The Road Ahead

I touched on this a little in my newsletter, and if you didn’t see that, then you’ll want to sign up for it by emailing me.  No, it’s not on my website yet.  I know it needs to be.

A good friend of mine who runs a candy shop told me that he was at an impasse once.  He either needed to expand his business or close down.  I know exactly what he meant.  If that intrigues you, keep reading.

Some of you have complained about my blogs on these topics and called them “existential whining,” and if you’re in that camp, go ahead and skip this one because it’s going to be one of those.  On the other hand, many of you follow this just to see the struggles and successes of a guy who does this work.

I have been trying to figure out just why I am not being very successful doing film restorations.  Tommy Stathes ships my products, and he’ll be the first to tell you he’d like to move some of my stuff out of his cramped apartment.

I’ve gotta tell ya, I was super disappointed in the turnout I got for the free movies I did during the early part of the pandemic.  I was getting 20 and 30 viewers for some and 80-90 at the best.  I don’t think we ever topped 100.  Then, Ben Model keeps posting that he’s getting 1000 or more!  You’ve gotta hand it to Ben. He’s been doing the longest-running free movie show during the pandemic, and people love it. This was my big clue that  I must be doing something wrong!  I mean, for heaven’s sake, I’m doing free movies, and rare stuff, during a pandemic, and I can’t get any views?  I was hoping to do a public service by doing these shows, and I thought they were good, but I eventually suspended them because they were literally more work than they were worth.  They weren’t helping my “brand,” I wasn’t getting donations, and it was taking time away from projects that DO pay.

So instead of becoming insanely jealous of Ben, which is tempting, I did what Ben does.  When Ben has a technical question, he sends me an email asking about it. I’m probably a good guy to consult with technical problems (especially if you want a long-winded answer.)

But you should never ask me about marketing problems.  Because I’m a marketing moron.  I consulted Ben, who is a Marketing Genius! and asked him for some tips. (In fairness, although Ben is really good at this, I’m way behind the curve on this kind of thing, so you can’t expect me to pull out of a dive immediately. My failures are my own, so don’t blame Ben for my goofiness.)

Ben steered me to Seth Godin, a marketing legend, and to Michael Boezi, who does his own podcast.  Now, I am frequently in the car and listen to podcasts (now even more often because I am shuttling disks between helpers working on my projects).  I started reading Godin’s blog, and I will freely admit that Godin annoys me.

I’m an engineer.  We deal in facts.  We want concrete answers.  You know, science.  Godin’s blog is all, RAH, RAH, you can do this!  Well, I don’t need RAH RAH, I need ideas!!!  If there are concrete ideas in there somewhere, I’ve missed them, because I got lost in the cheerleading.  I gave up. (I should probably reconsider this at some point… Godin annoyed me a lot less than Michael Bay has with his awful movies.)

I did a Godin spoof on my podcast.  (Please note that I also spoof ME a lot, which is one of my saving graces… like WC Fields, I make fun of everyone; no one is immune.)  Still, Boezi kind of crept in to my brain.  Remember, as an engineer, I have a pre-trained bias against marketing.  It’s not science: it’s squishy social stuff.  In fact, one of the guys who was helping me told me that I was a disloyal engineer for even listening to such a thing.  Marketing people, in his view, are evil.  They’re all Herb Tarlek.

What I like about Boezi is that he does have a fair number of concrete ideas.  I would say there’s a fairly low signal to noise ratio (translation for non-geeks: there’s not much content I find usable per episode), but that’s mostly because no one else really does quite what I do.

Wait, I hear you cry.  There are surely others.  Well, sorta.  I do high-end restorations at 2 and 4K. Many of them go back to archival film!  I go overboard on it. I focus on stuff that’s not out there, terribly damaged, or incomplete, and I do in-depth restorations of things I think are cool. In other words, if I don’t do it, it will never happen.  I know that I’m the only independent consultant goofy enough to go for National Film Preservation Foundation grants.  How do I know this?  They told me.  Yes, I’m nuts!

