Originally Posted by Michael Brooke  That's completely unwarranted cynicism, and I suspect you know it.
I'm reluctant to speak for my colleagues, but my own delayed releases had sound reasons behind them, namely:
The Long Goodbye - at a fairly late stage in production, Arrow decided to redesign their menus across the board (which I was firmly behind, as I never liked the white-bordered ones). The first one with the new menu, Big Trouble in Little China, took forever to get right because the disc structure was so complicated, which meant that the other late-2013 releases had to wait their turn. (I don't think the delay was that severe, but I do recall late November releases turning into mid-December ones.)
Sullivan's Travels - this was all set to go to replication as per the original schedule until at pretty close to the very last minute I was told that I could have the big Preston Sturges documentary after all (after spending much of the autumn trying to track down the European rightsholder, I'd more or less written it off in January). But including it required re-encoding and reauthoring everything, not least because the authoring house suddenly had to create space for a 75-minute documentary - so there was no chance of hitting the original deadline.
Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection - the original June 30 release date was entirely feasible based on the original plan: four BDs, five DVDs, and a mixture of newly-created HD and off-the-shelf SD material. But thanks to the success of the Kickstarter project and the smooth running of the Goto restoration (which freed up quite a bit of contingency funding), we were able to scan everything in HD - the feature, the five shorts mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign, two more shorts (and an alternative cut of an existing one) that weren't, three commercials and the 16mm on-set footage from The Beast. But not only did this require a lot of extra time to create new masters (film materials had to be tracked down and imported from France, James White and Deluxe had to find extra time in their busy schedules), but we then thought that we might as well go over the extras and upgrade all their clips to HD as well. And all of this work dominated April and May, when according to the original schedule we should have been authoring and QCing the final discs. The most recent delay is because I wasn't happy with the subtitles on Immoral Tales and we're experimenting with ways of making them clearer when they unavoidably have to appear over big wodges of text - I could have let them through as they were, and many labels undoubtedly would have done so, but I felt that we'd come so far that it would be a crying shame not to get it absolutely perfect.
In other words, in all three of those cases I could have met the original release dates - but you'd have ended up with inferior packages every time (I'd argue significantly inferior packages in the case of the last two). And one of the great things about working for Arrow is that they're flexible enough to allow you to react to sudden changes of circumstance - I can well imagine other labels saying of something like the Sullivan's Travels scenario "No, it's too late - just go ahead with what you've got".
Oh, and as a footnote, when the Borowczyk project was being budgeted, I agreed a flat fee rather than my usual practice of charging per day, as Arrow otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford two full-time producers (which the project badly needed, given the workload). Thanks to the delays, I've effectively been working for nothing since at least May (and that's aside from the fact that I'd already ploughed most of my fee into the Kickstarter campaign), and it would obviously have been far more convenient for both me and my family if I'd simply adhered to the original specs and stuck to the original schedule.
But would you really have preferred that? |