Guest Shot: Jim Abrahams
October, 1988
Gloria Swanson says it in Sunset Boulevard as a siren of the silent era: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." There's new meaning in that famous quote when you pop one of the rrrreally big films into a VCR, where it shrinks from wide-screen spectacle to armchair dimensions. Because TV's squarer shape often blanks out huge chunks of the original image, tape-industry innovators have introduced "letterboxing," which runs a black border above and below the picture--a sol...
