MH: The disc itself has one of the largest collections of supplemental features among your releases, and I wonder if you might go into some detail as to whether they were supplied to you, or as part of the discovery process that led to a rare LP recording of Eli Wallach, reading passages from the book, in addition to the archival interviews.

DK: Well, stuff comes from different directions. I've always been attracted to the DVD format precisely for its ability to give you that extra context for movies, and if you're dealing with a big blockbuster film that received a lot of publicity and was really popular on its release, you don't need that much, but with a lot of these marginal films, specialty films, and niche market sort of things, sometimes they are obscure because they're weird, and they're kind of hard to read; so giving a little bit of background about where they come from and about why they are the way they are helps viewers access them.

That's one thing I always like to do with films that really need it, and Christ in Concrete I felt really needed that context to help explain so many different levels of context. I mean, there's a real historical period that's being represented; then there's a true story even more specific than that about the real Geremio di Donato; and then the whole literary history of the book, and the Blacklist period. All these different levels at which the film can be approached. So I felt that using the supplemental materials for the DVD was the ideal way of getting that information across.

In the case of the LP recording of Eli Wallach doing the mono-drama, we lucked into that. I have a lot of fans on the Internet who send me emails through the web site, and someone saw a listing for Christ in Concrete… and let me know that he had this recording, and we borrowed it from him - one of our customers, actually.

[In addition to] the audio commentary and the featurettes that were produced for the DVD, I got this huge stack of documents, both from the di Donato family and also from film historian Bill Wasserzieher, that were useful research material in putting the commentary track together, but I felt that some of the stuff was so interesting that it needed to be just left alone, and that's why we did the DVD-ROM section.

MH: And in the case of Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, one of the things that I guess is kind of unique about B-movies is that they had a specific function, so to speak, and unless they made their way to TV or home video, they sort of disappeared. When you were going through some of the Ulmer titles, did you find that a lot of them were in very rough shape, because major Hollywood studio generally kept their materials in their own vaults and some master elements in a kind of safely storage.

DK: The stuff that Ulmer was doing at PRC in the Forties fell into three different packages for television distribution, and ironically, of those packages, it was the one that included his best-known and most popular things - Detour (1945), Bluebeard (1944) and that kind of stuff - that was the one that ended up falling into the public domain. His much less well-known films, the ones that are much harder to sell to today's market, ironically are the ones that got much better preserved because their copyrights were maintained.

There were companies that actually had a vested interest in keeping the stuff in good condition, but in the case of something like Bluebeard, as with any film, it is expensive to preserve and store film. Film takes up a lot of space, especially if you're going to preserve lots of different elements of films. It's really a challenge, and unless there's some reason for you to do so, some reason that you think you're going to make that investment back, you're just not going to do it. So in the case if Bluebeard, as far as I know, there are no 35mm elements left in the United States; certainly none that have ever shown up for access to preservationists or archivists. But in France, the French distributors did maintain local copyright control, so there was much better preservation of some of Ulmer's B-films than there was here. So the elements that we used for Bluebeard as well as for Strange Woman and for some of the other Ulmer titles we were actually getting from France.