From: Jeff Kreines (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jul 03 2006 - 09:51:13 PDT
There are quite a few of these films shot for 35mm release on video
-- there was a Richard Burton HAMLET circa 1965, in B&W, the T.A.M.I.
Show (Teen-Age Music International), HARLOW (the Carol Lynley
version), the first Richard Pryor concert film, NORMAN, IS THAT YOU?,
and 200 Motels -- which has recently shown up on cable, and is still
as tedious as when I saw it the day it opened, though some of Tony
Palmer's video effects are quite lovely for their time. (Barry
Stevens, who was one of the tape editors, is on the Avid list.)
Tube cameras permitted an easy change in aspect ratios by tweaking
the coils around the tube, so some of these "films" were shot in
1:1.85 NTSC, and "spot wobble" was used in making the kinescopes,
which weren't bad. Some of the artifacts associated with the B&W
Image Orthicon cameras of the day (highlights went dark when over-
exposed) were quite unique.
200 Motels probably used the early Image Transform system, transfer
of the film on an electron beam recorder to 16mm B&W successive-frame
RGB, then blown up to Technicolor matrices. (There's actually a joke
in 200 Motels about a "Technicolor Interpositive" in one of the
animation scenes, along with some Herb Cohen jokes.)
Bill Sargeant produced a lot of video-to-film releases:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0765090/
Russ Alsobrook wrote a piece about some of this history here:
http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/back-to-future.html
More here, but some inacuracies.
http://www.nealalpert.com/binder1.html
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