Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
24 FA L L 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y L-R: Scoring mixer Bruce Botnick, re-recording mixer Michael Babcock CAS, producer Mike Matessino, producer David C. Fein, and visual effects supervisor Daren Dochterman only because this was relatively new in the CGI era. Stuff was really starting to look CGI and people were spotting it. And even in the Star Wars special editions, which mixed new shots and old shots, people were calling it out for things standing out. "By the time we did this screening in December of 1999, which I think was right on the anniversary of the release of the film, we'd seen Star Wars: Episode I, which was what, six years after Jurassic Park by that point? I think even the casual viewers were becoming very attentive to CGI and how you could do a lot more. But somehow you had to be careful that things didn't look fake, because that could happen very, very easily. We were just very conscious of the CG and wanting to make sure that, unlike some of what had been done with the Star Wars special editions, that the work was seamless. We stuck to the storyboards and achieved the shots in a way that would've been theoretically possible if they had [the time and budget] to do them originally. "When things started to happen, like a third cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Blade Runner 'Final' cut, you were getting top quality in the form of a photochemical element, and that was always prohibitively expensive. We really had to wait for the right circumstances at Paramount and the right management there who really could grasp this idea of just what this was. Those conversations kept coming up intermittently over the years, and it was always about the money, and it was always about understanding the vision of what this really was. Because I don't think that they really grasped that until this time around." David C. Fein added, "I told Bob, let's communicate with Sherry Lansing and say, 'Hey, this film never really got done.' And it was painful for Bob. It was the only film that ever got away from him. But it was the magic of who he is that the film was able to be completed and become beloved in that form. He wrote her and said, 'Would you be open to me coming back and reopening post and giving this film the proper time that it needs to get this film together and make it work?' And she responded to the studio, 'Hey, let's talk about this.' And we went in with a film budget to do the whole project on film—to actually finish the film and complete it. But if you remember around 2000, there was almost no revival market for films. The studio's opinion was, 'Thank you, very much. This is awesome. DVD is where we make all our money. So, we're going to put out a DVD and, no, we don't need to do a theatrical or anything.' "The film went on to make more than it would cost to do theatrical, which meant I kept going back to the studio every now and then saying, 'Are you ready to do the theatrical?' When it came time to do high definition, which we were right at the beginning of at that point, but not enough to really do the job in high def, it was still a little too early. "Just looking at it from a business point of view of a producer, it wasn't cost-effective to do another theatrical element at that point—or even do high def—[because] the cost would have to be the project multiple times over. And even the sound mix we did was the state of the art at the time. It's funny, I remember that the sound mix that we produced with Chuck Michael at the time, he was the sound supervisor, the sound mix was fantastic. And it was funny because they had just released all the Star Trek films on DVD at the time,