This is my take-away from listening to a bunch of shows, consulting with a bunch of people, and thinking a lot:

I need more product out there.  I know that I need more stuff to sell, but for one reason or another, it hasn’t happened.  This ridiculous King of the Kongo project has been on-again off-again for 8 years.  I have more projects than I can count that ALMOST happened, and I had literally given up on Kongo when Steve Stanchfield convinced me to go for it one last time.  I then thought that all my grant prospects had fallen through, but I swung for the fences and got it.  Now I’m obligated to finish it and all my other projects are on the back burner.  For notes on which projects I have going, see the end notes here.

I should blog more often and make them shorter.  Well, good luck on that.  I don’t think in sound bites, and I don’t write short blogs.  I think about things.  It’s like when Hitchcock was pressured to use a pop score for Torn Curtain, and Bernard Herrmann told him, “I don’t write pop scores.  You don’t make pop movies.”  If you want two-paragraph platitudes, I recommend Seth Godin’s blog.

I should do more podcasts and make them longer.  (Irony noted that my blogs are seen as too long and podcasts seen as too short!) The podcast is something I’ve seriously thought about discontinuing, and I have great trouble doing them regularly, but some of you really like them.  Oddly, the ones that get listeners are the ones that I do that cover stupid goofy stuff.  We sorta morphed into old-time radio sorts of things and both Glory and I enjoy that.  I guess the six of you who listen to these do, too.  The “straight” podcasts get about half the listeners (yeah, three).  No, seriously, we get maybe 50-75 listeners for an episode, which isn’t fantastic, but not bad.  The one thing I can say that is somewhat encouraging is that we do distinguish ourselves by making a podcast unlike any other film podcast.  Someone called it “the weirdest film podcast on the web!”  Who else would have a spoof of 2001 or an episode with Claude Rains playing a satanic lawyer?  We do.

My website needs re-tooling.  This is a fair call.  Boezi has several good ideas about optimizing web sites, none of which I’ve implemented.  I last updated my site a year or two ago, after learning that my text-heavy site alienated viewers.  (Just like my text-heavy blogs.)  I’m currently re-thinking this.

I need an email newsletter.  Ok, I hate email newsletters.  As I said in my first one, they always seem like they’re trying to sell me something and I HATE that.  I struggled a lot with doing a soft-sell one and I think I did it OK.  Of course, it was probably too soft-sell because I sold zero products!  But I get that it’s important for a lot of reasons, so we’ll do it.

I should sell stuff directly from my web site.  I agree.  My opinion of Amazon would not be fit for a blog that is supposed to be PG.  It might not even fit into an R-rated blog.  I don’t like them at all.  I will do this.

I take on too much work myself and need helpers.  Boy have I learned that this year.  Now I have two helpers.  But the problem is I can’t pay them anything.  I also learned that I need an uber-macho computer, so what I did was buy these guys fast computers with grant money and then have them pay the grant back in work.  It’s going OK.  The backlash here is that I need to do more work than I can pay for or that sales justify, so I’m looking at forming a non-profit.  

My own self-assessments have proven wrong and that continues.  I was thinking that I was a total loser at this stuff and had screwed up everything I’d tried.  I also thought I was reaching a sum total of NO ONE and that people didn’t really care about my work.  What’s been very touching this year is the outpouring of support I’ve gotten from a lot of you, including some cash (blush) that I didn’t expect.  (I should probably do a whole blog post on this. I did an outdoor movie show and a woman came up to me, crying, thanking me for bringing my movie shows back. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had this year.) I have also learned that a lot of people have trouble setting up web sites, Amazon stores, blogs, and podcasts.  Well, I’ve DONE all that.

It’s just that I built it and no one came.  I’ve got to fix that.  I’ll work on it.  The upshot of the candy store analogy is that I realize now that I’m not really successful here, so either I have to finish Kongo and hang it up, or I need to get some funding to have 3-4 people helping me.  Like the candy store, I have to either expand or close.

Now, just FWIW, here’s a partial list of stuff that I couldn’t get off the ground before Kongo:

The White Tiger (1923) I wanted to merge my print with UCLA’s.  No traction with UCLA.  Universal did it recently, probably without my print.  I had mine scanned for archival use and nothing happened. Thanks, UCLA.

Rocky Jones Lost Pilot (1951) I scanned this.  We only have 2 of 3 reels, but it’s cool.  I’m hoping to get a 3rd helper to get this out for me.

Willis O’Brien shorts (1915-30). I love these and they’re hard to find.  Got them scanned, no time to clean up at this point.  Considering skipping them: this got the lowest rating of any of the shows I did, even with brand new scores.  Sometimes you guys don’t love the same stuff that I love!

Lupino Lane shorts (1920s).  This ALLLLMOST happened.  I was planning to collaborate with Dave Glass on this right before Kongo showed up and then I couldn’t do it.  Some of the prints are warped in such a way that I can’t easily fix them.  I still have a bunch and it’s near the top of the list.

Ella Cinders (1926) this has never been put on Blu-ray in a good way.  I tracked several prints (original Kodascopes) and was arranging to have them scanned.  I’ve also found some stills and the original score.  I think we could do a decent reconstruction of what this was including missing footage.  No budget, no time.

Alice in Wonderland/The Horror (1931/3). Several people are pestering me about this.  I was about to get Alice scanned before the pandemic started, but we ran out of time.  There’s also a print of Intolerance of 1933 at MoMA which would be a perfect thing for triple feature.  All Bud Pollard, one of the most bizarre filmmakers ever.

Thunder Over Texas/I Can’t Escape (1934/3) Edgar Ulmer double feature!  Immediately before the pandemic, I had Thunder scanned, but I will need another print because some of it was warped fairly badly and didn’t scan well.  We had most of I Can’t Escape scanned, but not quite ready.

Dynamite Dan/The Midnight Girl (1924/5) Karloff and Lugosi before sound!  I commissioned a new score for Dynamite Dan (Kodascope) and I was never able to get Midnight Girl scanned.  I think this would be a cool one.

So you see, I had a lot of irons in the fire.  They just all got cold!

Update on King of the Kongo

Boris Karloff shows up in Chapter 9. This is only slightly restored; we’re in the middle of this process.

I’m posting this in various groups that are asking me about this.  If you follow me on the Dr. Film page, you may have heard some of this, but it’s worth reading because there’s new information in here too.

THE PROJECT:

King of the Kongo is the first sound serial, made in 1929.  Although it’s been on video for years, the prints available are really bad, and they were all made from the sound version without the sound discs, so not only does it look bad, but doesn’t make sense without the sound.

It’s not a great film, but it’s fun.  I think it was partly the inspiration for Son of Kong, which also takes place in a wrecked temple, has a gorilla, jewels, and some dinosaurs in it.  Other than that, they’re different!

It’s also the first time Boris Karloff has dialogue in a sound film.  It’s his second sound film, the first being Behind that Curtain, which came out about a month earlier, although he has no real dialogue in that.

I’ve been working on this since 2011, and I bought a print of the film in 1989!  I have collected as many sound discs as survive on this one.  The entire picture survives, but only some of the sound.  Keep reading.

THE HISTORY:

King of the Kongo was released in late summer 1929 to a lot of ballyhoo.  It was released as a sound-on-disc only and it was called a “wild animal serial.”  True to their word, there are lions, cheetahs, “gorillas,” “dinosaurs,” and elephants in the film.  There was a silent version offered, but I have found no record that it actually played anywhere in the silent version.

In the 1950s, two collectors found a beaten up nitrate print with no sound discs and made a run of 16mm prints.  I spoke to one of the collectors who made these prints.  There are a few of these in private hands.  I think there were only 5-6 made.  I bought one of these prints.  The lab work is, shall we say, questionable.

Several video companies released various copies of the film mastered from various prints in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2011, I discovered that the print I had bought in 1989 was actually the sound version.  I had only dimly considered it for a restoration project, but the curiosity got me to contact Ron Hutchinson, who sent me copies of several sound discs he had.

