Search

I knew going into this was that I'd be dealing with a guy who was nuts about restoring stuff. What I ended up with was a glimpse of probably the most unusual home theater that has ever graced these pages. Driving up to a recent-vintage brick home in an upscale Indianapolis development on a particularly gloomy January afternoon, I wasn't sure I had the right address--until I saw a pristine Victrola on display in a bay window to the side of the front door. That good-as-new phonograph--and, I would soon find out, a lot of other stuff--was the product of the passion and skills of the homeowner, Eric von Grimmenstein Ill. A man as unassuming as his name is imposing, Eric is part hobbyist, part conjurer, with a knack for laying hands on just about any damaged and discarded contraption and bringing it back to life. His house is sprinkled with the fruits of his restorative labors--including 5-foot-high music boxes made of beautifully finished hardwoods, fed by amazing-sounding metal discs the size of lumber-mill saws. But while it was hard not to be intrigued and charmed by the music boxes--and the phonographs and the hand-cranked movie cameras and the jukeboxes, and all of the other intricate mechanical devices from bygone days--they were all really just a warm-up to the main act: a did-it-himself movie palace that tested the limits of Eric's considerable skills. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'I knew I wanted to do a 1920s-theme dedicated home theater,' Eric says, 'so I spent the last 20 years hitting antiques shops and eBay, looking for architectural items. The problem is that things like that are usually way out of scale--the light fixtures are too big and so on--so you have to be careful what you're looking for.' While he had some luck finding isolated items, Eric was having a hard time gathering matching sets that would make his space look like a movie theater and not some kind of curio shop. 'Finding sets of doors or light fixtures or poster holders is very tough,' he says. 'But the owner of Architectural Artifacts in Chicago told me that a friend of his who owns Urban Artifacts in Philadelphia had a tremendous amount of items from the Mayfair Theatre of Asbury Park, New Jersey.' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Built in 1926, the Mayfair was the opulent, exotica-filled flagship of the Walter Reade theater chain. But, like almost everything else in the once-thriving resort town of Asbury Park, the theater had fallen into disrepair by the 1960s; it was torn down in 1974. Fortunately for Eric, though, Urban Artifacts had enough elements from the Mayfair to give his theater the consistent look he wanted. The problem was getting everything from Philadelphia back to Indianapolis. 'It's a long drive,' Eric says, 'so I didn't want to make a second trip. I had a Suburban, but I don't know how I got six heavy 7-foot metal doors, two iron poster holders, two large ceiling lights, five small ceiling lights, and four sconces in there. They were thousands of pounds, and I couldn't begin to close the back doors, so I tied them shut and drove back to Indianapolis.' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While Eric was thrilled to have secured so many pieces from the Mayfair, they were in terrible shape. 'They were very rusty, like they'd been stored outside,' he says. 'Metal had to be replaced or refabricated, I had to bead-blast the rust off, the pits had to be filled with Bondo, and so on. You just don't realize how much time goes into restoration to do it right--especially when you're dealing with metal. Either you cut it out and replace it, or you've got to fill in the pitted areas. It just takes a lot of filling and sanding and prepping.' But reviving the near-dead is what Eric lives for, of course. 'It's like a frame-off restoration of a car: You go all the way down,' he says. 'And when you take something apart, it's nasty, it's greasy, it's dirty. You keep going down, down, down until you have it all in pieces, and then you start moving forward. You sandblast the first piece, you prime it, you paint it--and then you're finally starting to work with clean pieces.' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Even after Eric had restored the elements from the Mayfair and other vintage movie houses to their former glory, he was still a long way from having someplace to put them. And just because you've assembled a great collection of antiques doesn't mean you know how to integrate them into a theater--as far too many well-meant but kitschy man caves show. Fortunately, Eric had the good sense to approach home theater designer extraordinaire (and S&V contributor)Theo Kalomirakis. Eric first met Theo during the 1999 CEDIA Expo in Indianapolis, at the home of Scott Jones, whose Theo-designed theater had just won CEDIA's 'Best Home Theater Electronic System Design Over $150,000' and 'Best Home Theater Architecture Design' awards. 'I went up and introduced myself, showed him some pictures of the theater I had thoughts of having him do, and he was very interested. I had no timeline, though--the house hadn't even been built yet--so he probably thought he'd never hear from me again. But I got back in touch with him in early 2006, and he flew out and saw the project and all the architectural items.' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Mayfair was a challenge for Theo because, as Eric points out, 'it's much easier to design a theater from scratch than to try to design one around existing items. But Theo liked that I was looking for the most economical way to create the maximum look. He hates it when someone just wants to have a bigger, better theater than his neighbors--when they have an open checkbook but very little involvement with the project.' It didn't hurt that Eric and Theo share a love for movie palaces--or that Eric's desire to incorporate salvaged goods reminded Theo of his own first theaters. The other crucial collaborator was John Claeys, whom Eric affectionately calls The Artist. 'Ironically, John lives on the third floor of the Fountain Square Theater in Fountain Square, Indiana,' Eric says. 