289 Hoop Dreams

[Thomas Dukenfield]

I'm generating this from (my unreliable) memory, but Steve James et al were solicited by Criterion to film an update on Agee and Gates, and found that their stories necessitated another film. Being as this - to my knowledge - was initially to be produced by Criterion, I'm not sure what that spells for its distribution...

A follow-up piece ran on Chicago's PBS affiliate station WTTW/Channel 11 a few years back, I wonder why it wasn't included on Criterion's disc?

There have been several specials with update interviews with Agee and Gates. There was a "one year later" piece (maybe 15-30 minutes) that ran on Chicago television (it may have been WTTW) in 1996 I believe. I was hoping they would include that because I haven't seen it since and I can't find it on Youtube.

[hearthesilence]

New restoration screening at the Sundance Film Festival:

"Hoop Dreams was shot primarily on analog Beta SP videotape, so the image was cropped and transferred for its commercial release. Working from multiple elements, including standard definition video masters and a 35mm film print, the project team created a new uncropped, high definition digital master that better represents the pictorial quality of the original videography. Digitally remastered at Modern VideoFilm with sound restoration by Audio Mechanics, this version allows future audiences to see the film as conceived by its filmmakers."

FWIW, the Criterion DVD is thankfully uncropped.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I wonder if there is any connection to a future Criterion release seeing as Modern Videofilm does a lot of Criterion releases. Then again, they handle a LOT of releases for other studios too.

[movielocke]

what did the DVD source from, not the 35mm elements?

[hearthesilence]

According to one website review: "Even more interestingly, Criterion misses the opportunity to master the film from its original tape elements. Seeing Hoop Dreams in its original, video format would have been something very special – something that many studios fail to recognize when they handle non-celluloid creations."

I have to disagree a bit here, if you listen to the commentary, at one point they talk about prepping the film for theatrical release. I don't remember the exact words, but I remember them wanting it to look like a film, not a video projection, and that's what it looks like on the DVD. It would not have looked that way if they had mastered from video.

[Numero Trois]

Hoop Dreams An Oral History

[chucktatum]

My friend is at Sundance right now. He talked to cinematographer/producer Peter Gilbert, who said that Criterion has a restored print, so presumably that means a Blu upgrade in the near future.

[captveg]

My friend is at Sundance right now. He talked to cinematographer/producer Peter Gilbert, who said that Criterion has a restored print, so presumably that means a Blu upgrade in the near future.

Isn't most of the footage SD source though? I mean, there can be improvement, but it'll never look amazing.

[Brianruns10]

Could Hoop Dreams be released on blu-ray?

Yes and no. Yes, because in theory if they were using a 35mm interpositive created from the original video master, there's no reason why they couldn't scan in 2K or 4K and produce a new HD master for a blu-ray disc.

However, because the original material is SD to begin with, it's difficult to say what would be added, except for the fact that you could play the image on a larger screen without as much breakdown of the image as you would if you played an SD DVD on an HD monitor.

But there would be no added clarity or detail, and I suspect a blu-ray player's upscaling capability would yield similar results.

Make no mistake, I love this movie, but I think it would be a rather needless release on blu-ray, when Criterion could expend their money and resources focusing on another project.

[hearthesilence]

Blu-Ray can still be handy for something like Hoop Dreams simply by delivering an image that's essentially the uncompressed video. Even with something shot on SD video, there's a good deal of compression going on when you author it for a DVD. I have no idea what the restored DCP print was made from, but my gut decision would be to make something straight from the original Beta SP tapes, which should still hold up after all these years, and preserve the original aspect ratio instead of cropping it, which is what they did for the theatrical release. (As the oral history a few posts above mentioned, this was supposed to be for television and was definitely composed for a television aspect ratio. The idea of showing it in a theater did not happen until after it was completed.)

[hearthesilence]

Kartemquin Films posted this on Facebook. New restoration on the left, "original look" on the right.

[captveg]

Damn. That's pretty impressive.

[zedz]

If that's representative, this is probably going to be the best anybody has ever seen the film.

[Bando]

I'm in. Upgrade please!

[Yaanu]

Here, have a semi-perfect overlay comparison of the two frames. I haven't seen the movie myself, so I'm going to assume that the latter is actually a zoom-in during this scene, hence why the two frames don't match up. Still, I thought it might be interesting to do it anyways:

[hearthesilence]

The new HD restoration is currently a SundanceNow exclusive and IndieWire has posted a clip comparing the restoration with the old video master.

