmark mockumentary.
Such a waste of nice flowers to put them on a dead bloke's headstone.
Well, you're going to put it on a live bloke's headstone.
Oh, that's a good point.
I have to say I much prefer these creative audio commentaries to the producer and director saying things like,
Tom and Meg were great to work with or we had such a hard time getting that shot.
I like when they add a little more to it.
Yeah, you know, sometimes there are spontaneous moments that are really touching.
For example, in the commentary for Nashville, Robert Altman sees a scene involving Tommy Thompson,
who was assistant director for 30 years and who had died just a week before he recorded that track.
And he begins to talk about Thompson and you realize you're really in the moment with the director talking about a colleague.
And it's not like they're doing seventh or eighth takes on that. You're getting the raw, spontaneous emotion.
Okay, coming up next, a very popular feature of DVDs, nicknamed Easter Eggs.
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It's a sign that's meant to tell you what the freeway is doing up ahead.
And it seemed like a perfect metaphor for me for a sign who can tell you what's going to go on up ahead in your life.
Steve Martin explains the inspiration for LA's story in a feature not listed on the DVD menu for that movie.
It's an example of an Easter egg, a hidden treasure that might not be listed or detailed anywhere on the DVD box or even in the press materials, but it's well worth the hunt.
For example, if you activate the follow the white rabbit feature on the Matrix, you'll be shown behind the scenes footage without having to exit the story itself.
One, two, three.
And show a little patience when you find the color bars in Magnolia and they'll eventually lead you to an outtake of Tom Cruise cracking up in a scene about a dead dog.
I mean, when I got to the hospital, no one would listen to me.
I was saying, hey, you know, Pookie's in trouble here.
Not every DVD comes with an Easter egg and many eggs are of the soft boiled variety.
You just get an extra TV commercial or a list of people who contributed to the DVD.
I say if you're going to go to the trouble of hiding Easter eggs, make sure they're well decorated.
Yeah, I don't want to go clicking around for hours only to find out who did the sound on the alternate soundtrack.
Exactly.
You can find dozens of Easter eggs listed on the Web at DVD.com.
And here are a few of them. Man in the Moon star Jim Carrey as a brilliant but maddening comedian Andy Kaufman.
As you read his biography on the DVD, you see his face.
Click on it and you go to an unlisted scene of the real Andy Kaufman.
And from being John Malkovich, here's one of my favorite Easter eggs.
See what it says. Now look what happens when you press it.
I wonder if it's cheating to go to the Web to find the Easter eggs instead of spending hours clicking all over the screen.
Go to the Web, save some time. You know, I do love this stuff.
But sometimes the Easter egg hunt is so complicated and tedious.
I just do want to go back to watching that movie.
You're supposed to be able to find all kinds of hidden extras, for example, on the Independence Day DVD by highlighting the main menu entry.
But then you have to press the right button to go to the Easter egg.
And then you have to enter the ship while pressing the button.