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TWO-LANE TIE-UP Maybe you've seen fire and you've seen rain, but chances are you've never seen James Taylor in his lone leading-man role as an expletive-spewing car racer in the 1971 cult fave Two-Lane Blacktop, costarring then-Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Why? Mainly because a slew of songs on the soundtrack -- particularly one Doors cut, ''Moonlight Drive'' -- tied up the home-video rights for decades. It took four years of lobbying, but Universal Home Video exec Kimberly Johnson recently cleared the legal roadblock. She says it came down to a ''fortuitous connection'' between one of the Doors' attorneys and a Universal movie producer who was ''willing to trade on a personal relationship with the group's surviving members'' -- that and ''a lot of money.'' So after all that work, why's Universal licensing out the film to Anchor Bay, which will release Two-Lane Blacktop Oct. 19 on VHS and DVD? ''It's too much a niche picture for us,'' says Johnson, who made it her mission to find a surrogate label. ''We're mass marketers.'' Next on her rescue list: the 1969 Sidney Poitier film The Lost Man, which should be out by next year. -- Steve Daly
TOO GOOD TO SOUND TRUE? Sometimes a mere whack, boing, or thump just won't suffice. For the Sept. 28 release of WinStar Video's ''Fully Restored'' 60th-anniversary edition of the Max Fleischer animated feature Gulliver's Travels, the film's original audio tracks -- marred by both an aging print and an antiquated '30s recording system -- underwent some fine-'tooning. A team of aural artists noticeably overhauled the sound, which raises the question, How much can you monkey with a film and still call it a restoration? ''We used all organic sound effects -- no electronic effects, since they couldn't have been used back then,'' says producer Thomas R. Reich. ''If you have a normal TV, it just sounds good, but if you have a [topflight system], Gulliver's Travels can sound like Saving Private Ryan.'' Of course, why you'd want it to sound like Saving Private Ryan is anyone's guess.