[djproject]

This is creating an interesting mixed reaction in me =]

There's a part of me that, of course, really likes this as cinematic presentation: presenting images in the highest quality possible, taking advantage of technology to make the presentation better, etc. But there's a part of me that acts like a historian and thinks it should be true to the source material. The images make it seem that the entire documentary was shot using a Blackmagic Design camera, which would be flat-out anachronistic.

Again, this is just a minor point and I bring it up more to generate some thinking and discussion about the larger issues of presentation, restoration and so on.

[hearthesilence]

I think for this particular film, it may be much more complicated, so much that there may be no clear cut answer.

Unfortunately, I did not see this film in the theater, much less in 1994, but to my understanding, it was transferred to 35mm with a lot of post-work to make it look 'good' blown-up and projected on that format. More importantly, the image was heavily cropped in order to fill a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, something they chose for the theatrical exhibition.

Bear in mind, from the start, this project was intended for public television broadcast, and after its theatrical run, it definitely got shown on PBS stations everywhere, especially in Chicago. I ditched my VHS dub of a WTTW broadcast (Chicago's main PBS station) after the film came out on DVD, but from what I can remember, it was definitely broadcast in 1.33:1, not letterbox/widescreen. I have no idea if it was cropped yet again from the 1.85:1 image used in theatrical exhibition, or if they wisely just went back to the original video footage and broadcast it with no cropping whatsoever. I would suspect the latter (after all, wouldn't that be a lot easier and cheaper?)

So right there, you have multiple formats necessitated by the video format, the original distribution intended for the film, and the changes made for the theatrical exhibition.

[djproject]

As far as aspect ratios are concerned, the only time 1.85:1 was ever used was during its theatrical run. (It might have also been done for its Sundance run as the pervading attitude was "video was crap" but I'm not sure). I believe in all home video formats, including and especially the Criterion DVD, was 1.33:1.

I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear in the beginning but my response was more about the overall image and in particular its color and contrast. This was after looking at the demonstration clip comparing the original video and the restored presentation.

(Aspect ratio was never an issue with me with this one =] )

[Kirkinson]

The images make it seem that the entire documentary was shot using a Blackmagic Design camera, which would be flat-out anachronistic.

I think the image in the restoration video looks just about right for early-90's analog Beta SP. It looks like professional broadcast-standard video for the era, the only difference being that most people are probably used to seeing images like this that have gone through a few generations of quality loss on the way to their distribution format, whether an edited master for broadcast or (even worse) a VHS home video release. If they went back to the original tapes for this restoration, modern editing methods can present them with no quality loss at all, and given that the tapes are not likely to have suffered much if any quality loss as long as they were properly stored and cared for, the images should look better than they ever have before. Some digital fine-tuning has surely been done, but it doesn't look remotely excessive to me.

Bear in mind though that I've never seen this film and I'm judging this entirely from the restoration demo and my own experience with video from that era (which can look much, much better than a lot of people realize with a good camera and high-quality glass).

[MichaelB]

On the big Walerian Borowczyk interview (in Arrow's box set and on the separate release of Blanche), we went back to the original Beta SP tapes of an interview shot in 1985 and blew them up to HD for the Blu-ray. Nobody's going to mistake the end result for true HD, but it nonetheless looked really startlingly good when set against expectations.

But the crucial thing is that we had direct access to the raw footage - had this been edited into a documentary at the time and we'd licensed that instead, the image would have dropped at least a generation because that was an unavoidable by-product of how analogue tape editing worked back then.

[djproject]

Thank you for curing my ignorance =]

[Minkin]

Blu-ray / DVD upgrade - March 31st, 2015

New digital restoration, with 4.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Two audio commentaries: one by filmmakers Peter Gilbert, Steve James, and Frederick Marx, and one by the film’s subjects, Arthur Agee and William Gates
Life After “Hoop Dreams,” a new documentary catching up with Agee, Gates, and their families
Additional scenes
Collection of excerpts from Siskel & Ebert tracking the acclaim for Hoop Dreams
Original music video for the film’s theme song from 1994
Trailers
PLUS: Essays by author John Edgar Wideman and filmmaker and critic Robert Greene

New to this edition:
-Life After “Hoop Dreams,” a new documentary catching up with Agee, Gates, and their families
-Additional scenes

Although it might look like some of the earlier booklet content is left off. The new restoration should be quite impressive!

[swo17]

The upgrade should be substantial. See discussion earlier on this page.

[Bando]

Great timing for this to be released the week before the NCAA Final Four. Can't wait.