'In exchange for rent, he was working on restoring the theater. I found him one day painting a poster holder, got to know him, and told him I wanted to have him involved with painting my theater.' Eric needed somebody whose ability with paint and brush matched his own with the tools of the restoration trade. 'John's taste in colors, mixing, marbleizing, and faux finishing is incredible. All the architectural items were restored by me up to being primed, and then I turned them over to The Artist for the final painting and antiquing.' Eric modestly claims that the new Mayfair 'wouldn't have been possible without Theo and John Claeys. They made this theater.' Eric initially envisioned a layout where you would walk straight from the concession area into the lobby and then into the theater. But Theo came up with a much more involved, and involving, floor plan in the form of a giant U. 'Which is deceiving,' Eric says. 'It makes the space seem much bigger than it is because you're moving from room to room.' From the first floor of the house, a set of limestone steps descends to the box office, which uses a fiber-optic ceiling, limestone walls, a large poster holder, and an antique-style marquee to create the illusion of being outside. 'I had a hard time finding a ticket booth that was the right size and scale,' Eric says, 'so I ended up buying some bankteller fronts that I thought would, after some slicing and dicing, make a pretty neat booth.' The doors to either side of the booth are from Architectural Artifacts. 'Unfortunately, we had to chop 18 inches off [from their height] to get them in scale to fit that area.' Eric wanted to have a mannequin in the ticket booth, but his wife, Susan, was dead-set against it. 'She has a phobia about clowns and mannequins, so she told me, 'If you put a mannequin in there, I get a German shepherd.' I'm not ready for another dog yet.' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From the box office, you enter the concession area, which features a display case with candy, an antique cash register, and a 1940s Manley popcorn machine--all of it restored by Eric. The popcorn machine isn't from the same era as the rest of the theater's fixtures, but Eric found ways to integrate it into the overall scheme. 'It's Art Deco,' he says, 'but the pendant lights over the display case and the cash register both have a bright nickel finish, which ties in with the chrome elements in the machine, pulling it into the color scheme. Only a purist would know that it's out of scale or out of date.' The concession area also features a massive wall fixture with two large poster holders to either side of a mirror, four large horsehair-plaster ceiling coffers from a Chicago mansion, antique exit signs, and an intriguing ship's-wheel ticket grinder. 'They would shred your ticket in it so you couldn't reuse it,' Eric explains. From the concession area, you turn right to enter the lobby, an elaborate eight-sided space incorporating most of the elements recovered from the Mayfair. 'It has two iron three-sheet poster holders on the main side walls, four very ornate sconces, and a single large ceiling fixture--all from the Mayfair,' says Eric. 'The four cigarette urns came from the Murat Theatre in Indianapolis.' As beautiful as they are, the light fixtures caused a bit of a controversy--especially the chandelier. 'The Mayfair had a Spanish Moorish theme, so it had pretty wild-looking fixtures,' Eric says. 'When Theo first saw them, he thought they were hideous because they had multicolored, round glass jewels in them. He said it looked like a carnival. But I replaced all the glass jewels with amber-colored ones, which toned the fixtures way down.' As you walk through the lobby, it's natural to assume that the large double doors at the end (also from the Mayfair) lead into the theater. But they instead lead into (of all places) the restroom. 'I wanted an older-looking style,' Eric says, 'and to me that means a pedestal sink and lots of Carrera marble.' The most unusual thing in the room is the pair of two-way mirrors above the sink and the toilet, which have 19-inch Sharp LCD TVs behind them so guests don't have to miss any of the movie. Eric had to be careful to integrate the restored elements so that his Mayfair would feel like a 1920s movie theater and not like a museum. 'The sad thing is that I wasn't able to use some items,' he says, 'including a Powers carbon-arc movie projector and a restored oak-cabinet movie camera.' By this point, you've navigated the giant U and are about to enter the theater proper. But that gratification is deferred a moment longer by a small gallery space located to the immediate right of the lobby. The gallery, which is made up of a series of steps running along the left side of the theater (as you face the screen), was the product of necessity. The theater began as a 20 x 30-foot space, but by the time the stage was added, its dimensions had become closer to 20 x 20--which, as Eric points out, 'isn't good acoustically.' So Theo suggested adding the gallery, which not only changed the theater back into a sonically friendlier rectangle but also gives people a way to discreetly get to and from their seats during a movie. 'That's something I never would have thought of,' Eric says. Something he did think of was adding mirrors to the front of the equipment room at the end of the gallery. 'The door was a distraction,' he says. 'Putting mirrors on and above it creates the illusion of doubling the length of the gallery. So, by solving that problem, we actually enhanced the look of the area.' Turning to the right when you first enter the gallery takes you into the bar area in the back of the theater. 'It's the most useful area in there,' Eric says, 'because you're sitting up on bar stools, and you can have food and drink and not have to worry about spills, but yet you still have a great view of the screen.' The main theater area is filled with two rows of six large seats from Fortress Seating. 'I went with a very traditional style in order to have the 1920s look,' Eric says. 