Audio Commentary

Imagine watching your favorite movie together with its director or other expert, who tells you all about the making of the film and the background stories about its production. An audio commentary is an additional audio track, usually digital, consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with the video. Commentaries can be serious or entertaining in nature, and can add information which otherwise would not be disclosed to audience members. Working with the Criterion Collection, I introduced audio commentary on the LaserDisc format, which was able to accommodate multiple audio tracks. Inspired by the stories Ron Haver told (a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum) while supervising the film-to-video-transfer process, (The film negative we used was loaned to us by the Library of Congress.) I recorded him for the first commentary track for the 1933 film King Kong. Criterion expected that the commentary would only be of interest to serious film students, but it received a favorable reaction, and his commentary on King Kong is considered to ultimately have started the trend. Haver went on to provide commentaries for Criterion for the rest of his life.  

- Peter Crown

His narration of King Kong begins:

"Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I'm Ronald Haver, and I'm here to do something which we feel is rather unique. I'm going to take you on a lecture tour of King Kong as you watch the film. The laserdisc technology offers us this opportunity and we feel it's rather unique — the ability to switch back and forth between the soundtrack and this lecture track.”________