We've Definitively Found Looking For Mr. Goodbar!

This is probably the most surprising "M.I.A." post I'll ever write on this blog. It's crazy that this was never, ever released on DVD, yet alone blu. Like, I'd be delighted to see one of my favorite cult labels procure the rights for a restored, special edition of Spirits of Jupiter. But I also realize that probably puts me on a very short list of cinephiles.  But Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a major studio, Academy Award-nominated film by a huge director, based on a bestselling novel, that made the career of two big Hollywood actors, and stars a couple more. And I can keep going.  It was highly critically regarded, a box office success and controversial for its time, but not so controversial that the studios would have any reason to worry about releasing it today. And it has its roots in a famous true crime story that still draws attention to this day. How is it possible there was never even a generic, full frame, MOD disc released ever, in any country?

Update 8/2/16 - 11/7/22: Is it possible there's really, truly a legit widescreen Looking for Mr. Goodbar available overseas!?  Well, "legit" is a bit shaky, but the situation has definitely at least improved since I last reported on this gem of a drama.  Viva la Update Week!

Update 1/14/25: Forget every questionable, dodgy, import, bootleg or grey market discs; we have a definitive, official release!  Vinegar Syndrome has put out a fully licensed, 4k restoration on BD and UHD, so we can finally close the ledger on Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  Though that's not to say it's 100% free of imperfections...

Update 3/10/25: Replacement discs are here!  Mine landed today.  See above so you can tell the difference.  Your disc should have the "V2" at the end of its scrawl if it's the corrected disc that will play through all the way to the end (as explained at the bottom of this page).

Diane Keaton gives really one of her strongest performances as a young, New York City school teacher who rebels against the very conservative, restrictive life built for her by her family and career. She steps into the liberated night life only to stumble across the darker side that naturally develops in a repressed society. She finds herself caught up living the double life many young women were faced with during the sexual revolution of the 1970s; and as I already mentioned this is based on a famous true crime, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by simply saying it ends in violence.

Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof) focuses on creating almost morbidly sincere performances in bringing Judith Rossner's study of a character whose soul is slowly dying. You can feel that it's based on truth even if you didn't know it was based on an actual case, although admittedly, her relationship with her parents does feel like its taken from "Dover's Big Book of Overly Familiar Cliches." If you've seen Carrie's mom or The Great Santini, you know what you're in for. But fortunately she gets out of the house quickly enough and surrounds herself with more relatable, nuanced characters.

And did I say this film launched careers? Yeah, Richard Gere and Tom Berenger both launched out of this film, and neither have yet managed to make very many films to rival this one. And the cast doesn't stop there, with more additional strong turns by Tuesday Weld (who netted one of this film's Academy Award nominations), Brian Dennehy, a very dramatic William Atherton (Ghostbusters' Walter Peck), and keep your eyes open for a young Levar Burton.

And yet this has never been released on DVD until, sort of, recently. What we've been looking at here is my copy of Paramount's 1983 laserdisc release. Not '93, '83. Most people weren't even aware laserdiscs existed back then. It's so old, it doesn't even have chapters, let alone special features. But it was the best release you could get. Things got shook up a bit in recent years by the appearance of a widescreen television broadcast leaked online, allowing us to see the film in its original aspect ratio since it first played theatrically in 1977. But since I made this post comparing those two transfers, there have been some developments.  I'll describe the least interesting first.  Australian label La Entertainment released this on DVD in 2020.  It is 4x3, however, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're using the same master as the laserdisc, a la previous Australian exclusives of Paramount titles like The Keep and Ordinary People.

That still might've been rather newsworthy if they hadn't been beaten to the punch in Spain.  They released it as a 16x9 widescreen (and yes, Region free) DVD.  Is it official?  Well, it's got a UPC listed in many databases and is being carried by a lot of mainstream outlets, but Spain is known for some shady grey-market discs.  It's at least a pressed disc and less of a bootleg than those that've been passed around for years, but, well, you know.  We can write that one off now, too, thanks to Vinegar Syndrome's fancy 4k restoration on both BD and UHD.

1) 1983 laserdisc; 2) widescreen TV rip; 3) 2018 DVD;
4) 2024 BD; 5) 2024 UHD.

Now, there's no reason to delve deep into the comparison between the laserdisc and the downloaded rip - presumably from Italian television, since it has Italian audio as its primary track - as it's not even a secondary purchase option. It's soft and murky, far from an impressive HD transfer. But it tells us about the framing. Vertically, the 1.77:1 rip is a perfect match to the 1.33:1 transfer we've all lived with for decades, so we don't have an open matte transfer here. All the fullscreen version did is the very old school move of chopping off the sides. It just made you pine that much more for how great an official Paramount release would be. Because what we've got is such a low contrast, washed out mess. Even the laserdisc cover is soft and blurry!

