You may not know this (or care), but I majored in film (if you hadn’t guessed from my nom de plume). So even more egregious to me than word abuse is thoughtless filmmaking. And still more unforgivable is incompetent film restoration – because if a film is worthy of restoring, it is not thoughtless filmmaking.
But venturing deeper into the circles of hell, we find the combined sin of careless restoration coupled with dunderheaded copy editing.
According to the blogger who caught the errors:
“Do a few misspellings really matter that much?” – Yes they do. “Nobody would really notice would they?” – That’s not the point. Think how insulting it is to these crew members, their families, descendants. This HD master of FRENZY will now become the master that everyone will see for decades on TV, on iTunes, in DCP, and on this bad disc.
We’re not seeing the film as released in 1972 and signed off by Hitchcock, we’re seeing an approximation of the opening titles, the text of which looks like a PS3 videogame, completely static, with digital fades between each piece of text. All done in a vain attempt to make the opening credits look a little better than they probably do, and to save cleaning up the original.
Look at that awful un-smart apostrophe. (Did I mention I also worked as a graphic designer? Yes, third in my inner circles of hell is thoughtless typography, like using Arial in place of Frutiger or using Comic Sans – ever.
Read the Slate article here.
– Otto E. Mezzo