I did a Kickstarter to restore Chapter 5, and subsequently restored Chapter 6 and 10 with National Film Preservation Foundation grants.  Each chapter is two reels (each reel lasting about 10 min), and there’s a talking sequence (about 2-3 min) in each reel.  The rest of each reel is silent with a music and effects track.  So far, the sound survives for about half the serial: Chapter 4 (one reel), Chapter 5 (both reels), Chapter 6 (both reels), Chapter 7 (one reel) Chapter 8 (one reel), Chapter 9 (one reel) and Chapter 10 (both reels).  The script for the entire film survives.

As I was finishing up the work on the last of the NFPF grant work, word came to me that there was a stock film library that had the entire film in 35mm.  Given that what I had was from beaten up 16mm prints made in the 1950s, the idea that there was nitrate was of some surprise.

THE CURRENT PROJECT:

I had been negotiating with the owner of the stock film library and the Library of Congress (where the stock film library is now held) since 2015.  The length of time this has taken has led many to believe that I’m an evil hoarder who will never release this material.  I just felt there wasn’t really cause to release what I had if there was a chance of getting better material, really four generations better than what I’d restored.

This year, I got all the details worked out, and we went through the whole film.  In one state or another most of it survives in 35mm.  We still have only 10 of the 21 reels of sound, but that’s not changed in several years.

The LoC currently has 47 reels of material on the film, and, amazingly, much of this is original camera negative!  Given that this was a Mascot serial, later a part of Republic, the master negatives should have burned with the bulk of the Republic and Mascot material in the great Fox nitrate fire of 1937.  Just how this survived is a mystery.

So we’re trying to restore the entire film with the best surviving material from each chapter, the best surviving sound material from each chapter, and using actors to recreate the missing sound.

WHERE WE ARE ON IT: 

I am restoring the whole film at 4K right now.  The Library of Congress is still in the process of scanning materials.  I’ve only seen about 1/3 of the material so far.  I have a grant that covers most of the cost of the actors and the blu-ray mastering, but the whole process at 4K is REALLY SLOW, and there’s a lot of damage in the film (keep reading).  I’m hoping to have a release of this on Blu-ray in 2020.  The grant I have is barely going to cover expenses, which means I’m going to have to do a lot of the work myself instead of farming it out while I do only the most critical work.  This just means it takes longer, but it’s happening.  FINALLY.

So far, I’ve rendered preliminary passes of Chapter 7, 9 and 10.  I’ve discovered that there’s a section of Chapter 9 that’s rotted out and will have to be replaced from 16mm.  Also, the surviving 35mm of Chapter 10 is missing the cliffhanger resolution and will have to be restored from 16mm. Even though we’re working from stunningly sharp negative on most of this, the negative is deteriorating.  There are glue splices that are starting to rot and there’s flickery decomposition throughout most reels.  I’m working with animation historian Steve Stanchfield to remove most of this, one more pass through restoration programs I wasn’t expecting.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED:

This film really has some beautiful photography in it.  This aspect of the film has been missing in the horrible dupes that have been available for many years.  You can tell that some of it was shot on location and in a hurry in those scenes, so the lighting there is kinda hit or miss, but the interior scenes are very well done with some atmospheric lighting.

Some of the scenes in Chapter 6 were originally tinted!  Pretty amazing.  The negative has tinting instructions in it.

The temple scenes, credited with being shot at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, were inserted from camera negative shot in 1922 and 1927.  These shots, by and large, are responsible for a lot of the deterioration.  Apparently, producer Nat Levine just bought this negative and then had costumes made to “match cut” in with the footage of his actors shot in California.  The closer temple shots in California are shot in some deteriorating building, and I think it’s a Spanish mission.

WHAT I AM HOPING TO DO:

I’ll have a restoration commentary on this (that seemed to work well on Little Orphant Annie), and I’d like to have some guest commentators on this so I’m not shouldering a three-hour yawn fest of me telling you that this is from print one or print six.  I’ve contacted a whole swath of people and I’m hoping to have a number of them provide some good insights here.

WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD:

There is another entity trying to release King of the Kongo on DVD/Blu-ray.  They have been spreading bad will in social media and the collector network.  If you have heard that I am hoarding material or if I am out after a cash grab on this for my own glory, this is not true.  The actual answer is that I’m bordering on psycho for working on this as much as I have!  I’ll be lucky to break even!

I don’t go for trashing other people in public forums, so I wish these guys well, and I hope they continue their work in restoring other serials.  I have no idea why they are so upset with me, but it’s been pretty nasty in some circles.  If they release King of the Kongo in their group, you have my blessing to buy it.  Maybe they’ll have some cool stuff I missed.

No, I will not be working with them.  Sorry, life is too short.

Karloff threatened by a gorilla in this, um, well, you’ve gotta love it.
Close-up from Chapter 9. This is from original camera negative
Larry Steers discovers jewels in European settings while searching through a Spanish Mission doubling for a Cambodian Temple, all of which is supposed to be taking place in Africa. OK, it’s not too accurate.

About the Podcast

I’ve gotten some feedback about the podcast that I would like to address here. I always have to say that when every side complains, I have to be doing something right, because you can’t please everyone, but you certainly can annoy everyone.

First, let me tell you a little about it. I guess it hasn’t really been properly introduced here. It’s at https://podcast.drfilm.net

For those of you who may not have been following this long-term, I started this as a TV pilot years ago (2008-2010). I utterly failed to get anyone to take the pilot seriously, although I sure tried. The intent was to share rare films from my collection and do it in a humorous way as kind of a tribute to the 1950s movie hosts. The one thing that succeeded was the PR that I put out on Facebook.

But no one ever read the web page, and they thought that I personally was trying to promote myself as Dr. Film. Dr. Film was always supposed to be a character, not Eric, and that made it a little strange. My genius marketing skills at work.

And then I started the blog, in hopes to reawaken interest in the pilot, which failed as well. Ultimately, the blog became a forum to discuss film issues that I thought were important, and it veered away from the concept of Dr. Film.

Oddly, the blog got a little play, and so I wanted to keep it going, and the Facebook page is a great forum for discussing issues that not many other people discuss. We discuss lost films, restoration issues, and copyright stuff, things that aren’t often fodder for other places. And that’s cool.

I thought seriously of shutting down the Dr. Film web page and just moving it over to other sites, since the pilot was a non-starter (I still like the pilot, but that’s apparently just me.)

But several people told me I was crazy. They said, “You have a trademark that people know NOW, and you’re wanting to throw that away? Why would anyone do that?” Of course, it’s a crazy way to have acquired a trademark, but hey, what are ya gonna do?

And then people told me that I needed to have a podcast. “No one reads blogs anymore, dude,” they said. “You need to get with the program and do a podcast.” And I went out and listened to podcast after podcast and I thought to myself, “I can’t really add anything to what’s out there. I have nothing to distinguish the podcast.”

I thought back to the origins of the Dr. Film character. I know that my voice and “manner” tend to sound pompous and condescending, particularly when I’m “acting,” so I designed Dr. Film as a pompous character, knowing that I could play that! I decided to go back to the character’s roots and play from there.

I added some back story and made Dr. Film a film superhero, with his alter ego being me. So there’s a difference between Eric and Dr. Film (finally.) And Dr. Film stands for real film history, quality presentations, and non-stupid stuff.

And I brought back Anamorphia, who keeps Dr. Film stable and cuts him down to size.

I probably can’t do a Dr. Film show TV show anymore (I have too many restoration gigs now, and I’d have to finish those before I could even think of shooting anything), but I can do an occasional podcast.

So if you’re a fan of the blog, with serious issues discussed, then stay here, and you’ll continue to see them. I’m going to make an effort to do more of them, but I’m working behind the scenes on a lot of stuff that I can’t really tell you about. Not yet at least.

I realize that there are a lot of you who are disappointed at the silly tone of the podcasts, and they are actually a good deal sillier than the Dr. Film show. I’ve gotten several complaints that the Dr. Film character is negative. Well, he’s not supposed to be a character you like. He’s intended to be obnoxious.

