Ill ‘Wind’ Is Reason Enough to Stay Home

I think you should check out the “restored” print of “Gone With The Wind” now playing at the Marina Pacifica Theater on (Pacific Coast Highway) in Long Beach. As the ads say, “you’ll see it as you’ve never seen it before.”

Apparently AMC management feels it is unnecessary to mask the sides of the film, so the experience is like watching the film projected onto a white wall. And as for New Line Cinema, which sent out the prints, the bottom of the frame line would jump up during many of the great shots, cutting off the top of the frame.

If there was ever a reason to stay home and watch the laser disc, New Line and AMC have given me the excuse.

EUGENE IEMOLA

Los Alamitos

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Thanks to The Times for exposing the “Gone With the Wind” re-release travesty--from the blatantly false “restoration” advertising to the shoddy prints being exhibited in theaters (“Frankly, My Dear, You’re a Bit Blurry,” by Bill Desowitz, July 7).

I sat through 20 minutes of a blurry, color-fragmented screening in mono sound before asking for my money back (dragging along my 82-year-old grandmother, who was convinced she was simultaneously losing her vision and hearing.)

The corporate buck-passing detailed in your pages is pathetic. I pity anyone whose first exposure to this classic is through this profoundly inferior release. Everyone responsible should be ashamed.

MATTY BAER

Torrance