And the Spanish disc isn't heaps better.  But it is a way to buy the widescreen version.  And the DVD is a little bit more of an upgrade.  The very slightly windowboxed framing is now 1.78:1 instead of 1.77, gaining a few extra pixels of info along all four edges.  This tells us, though, that they didn't just take the old online rip and slap it onto a disc.  You can't uncover extra picture doing that, no matter how slight.  Also the PQ, while still rather low quality, is another tiny step forward.  It's sharper and restores a bit more detail.  Unfortunately, it also restores compression noise... one thing about the old online rip: it was so compressed it acted as a sort of DNR.  But if you actually zoom in, the image is genuinely sharper and renders a little bit more actual picture info as well.

gamma raised by 500% to clarify my point

But thankfully, we'll never have reason to zoom into those old releases again, because VS has blown them out of the water - their UHD is a whopping 96GB!  They've framed the film at a proper 1.85:1, not my matting the image any, but by unveiling more picture along the sides.  Compression noise and other issues are replaced by the first appearance of actual film grain, which is immaculately captured on the UHD, and nearly as well on the BD.  Colors are stronger, and a bit warmer compared to the Spanish disc, making imagery more distinct onscreen without betraying its often muted, subtle scheme.  And information that was crushed out of existence in all the earlier versions (like, for example, Atherton's top button from the second set of shots, as highlighted above) is now visible, even on the blu.

the scene in question

Besides the original mono track on the laserdisc, rip and 2018 DVD, the Spanish disc also includes a Spanish dub and optional/ unforced Spanish subtitles.  The VS releases bump the audio up to DTS-HD and add optional English subtitles (and forgo the Spanish, naturally), but here's the bit that may get controversial.  There's been a music swap in the audio track (which tells us, yes, the music rights were probably the problem all along).  Roughly half an hour into the film, a lengthy scene is set to "All Of Me" by Frank Sinatra.  Interestingly, that song was never listed with the others in the credits.  Anyway, past releases have it, including the Spanish DVD (on both the English and Spanish tracks), but VS has a more generic, old timey song, which, based on the lyrics, might be titled "say hello?"  It's not as good, but the song was always mixed down under the dialogue, so it's not a huge upset, but it's a bit of a bummer.  DIY fans might want to get both the Spanish and VS releases and mux a composited, ideal audio track; but otherwise, we're just going to have to settle and pick a version to watch on disc.

There are of course no extras, not even a trailer, on any previous edition.  But VS has come up with a bunch, including the trailer.  There's also an excellent audio commentary by aspiring filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat, which is impressively informative, bringing in details from the novel, an early draft of the script, the true crime the story's based on, the director's notes, articles and critical reviews.  Then there's an expert interview with Douglass K. Daniel, who wrote a book on Richard Brooks, a 30-minute audiobook reading about an obscenity trial that came about when this film was released in Utah, a couple radio spots, and perhaps best of all, an audio-only vintage interview with Judith Rossner.  All together, that's a pretty dry collection of mostly audio-only features by experts, but it's hardly a fair expectation for Vinegar Syndrome to have pulled Diane Keaton and Richard Gere down to their offices to record a commentary.  They made an effort and did their best, and Horvat's commentary really is strong and well worth the listen.  VS's release also includes reversible artwork and, If you ordered their limited edition, a 40-page booklet with essays by Marya E. Gates, Marc Edward Heuck, Elizabeth Purchell & Jourdain Searles, with a side-loading slipcase and a slipcover that fits over the amary case but inside the outer case.

Oh, and just as an aside, there was a made-for-TV sequel in 1983 called Trackdown: Finding the Goodbar Killer. Of course, without Diane Keaton's character, who was entirely what the original film was about, there's not a lot to return to.So instead, this is largely a police procedural, with George Segal as a detective going through a divorce as he investigates the murder from the first film, cross cut with Tom Berenger's character, now played by Shannon Presby, going on the lam. Shelley Hack plays one of Keaton's fellow school teachers who Segal takes to nightclubs to help spot the killer. And Joe Spinell has a feature role as Keaton's former doorman, who's questioned by the cops and pressured into picking somebody out of a line-up.

It's pretty boring. Segal's sappy drama with his wife and daughter, who's leaving for college, almost winds up getting more focus than the case of the Goodbar killer. I think the idea is that Segal's worried his daughter is on the verge of entering the same kind of scary, radical feminist life Keaton led; but the film never manages to quite get there. There's just lots of pedantic dialogue scenes that tend not to connect with each other. Segal has scenes with his wife, trying to hold his marriage together, and we never find out if he does or not. He keeps going back to Hack, who was never needed to catch the killer. And there's a bunch of other cops pursuing other suspects, who aren't even red herrings because we know who did it from the very start. Ultimately, it's really just flat, Segal's lead holds absolutely zero of the fascination Keaton's did, and it's far less surprising that this flick never made it to DVD.

Anyway.  Goodbye, M.I.A. tag!  The Spanish DVD was an alright placeholder, but now we've got a proper release.  Is there room for improvement?  Possibly, if somebody managed to release this 4k transfer in another region that could get away with the Sinatra track, and maybe even rope Keaton or somebody into an interview.  But I wouldn't hold my breath, and this is an extremely satisfying release in the meantime, like a ginormous upgrade.

Finally, I have to mention that there's a playback issue with the UHD, where watching it with Dolby Vision on causes it to stop mid-movie.  You can turn off the HDR to watch it in the meantime, but obviously that's not a satisfying solution and VS has already announced a replacement disc program.  If you ordered the film directly from VS, you're already on their list to receive it.  Everyone else just has to contact them with proof of purchase.