MH: Does the existence of a prior TV or international distribution run improve the chances of finding extant film prints?

DK: If it weren't for the expectations of the DVD market that the releases be of studio master quality, it would be a lot easier. It's not a case where prints aren't available; it's just that prints that are so much harder to find, and there are a couple of titles that I passed on over the last couple of years because, although they were good movies and I had access to elements, they didn't have access to elements that I thought were worth using. It's one of the great ironies of the DVD market.

I first started collecting movies when I was a kid, and the only medium in which you could do that was Super 8, where you'd spend $50 for a ten-minute cut-down version of a movie in black and white with subtitles. When you get to the 1970s and the 1980s when videotape was first coming out, Hollywood actually went to the Supreme Court trying to assert that individual, private ownership of copies of movies was a crime, and unconstitutional.

MH: Which is very bizarre, because when videotape first debuted in England, the studios offered movies through unbridled rental and sales agreements with incredibly virgin copyright laws, and it was only when they discovered the video stores were buying a few copies and renting them out that they realized, 'Wait a second, we can actually make better revenue here,' resulting in a rental-only pricing scheme that continues to this day with videotape.

DK: Yeah, it took a long time for Hollywood to come around to the idea that this was a market worth exploiting, and for most of the history of home video, it was a market they were exploiting in the cheapest, lowest quality possible… I mean, VHS won out over Beta (which was a superior format), and VHS was often EP [extended/slow play] speed or other really low quality copies on VHS that people were getting. Widescreen movies were panned & scanned. Foreign movies were dubbed. It took a really long time for the idea of watching movies in a collector format, with a serious eye towards appreciating them as art, to break through in the video industry.

So now, here we are with DVD, where you can actually go into a place like Best Buy with $20 in your pocket and walk out with something close to a studio quality master of a lot of films, filled out with all kinds of extra bonus material. And rather than think that that is a really miraculous turn of events, I think a lot of consumers have come merely to expect it; so instead of really appreciating it when it happens, they get really uppity when it doesn't happen, and there are a lot of films, especially older films, that simply cannot look as good as the stuff that's coming out today. It just will never happen.

For films that are more narrowly marketed [and have] a much smaller potential audience, the incentive to do work that is going to be required to make them look pristine often times isn't there. So I think that there needs to be a little bit of a change among the DVD audience to be a little more receptive; maybe to paying more and expecting less when it comes to some older films, because there's a lot of stuff I fear is getting orphaned because I just can't compete.

MH: Two quick questions before we close: Was Daughter of Dr. Jekyll originally shot widescren?

DK: It was at a time when the distribution of those kind of films was scattershot. It was going to be at drive-ins, it was going to be at hard-top theatres, it was going to be on TV. So it was shot open-matte with the idea that you would put a widescren matte on the projector when showing it on a screen that was designed for widescreen, and you'd just take that matte off when showing on TV. Most of the times when people have seen video copies of Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, they're seeing the open-matte version which has a lot more empty space around the top and bottom of the image, so we were hard matting the image and giving you less picture area in order to preserve what would have been the original theatrically distributed compositions

MH: And lastly, you also provide a commentary on your double feature disc The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1962)/The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse (1932). Given some of the best commentary tracks involve the participant using well-prepared notes and research materials, was it a bit daunting that you decided to take the challenge yourself, because your Mabuse track is very consistent with a lot of good information.

DK: Well thank you very much, I appreciate the compliment. I had the advantage that I was in the process of writing a book [The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse] about the Dr. Mabuse films, so I was doing the research anyway. And to a certain extent, I was writing the stuff down in a way that was rather similar to what I was using on the commentary track, so it wasn't as if I was coming to the project completely cold. That I think was an advantage that a lot of people siting down to do a DVD commentary might have, because you're right, it is a lot of research; and terms of cohering that material into something that has a relationship to what you're seeing on the screen, it's a really time consuming process.

When I was hired by Image to do the commentary track for the silent Dr. Mabuse film [Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922)] which runs about four and a half hours, I could probably talk for four and a half hours just about all of the stuff that is going on in the first 20 minutes. There's so much social and historical and film historical and pop cultural references - all this stuff that's packed into those twenty minutes.

But then the film kind of slows down, and there are sequences where there's not a lot interest going on from a film historical standpoint. If you're trying to be scene-specific, there's a lot of stuff that you then can't say, because it doesn't fit into the time that you have and you can't come back to it later. So it's a real challenge of taking all of the stuff that you want to say, and somehow find the most appropriate time during the course of the movie where to fit it.

It is a lot of work, but as I said, with the Mabuses I had the advantage that a certain amount of the work was something I was doing anyways for the book.