I’m not sure if this belongs in Cafe Society or GQ, but who first came up with the idea of having directors comment on their films on a seperate audio tract for DVDs? What move was it first done with and in what year? And I’m I correct in asuming that the concept in unique to DVDs?
Nope. Laserdiscs had commentaries.
The first directors commentaries I remember seeing were on Criterion edition laserdiscs in the early '80’s. I don’t remember what the films were. The Criterion editions were special digitally remasterd edition for the videophile, where you could go through the movie frame by frame if you were that dedicated. They were mulit-disc boxed sets, initially.
According to IMDb (which has been wrong before), Criterion’s “King Kong” laserdisc had the first audio commentary. It was done by one Ronald Haver. Here is a link to the page with the info (scroll down a bit).