Letters to Sunday Datebook, Jan. 16

More than a year has passed since I submitted my own "awful cruel" critique of Sofia Coppola's performance in "The Godfather 3," which ruined the movie for me. Mick LaSalle's response to my comments in his column was more vicious than anything I could have thought of. But I always wondered why Coppola mounted so poor a performance when she later produced such outstanding movies as a director.

Now Ruthe Stein's column in the Dec. 19 Pink section sheds some light on this aberration ("Coppola puts own spin on the family business"). Coppola "didn't really care" about her part in "Godfather 3" because she "didn't want to be an actress." Little excuse exists for even a teenager involved in a major motion picture of such historic proportions. But she made up for it later.

Steven F. McNichols, San Francisco

How times have changed

The Wayback Machine by Johnny Miller on Dec. 5 had an item gleaned from a 1910 Chronicle. It told a police blotter story about a bloody-faced Thomas Kralich staggering up Sixth Street after being beaten. "Patrolman C.T. Thompson asked where the men went who beat him. 'One man went this way,' said Kralich, drawing a revolver and firing a shot in that direction. 'Another man went that way,' he added while pointing his revolver in the opposite direction and firing. 'I stand in this place,' and he pointed the revolver to the ground and fired. Kralich was charged with discharging a weapon within city limits and fined $30."

Had Kralich punctuated such directions in this manner 100 years later, he would have been riddled by shotgun blasts and automatic fire from a dozen heavily armed SWAT team officers, all of whom would have been given two weeks' suspension with pay until the matter was dismissed.

Dave Heventhal, Windsor

'West Side' clarification

The irrelevance of the ethnic group portrayed in "West Side Story," pointed out in the Dec. 12 Letters column, is reinforced by the fact that the play as originally conceived was titled "East Side Story" and involved Catholics and Jews, not Puerto Rican gangs.

Later, Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein found a more appropriate contemporary metaphor in a series of Los Angeles Times articles about teenage Anglo-Hispanic warfare and shifted the scenario to New York's Spanish Harlem and conveniently altered the title to "West Side Story."

Alan Avakian, San Leandro

Notes on high def

In regard to Glenn Lovell's assertion in the Dec. 19 Letters that high definition digitally enhances an image, thereby compromising it and revealing much that a director never intended, I have to take exception. While some studios do use edge enhancement to sharpen a picture and dynamic noise reduction (DNR) to clean up noise and grain in a picture, they are not parts of the high-def process, and it is often best not to use them at all.

High def (using more pixels than standard def to reproduce an image) should simply replicate an original print in the condition in which it started. If Lovell would rather see the image softened, as in DVD reproduction, to hide imperfections in the original print, that is his prerogative, but he shouldn't blame high definition for revealing what is already there.

John J. Puccio, Martinez

This article appeared on page Q - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle