Paramount

Book by Peter Bart

I’m referring, of course, to the controversy over CBS/Paramount’s DVDs of The Fugitive. Today’s Variety has an article about this issue. But notice that even for Variety, one of the biggest entertainment publications around, CBS/Paramount refused to comment. Maybe it’s because any further comment besides their recent unresponsive statement (see below) would force them to admit they made a mistake. Despite the unresponsiveness of the studio, the article does seem to bring us closer to understanding what happened; the studio didn’t want to be bothered to sort out the stock music cues they owned from the cues they didn’t own, so they changed everything:

CBS/Paramount home video finally put out an official response on the whole The Fugitive re-scoring fiasco, but it’s really no response at all: