The Big Con

Part I: The Set-Up

If you have not seen the news yet, Paul Newman is dead. He has been battling cancer for a couple months now, and he will be missed. Paul was in many great movies including The Hustler, Slap Shot, Cars, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke, but my favorite movie of his has always been The Sting. I really don’t know the man on a personal level, so I can’t eulogize him, but I do like his movies, especially The Sting

Part II: The Hook
The Sting has always struck me as an outstanding movie for so many reasons. The story flows really well throughout, the brave decision to shoot the whole film full screen in order to be more like the films of the 1930’s, and of course, the overall cool characters. I mean you go Harold Gould as Kid Twist (a name I have adapted over the years) one of the coolest second fiddles ever on film, right up there with Bubba Zannette in Mad Max. Then you have Robert Redford as Hooker, just smoothing his way through life, and of course, Paul Newman as the smokin’ cool old pro, passing his master swindling skills on to the young rookie. Whoever involved in the production (probably George Roy Hill) came up with the idea to use the excellent compositions of Scott Joplin as the sole score, kudos to you in creating one of the top ten soundtracks of all time.

I would say it was around 9th or 10th grade for me when my parents got me Animal House, American Graffiti, and The Sting on VHS for Christmas. Real cool editions that came with sampler soundtracks CDs cute in interesting shapes. The Animal House one cut to look like the frat house, Graffiti as a waitress and The Sting like a hand of cards. Within a month me and Raindogs Ryan and Shane watched them all and became addicted to The Sting. Everything just clicked for us, we were listening to the soundtrack none stop (we even upgraded to the full thing on vinyl!) we quoted lines to each other, and we’re swiping our fingers past our noses when passing each other, even if we were just walking by on the way to the bathroom. Slowly we shared our love for the movie with more and more Raindogs until everyone was just as familiar with every aspect of it.

Part III: The Story
One day I decided to upgrade from my worn VHS to a DVD. I was not aware of that the movie was filmed in full screen, no idea at all. In the early days of DVD, widescreen became a big thing, I finally realized what I was missing out on, and when I went to the store to get The Sting, I could not believe it, they were all full. That was bullshit for months I searched, and nothing, no wide screen movies anywhere. I gave up and went back to my VHS. One day while goofing around online, I looked up The Sting, found out the interesting fact about the aspect ratio and hit myself in the head for not buying the DVD before. I went out and could not find a single copy; it had gone out of print. I kept an eye on eBay, but that bad boy started going for 70-100 dollars a pop!

Finally on some DVD news site, I found out a special edition was finally coming out, about fucking time. I was just about to run out and pick it up, when I saw online that it was widescreen? What the hell? So I checked the forums to find out the truth, and sure enough everyone was bitching about it, they made a chopped widescreen release in order to appease the new widescreen loving film fans.

Part IV: The Sting
I ended up picking up the new Special Edition of it anyway and was not really disappointed, I mean it had great interviews with just about everyone involved, a little book with even more to read and it was the clearest the film has ever looked, after all I had gotten used to seeing it on VHS. Even the music sounded better than ever, remixed in 5.1 bitches. I always did keep my eye open for the earlier version though; I wanted to see a clean version of how the movie was suppose to look.

At some point while walking through some random used DVD shop, I finally found a copy for about five bucks. I couldn’t believe it, so I ran home (well probably drove) and threw that fucker in the player (well probably placed it in there) I started watching and everything looked sort of weird. I wasn’t quite sure what the problem was then it dawned on me, this was pan and scan. It made no sense; did they pan and scan the chopped and screwed wide screen to make a full screen copy? What is going on? So I went online again and did some more digging, turns out it was FILMED in 1:33 (full screen ratio) but always intended to be shown in 1:85 (widescreen) well, how about that? I believed the internet fan boy bitching, fuck.

Rest in Peace Paul Newman. I liked your movies.