'There are seats that are more comfortable, but it was more important to have the right look instead of going with some of the real plush leathery seats that are out there.' All the anticipation created by the progression from box office to concession area to lobby would build to a tremendous letdown if the theater itself wasn't stunning. But the lush yet cozy burgundy-and-gold room delivers, successfully evoking the great movie palaces within a fairly modest space. For all its flash, the color scheme is actually toned down a bit from Eric's original plan. 'I assumed it would be filled with bright 24-karat-looking gold,' he says. 'But Theo was like, 'No, no, no. You don't want it looking like it's dripping in gold. You want it subdued.' So everything has been antiqued to create the impression of an old-time theater in perfect condition.' Theo had a big impact on all of the color choices. 'For the seats and the carpet, we went with solid burgundy,' Eric says. 'And that's another Theo trademark I wouldn't have thought of. He says to go plain with your carpet and theater seats, and to put all the colors into the walls, the ceiling, and the proscenium area, because elaborate patterns in the carpet and seats pull your eyes away from what you should be looking at, which is the walls and ceiling.' Getting the look of the Mayfair's many rooms right meant that Eric, Theo, and John Claeys had to be in perfect sync. 'Theo has seen wonderful theaters ruined by how people have painted them,' Eric says. 'So he, The Artist, my wife, and I got out a paint deck, started looking through the palette, and picked two color schemes. Then we went room by room and used a pencil to mark every wall and piece of trim. Theo labeled each color 1 through 5, with 1 being the darkest and 5 the lightest, beginning with the baseboard, which is usually darkest. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'I questioned Theo's colors in the beginning, but he said, 'Just trust me. I've been through this a million times.' And he was deadon with all his picks.' The installation work was deftly handled by Jim Swearingen of Indianapolis-based Counterpoint Design (counterpointav .com), who had worked with Theo on Scott Jones's award-winning home theater. And while the gear is seamlessly integrated, choosing and installing it presented its own set of challenges--especially the screen and the speakers. 'There was a big controversy over the screen,' Eric says. 'The problem is, going with a 2.35:1 model would have left a 9-foot-high area above the screen. You would end up with a 4- or 5-foot-tall screen that looks like a Band-Aid across the stage, with all this dead space above and below. I opted for a 16:9 screen that fills the proscenium and then masks horizontally to create 2.35.' The front left/right speakers were supposed to go into angled columns on either side of the screen, but there wasn't enough room there for models that could fill the theater with sound. So Eric and Jim decided to put the speakers behind the perforated 132-inch Stewart Filmscreen FireHawk screen. The problem was, there still wasn't enough room. 'The design only left 14 inches behind the screen,' Jim says. 'As it turned out, Klipsch had a speaker in its professional cinema line [the KPT-325] that was 12 inches deep and yet could give us the volume of sound we needed to fill the space.' (And it didn't hurt that the company calls Indianapolis home.) The four Klipsch KS-7800-THX and two KL-7800-THX surround speakers are placed in columns throughout the theater, while the four 12-inch Klipsch KW-120-THX subwoofers are located on either side of the screen. Positioning the subs created yet another, and more elaborate, problem. 'They were supposed to go underneath the screen,' Jim says, 'but as the design evolved, we had to lower the screen to be in the correct line of sight for the seating. So that meant we had to stack the subs in the corners, to the sides of the screen. But that meant there wasn't enough room for the curtains to gather at the sides. So Eric did some pretty intense research and wound up with an overhead curtain, which actually works quite well.' 'Fortunately, we had enough room above the proscenium for an Austrian-type curtain, which is a very early style, from Florida Rod and Drapery in Orlando,' Eric says. 'That worked out perfect. Plus, people like the effect of the rising curtain.' Eric's ingenuity extended well beyond his restoration skills. When he found out that the access door to the projector vault wasn't big enough for the Runco VX-22d projector, he came up with a solution that impressed even his installer. 'Eric devised a rope-and-pulley system, and a series of boards were moved into place,' Jim explains. 'It required four people, each carefully coordinated--two on a ladder, two on a rope--to get that projector up into place. It sounds like a terrible way to mount a projector, but it actually was well engineered and worked extremely well.' Having a movie palace in the basement would be more than enough for most of us, but the tireless Eric has filled his underground domain with all kinds of elaborate spaces, including a racquetball court, an antique billiards room, and an English pub with a mural of the Thames glimpsed through rippled-glass windows. As Eric and his wife show me around the labyrinthine basement, we go through the garage, where I spot an Amphicar--a car/boat hybrid from the mid-'60s. Of course, this was one of Eric's projects, too. 'I bought it when our kids were small, did a ground-up restoration, and we still use it,' he says. I said Eric was tireless, but we all have our limits, and creating an indoor theme park that would put the Disney Imagineers to shame would tax anyone's abilities. Eric says his next project will be a castle-themed family room. 'It will probably have limestone walls, coffered ceilings, stone floors, and a limestone fireplace with a mantel from floor to ceiling. Then I'm going to do the hallway connecting all those areas with cobbled streets and street lamps, to make it seem like you're outside.' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When I ask him when he's going to work on all that, he finally concedes that he's only human. 'I don't know. The theater wore me out.' Photos by Michael Weschler

