[The Reaper Man@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Michael Brooke

Thanks for that - that's very much the intention.

I cut my teeth on BFI booklets (contributing to loads, editing three), and I've tried to maintain or surpass those standards on every project I work on. In fact, it's funny you should mention Criterion because when I started on The Night of the Hunter I knew that while my extras budget couldn't possibly compete with Criterion's (for starters, I only had one BD to play with, whereas they had two), at the very least I could make sure that the booklet was superior to theirs.

And one of the great things about having two media to play with is that I can decide whether things work better in text or video form. For instance, when it came to the making of Don Siegel's The Killers we had the headache that there was no pre-existing documentary and that virtually everyone involved was either dead or inaccessible (fruitless approaches were made to Angie Dickinson and Clu Gulager), so anything we created would inevitably be somewhat bitty. But Siegel's memoirs contained an incredibly detailed, punchy and vivid account of the shooting of the film (and a lengthy one as well - I think it tips the scales at over 8,000 words), and it's pretty much the last word on the topic.

And it's because of situations like the Siegel one that I could never regard the booklet as some kind of optional extra - it's an absolutely integral part of the package.

Booklets and reverse artwork,to me,are the prize extras in an Arrow package.