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] A voice booms from the ether of the home theater like a female Jehovah. 'Pick up Line 2,' it commands. 'Meryl wants to talk to Natasha.' I'm alone [...]

Back in May, The New York Times asked you what your next big purchase would be, and you said a home theater. Which is still weeks away from being completely done. So it's a typical home theater, then. Did you get involved in the planning, or did you just tell the installer, 'This is what I want'? I'm too busy to be able to do anything but say, 'This is what I want'--or, 'What do I want?,' which is more the question. My installer is Geoffrey Franklin, whose company [The Projection Room in Corte Madera, CA] has done stuff for George Lucas and John Lasseter. So when you get to somebody at that level, you just get out of their way. The only thing I said was, 'Don't spend past this.' Given his other jobs, I'm actually pretty small-time. Is your theater a relatively intimate space? Yeah. I finally moved to a house where there was the space for me to devote a room to a theater. My wife and kids didn't want to get caught up in that because they're not moviegoing aficionados or as picky as I am. So I had to make a home theater that doesn't interrupt the regular flow of the house. It's basically a nice receiving room that can be easily converted into a theater. So the screen and projector retract. Exactly. The projector comes down from the ceiling. Geoffrey got me some of the latest and greatest gear. I've lived with antiquated technology for so long--at home, not at work--that it blew me away. What's your favorite thing about the theater? The thing Geoffrey introduced me to that's becoming quite the time-eater is the Kaleidescape system. I don't know how you go back from that. To me, it's as life-changing as TiVo. To be able to just jump to my favorite scenes and make a playlist of them and access them with the same ease I've gotten used to with iTunes--wow. I can now search for things I haven't watched yet with the same kind of instinct I use at a record or book store. I can just rifle through, see what hits my fancy, and then immediately do something about it. It's great. I've watched way more movies at home in the last 2 weeks than I did all last year. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] How do you make the time for that? Rather than watching 2 hours of TV that we're just kind of interested in, now we're like, 'Hey, let's watch this movie.' When I was growing up, the whole family went to the movies every weekend. It didn't matter what was playing. And I naively assumed it would be the same way in my household. But with my kids, it's such a different world. The idea of having to get into the car and drive all the way to the theater and devote 2 solid hours without interruption to a movie isn't as attractive for them as it was for me. In their minds, you can see anything whenever you want and in any way you want. So why should they want to take this extra laborious step? Are they missing anything by not going to the theater? Oh, definitely--in the same way you're missing something by not seeing live drama. It's not a replaceable experience. So it just kills me that my kids aren't as eager to do it. But with this new home theater, I find that they're a little more willing now to wander past the room and go, 'What's this?' Do you try to expose them to your favorites? I don't force-feed them anything, but I definitely will not hide from them what I think is good and what they should be watching. They're at an age, though, where just the idea of recommending anything at all will kill it. So I'm much better off just letting something play that's really good and let it do its own job. My wife and I were watching Defending Your Life the other night through the Kaleidescape. And within 10 minutes, my daughter, her two friends, and my son all stopped what they were doing to come in and watch. And everybody loved it. I think you just know that when you have a good movie, it's going to do that. One of the dangers of a home theater is that it can become the husband's room, and the rest of the family becomes afraid to venture in there. No, I didn't want the home theater to be too sacred, too precious, because then it wouldn't be used. I want to watch movies with my family. I want to walk in and see my kids investigating some Kurosawa film by accident. That would just make my day. That is definitely the goal, to make it as easy to use as a TiVo. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Are you buying every Blu-ray Disc that comes out, or are you being more selective? No, I'm being really calm about it because it took me years to amass the DVD collection I have. How many DVDs do you have? I have thousands--thousands. I was that guy in college who had all the albums that everybody wanted to borrow, and they were in milk crates that filled the whole wall. That certainly translated to CDs, which then brought me to laserdiscs, and then straight to DVDs. So my hobbies are my profession. I just love music and movies equally. I'm either going to a movie or watching a movie at home or going to a concert or listening to music at home or in the car or on a portable. What's one movie you really wanted to see on Blu-ray? Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That's one of my Top 5 favorite films, and the Blu-ray boxed set is the fiber film geek's dream come true because it's got every version of the movie. Just to be able to see a high-quality version that's close to the way I experienced it for the first time is huge. What do you most want to see come out on Blu-ray? Lawrence of Arabia, just because it's my favorite film ever. And of course, I want to see Wall*E on Blu-ray, but that's coming. John Lasseter told me that the Blu-ray version of Cars is at the same 2K resolution you guys create the Pixar movies at. It's true. So we finally have a format that's one-to-one with the theatrical experience. Yeah. And it's weird because I've been conditioned since Toy Story to allow for the drop in quality once a film goes into the world beyond the movie theater. Before, I couldn't expect people at home to be able to watch it at the resolution I'd been seeing it at during the 4 years or more I'd been working on it. So it's such a treat to go to a digital-projection theater with an audience and see Wall*E at that resolution, because it's how we see it all the time. It's that level of quality that makes us add the extra 10% of detail that's otherwise lost unless you see it at the same resolution we do. And when you do, there's that much more of a bang for your buck. But there's still a ways to go before people trash their DVD players for Blu-ray. True. But if I or anybody else I know is an example, it just takes seeing the right movie. There's always that one film that converts you, whether it's something you cared about or something that just looks that much better than you ever thought was possible. For Wall*E, you've got two DVD editions coming out plus two Blu-ray editions. Yeah. As you go up to the next level, you get everything that's on the lower tier, but you also get more extras. In other words, if you buy the Blu-rays, you'll get everything that's on either of the DVDs, plus more. How involved do you get in the creation of the discs? I know the film's going to live much longer on disc than it will on the screen, so I like to be very involved in the DVD and Blu-ray releases. I'm definitely concerned about the major things that go on the discs, like the film transfer and the main bonus features. How involved were you with the short film Burn*E? I was fortunate because Angus MacLane, who directed it, was my directing animator on Wall*E. When he came to me with the idea for Burn*E, it was just half formed, but he and I immediately started finishing each other's sentences, so it grew very fast. It was like we were just coming up with a little bit more footage for a sequence in the film as opposed to having to create something from scratch. And because it's sort of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern point of view on what's going on in the spaceship, we could go back and tweak the film itself before it was done, so it would match what happens in the short. You've also got a couple of fully realized deleted scenes, as opposed to the usual storyboard-type deleted scenes. Yeah, which is rare. But that wasn't planned. To be honest, it's more of a statement of embarrassment about how far I'd gone along in the film before I realized that those scenes were wrong. With one, I just took too much time telling it. The second one was where Wall*E went after Eve and saved her life. The scene kind of worked, but you never felt the amount of investment in him that we knew was possible. You were feeling something, but not at the level that you do now in the film. And I think it was at one of our post meetings about it that Brad Bird said, 'Maybe it should be Wall*E that's hurt, and everybody he's affected will have to rise to the occasion.' And before he had even finished the sentence, I was like, 'Oh my God, that's it.' The sequence was already gorgeous and cool and lit, and everything that happened in it then was exactly what happens in it now, but with the roles reversed. Is there anything else on the Wall*E Blu-ray Disc that you get a kick out of? One of my favorite things is the Geek Track. We said, 'You know what? Because Wall*E is sci-fi and computer graphics and robots and animation, we're just asking for a million geeks to watch this movie and call out all the things we did wrong. So we should call out ourselves before they do--and have a blast doing it.' We basically did a Mystery Science Theater 3000 thing where we got the three geekiest guys on the crew, who just go off without any prompting--and it's really hysterical. It's a little window into why I love working here and how I can still be laughing at the end of the day when it's been hard. Even though you might think we just did this extra to be funny and to sell discs, it's actually a great way to watch the movie again after you've seen it--but please don't watch it that way the first time through. In other interviews, you've named your Top 5 movies, it's the most eclectic list I've ever seen. What are the five you have? Lawrence of Arabia, The Lion in Winter, Cool Hand Luke, Gallipoli, and a tie between Cinema Paradiso and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I think you'll be just as thrown by the next five. Let's see: Network, the Japanese Shall We Dance, Amadeus. I know I should put Star Wars in there because of what it did for my life, but everybody just assumes it's going to be in there anyway, so it almost doesn't make it. The tenth seems to float a lot depending on my mood. Paper Moon's been in there quite a bit before. I think my list reflects what my youth was like. I spent half my time going to the movies to see the latest big blockbuster. But I also spent my summers as an usher at a local theater that showed the best arthouse and foreign films of the year prior. So I was always seeing top-quality obscure films that no kid in his right mind would even know existed, let alone go see three times a night. But a good movie is a good movie. I might not have understood everything I was seeing, but I was moved. So I feel like I was raised getting two ends of the film spectrum. And I've always been striving to see if I can include them both whenever I make my own movies. Network is one of my favorites, too, but what do you attribute its success to: the writing or the acting or the direction or something else? Ultimately, I think it's because it's so emotionally honest. If I had to guess, I'd say that's the common denominator between my favorite films. Within the first 10 minutes of watching one of them, I begin to care again, and then I forget where I am, no matter how many times I've seen the movie--and then the lights come up after 2 hours. That's the ultimate moviegoing experience. Bob Chapek [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment president describes his company's efforts to bring Blu-ray to the masses: 'From a household-penetration standpoint, we're close to where we thought we'd be. From a technology and innovation standpoint, we're ahead of where we thought we'd be. People are just beginning to see what Blu-ray can do, because our first BD-Live title [Sleeping Beauty] came out the first week of October. So the mass market hasn't yet seen what's really possible; we're only scratching the surface. 'Blu-ray is a no-compromise format because you get everything you want on it. Not only can you see fantastic-quality pictures and audio, but there's also a level of interactivity that's beyond what people have had before. A lot of people in the industry ask, 'Why do you want all this interaction on your discs?' And the answer is, because that's what's going to make Blu-ray bigger than laserdisc. 'Blu-ray will become a mass phenomenon not this fourth quarter but a year from now. People will see the demos and the ads and realize that, thanks to BD-Live, their kids can be watching a movie with their grandmother who's 2,000 miles away. 'For people who aren't switching to Blu-ray because of upconverting players, all I can say is the proof is in the pudding--in seeing the difference. You've got factions of the industry that for whatever reasons--sour grapes, whatever--are trying to perpetuate DVD technology through upconverting players. At least HD DVD was evolutionary, and Blu-ray is evolutionary. Re-tooling DVD isn't. We want to offer a long-term viable solution for high-def as opposed to a sort of a pseudo-approach. 'Getting people to recognize Blu-ray as the high-def replacement for DVD when it doesn't have DVD in the name was a big issue a year ago, but not anymore. While the format war was going on, HD DVD had an advantage just because people love DVD. But now that the war is over, the Blu-ray name leaves no doubt that this is something revolutionary and not a spit-shine version of DVD.' For more with Bob on the future of Blu-ray, go to soundandvisionmag.com/bchapek Andy Siditsky [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Disney's senior vice president of worldwide DVD production & creative services talks about what goes into creating a Disney Blu-ray Disc: 'DVDs can be very hackneyed. If you just gather a making-of documentary, deleted scenes, and a blooper reel and call it a day, that's not a fresh approach. We're fans of movies and TV shows, so we ask ourselves, 'What would we want to see?' But we've got to think about both hard-core fans and first-time viewers, because many different people watch our discs. 'Before the Blu-ray spec was finalized, we had a good sense of what it could do, so we went ahead and started working on ideas. Many of them have now come to fruition with Sleeping Beauty, thanks to Blu-ray BD-Live. But we've been pushing the envelope with all of our Blu-ray Discs, and now we're taking it to a new level with titles like The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. 'For us, the most interesting thing about Caspian was how they orchestrated the castle attack. So we used CircleVision to cover from many angles everything that was happening before, during, and after the shoot. We've essentially turned your Blu-ray player into the camera, so you can go to any angle you want and See everything the camera saw. Meanwhile, there are little icons floating around called clickables, and it's not predictable what they do. Sometimes they're factoids, sometimes they're storyboards, sometimes there's an audio commentary. Not only do you get a virtual tour of the set, but you also have a host of interactive features to explore. 'For the Wall*E Blu-ray, we've done a number of things to extend the experience of watching the film. For instance, there's a scene where Wall*E plays Pong, so we created a videogame arcade as an homage to the old 8-bit games. But they're all in high-def. And because Blu-ray has memory, you can save your scores, so you can go back at any time and continue. You can also go online and play the games with people from around the country. 'We didn't want to treat being able to go online as a bonus feature unto itself. We wanted to create a destination that everyone would talk about--a place where you would go with all our Blu-ray titles. For our upcoming releases, we're already putting together live events that a lot of people are going to want to participate in. Once you have the disc, you'll be able to use it to go online and join in.' For more With Andy, go to soundandvisionmag.com/asiditsky [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] The 2-disc Blu-ray edition of Wall*E includes: * Burn*E animated short with boards: picture-in-picture presentation * Presto Pixar short * Deleted scenes * Sneak Peek: 'Wall*E's Tour of the Universe' * 'Animation Sound Design: Building Worlds from the Sound Up' * Audio commentary and Cine-Explore with Andrew Stanton * The Pixar Story by Leslie Iwerks * Wall*E's Treasures and Trinkets * BnL shorts * 'Lots of Bots' storybook * Making-of featurettes * Axiom Arcade: retro videogames * Geek Track * BD-Live network * And more [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The 3-disc Blu-ray edition includes everything on the 2-disc Blu-ray plus a Disney File digital copy of the movie for portable players

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Paul Shaffer has spent pretty much his whole career standing just off to one side of center stage. Everybody knows him from his 26 years as David Letterman's [...]

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] See that big, friendly-looking guy in the Hawaiian shirt with cartoon cars all over it? He's probably the most important man in Hollywood. No, really. Consider John Lasseter's [...]

Brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly are the legendary duo behind some of the most raucous, outrageous, original--and successful--comedies ever, including Dumb & Dumber, There's Something About Mary, and most recently, [...]

When we last checked in with installer John Tamburello, he was 60 stories above Manhattan, completing an elegant multiroom system in an art collector's apartment ('Sky High,' May 2006, also [...]

Here's a predictable plot: A world-famous director buys a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and immediately demands that his underlings bring forth a traditional screening room--an opulent showplace, sealed off [...]

For years, Bill Gates' burning desire to take over your living room has been the butt of innumerable disdainful jokes. And there is something absurd about the idea of having [...]

HOME THEATER GEAR * Yamaha DPX-1300 DLP projector ($12,495) * Screen Innovations 108-inch screen ($1,500) * 5 Sonance Cinema Ultra II in-wall speakers ($950 each) * Sonance The Sub 12-inch [...]

Most of us would have our hands full just getting a whole-house audio/video system installed. Imagine taking on that task while starring in a Broadway play, directing your first feature [...]

No, we didn't call this the 'ultimate' gift guide just to get your attention. This is the biggest, most comprehensive, most eclectic, highest-tech guide we've ever put together, so it [...]

Five years ago, if you'd asked a home theater nut if you could play Metal Gear Solid on his 50-inch screen, he probably would have beaten you about the head [...]

To enter the spanking-new house, you first have to get past Gort--no, not the 10-foot-tall laser-eyed titanium robot from the '50s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still but [...]

You've all seen gift guides before--one item after another lined up in no particular order, looking like some kind of glorified catalog. And while this approach can be useful, it [...]

Barry Sonnenfeld is the master of droll. You can see it in his work, from John Travolta's suave, minivan-driving gangster in Get Shorty to Tommy Lee Jones's slow-burning G-man in [...]

You might not know the name, but you definitely know the movies. The Sixth Sense, the left-field hit of 1999, put director M. Night Shyamalan on the map in a [...]

Nobody's likely to remember 2001 as 'the year the consumer-electronics industry saved Christmas,' but it did just that. Without the surprisingly strong sales of DVD players and big-screen TVs, this [...]

Our readers are intensely curious about both Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio, if recent mail is any indication. But most have stayed on the fence, unsure which format is going [...]

Some musicians think it's neat to hear their music remixed for surround. Others don't give a damn and let their labels do a remix so they can sell a few [...]

Come with me back to the first days of portable computing, when two now extinct titans named Osborne and Kaypro ruled the land. Both offered models the size and heft [...]

showstoppers 1 Why would you need a video screen on your processor--and a widescreen display at that--if you've got your TV right in front of you? Rotel can give you [...]

Saying that Tony Visconti produced some of David Bowie's most innovative albums is the same as saying he produced some of the most innovative albums in rock. It's hard to [...]

If you haven't yet heard about Digital Video Express -- better known as Divx -- you soon will. Circuit City launched its controversial pay-per-view DVD system in San Francisco and [...]

Eldorado Epic/Legacy Music **** Recording **** Don't be fooled by the packaging or promotion. Zoom is not an ELO album. No operatic soundscapes or swirling strings here. Instead, this is [...]

THE ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA Zoom Epic Music **** Recording *** 1/2 Don't be fooled by the packaging or promotion. Zoom is not an ELO album. No operatic soundscapes or swirling [...]

DVD recorders are taking home recording to a whole new level The VCR, that battle-tested veteran of the VHS/Betamax wars, has served us well. It's allowed us to archive our [...]

Sunfire's Theater Grand II is the Ginsu knife of preamp/processors. For $3,300, you get everything you'd expect from a high-end preamp and surround processor, including Dolby Digital, DTS, and Pro [...]

When you think about going to the store to buy your first home theater system, what game show comes to mind -- Let's Make a Deal or Jeopardy? You might [...]

The Art of the Song Verve ***1/2 (Good) Wary of anything nostalgic, I've never known how to take bassist Charlie Haden's retro-drenched Quartet West. He's too bright to be duped [...]

A Buyer's Guide to Systems For $1,200 or Less Not so long ago you had to have a big room, big speakers, and a fistful of dollars to have a [...]

CIBO MATTO Warner Bros. *** [Good] This isn't a record, it's a fashion statement -- and a big letdown coming on the heels of Cibo Matto's debut, Viva! La Woman. [...]

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Sony) Movie ***** Picture ***** Sound ***** Extras ***** To see what a mixed bag Blu-ray has been as a videophile format, all you have to do is look at the various Stanley Kubrick releases. On one hand, we've been getting some excellent transfers that at least attempt to show the films in their original aspect ratios. On the other hand, most of the releases have been larded with slick documentaries and other 'bonuses' that traffic in the usual well-worn cliches about the director while shedding little new light on his work. The 45th Anniversary Special Edition of Dr. Strangelove--possibly Kubrick's best film, and possibly the best comedy ever--fits firmly into this mold. Essentially the 40th-anniversary DVD edition with a Cold War-trivia pop-up feature added (do we really need to be told that the 'go code' means it's okay to go?), it does have an Impressive (though not flawless, and probably too fussy) transfer of the black-and-white film and a clean, dynamic mono soundtrack. (Unfortunately, there's also a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix that renders those taut sonics unnecessarily diffuse.) My big beef--from the lame-ass menu graphIcs and that pop-up thing to the all-over-the-map documentaries--is that this release tends to treat the movie as an early '60s artifact when it couldn't be more relevant. Anybody hear of a little country called North Korea and Its Ripperesque wacko leader? How about Iran? Pakistan? India? Besides, Dr. Strangelove was always less a Cold War thriller than a steely-eyed, Swlftlan Savaging of human nature. Kubrick's whole point was that nuclear annihilation is the logical extension of our everyday bad behavior. Nothing has happened since 1964 to make that any less true. MICHAEL GAUGHN

Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Movie Versions: Preview ** 1/2 Theatrical ***** Restored *** Picture **** Sound *** Extras *** [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] You can't 'restore' something that never [...]

OF THE THREE ways of hooking an iPod to your car's audio system--using an FM modulator to send signals through the radio, using a cassette adapter, or having a dock [...]