I’m hoping to make a show that appeals to a different audience and one that uses newer technology than what the blog relies on. It’s still tackling serious issues, but in a light-hearted way, and, oddly, we’re doing it in a 1940s radio sort of approach.

The shows we do that are the weirdest and most “out there” seem to be attracting the most listeners, and the straight interviews, which I will continue to do, seem to be more like medicine that people need to get through to the weirder and funny stuff.

This is partly why I’ve resolutely refused to put the blogs on the same page as the podcasts. They’re not the same thing. I know that some people are telling me that they don’t listen to podcasts and would rather have CDs, and others tell me that they only stream and don’t want blogs. It seems like two different markets to me.

So if you’re interested in what we’re doing in a purposely bizarre podcast, please listen in. If it bugs you, if it seems too frivolous and not serious enough, then it’s not for you and stay here on the blog.

Is this marketing genius, or marketing foolishness?

I have no idea. I make this up as I go along. If you want a marketing genius, call Seth Godin.

The Perks and Perils of Preservation on Your Own Label

When I decided to do a preservation of Little Orphant Annie, I also decided to start my own video label. It was a calculated risk, and it remains to be seen if it pays off. I’ve done much work for major labels, including Shout! Factory, Kino, Flicker Alley, etc, and I’ve helped smaller labels including Cartoons On Film, Undercrank, and Thunderbean. But Annie was different. It was my baby. I’d gotten it through numerous hurdles, and I really didn’t want it to be announced as NEW RELEASE FROM XXX VIDEO! PRODUCED BY ZZZ and with restoration by some dude named Eric.

Besides, none of the other labels wanted to release it anyway. Well, some of the smaller labels would have been willing, but then it would have been the same thing, and I didn’t want to do that. Now, many of you will be out there saying, “That Eric is just a credit hog and wants to get his name out there. What a ham.” Well, in a way that’s true, but overall it isn’t.

You see, I do a lot of film work, and preservation especially, but no one knows who I am. Well, some of you do, particularly if you read this blog, but in general, I’m an unknown quantity. That works out very well for me in some ways, because I’m the guy who likes to stand in the corner at parties and eat black olives until everything is over, but it doesn’t work out for me in other ways. By staying unknown, it reduces my chances to do other, more interesting work. There has to be a compromise between me standing silently in a corner and me being a ham who just has to be in front of an audience all the time. It’s a tough balance to find.

So Annie was my first shot at this. If you’ve been following me on Facebook, then you’ll know that it was the first of two giant preservation projects that I did starting in 2016 that have only recently reached fruition. The other one was the Milan Miracle Basketball films, which are the original game films of the David-vs.-Goliath basketball championship in Milan, Indiana that inspired the movie Hoosiers (1986). In both cases, the films needed preservation, and no one else had the immediate capacity to do it. If I hadn’t done them then, it would be too late for at least some of the elements by now.

I had to do a bunch of research on the DVD and Blu-ray formats. This is why I sometimes put polls up on my Dr. Film Facebook page. Some people do on-demand DVD publishing, which is easiest to do, and takes the least up-front money. But you can’t do Blu-ray discs on demand through Amazon, so that put the kibosh on everyone who said, “WE WANT BLU-RAY, NOT DVD!” Of course, then there were the other folks who told me that they didn’t want to buy a Blu-ray player, because their old TV works just fine, thank you, so could you put it out on DVD?

Thunderbean and Cartoons On Film have a good answer for this. They make combination packs of DVDs AND Blu-rays, both of which are functionally identical. That way, if you buy the package, there’s a disc for whatever your use is, and it saves the publisher from having to do separate art for the Blu-ray and the DVD boxes, because they are different sizes. That said, I guarantee that at shows I’ll still get people that tell me that they want one or the other and that this disc won’t play in their system.

Then there was the next problem. Everyone told me they want commentary tracks. Well, OK, the DVD software I’ve used for years doesn’t support commentary tracks, and it also doesn’t support Blu-rays at all. So that meant I had to learn a new software package, which I thought was OK.

Except it wasn’t. In order to get a software package that would do DVDs, Blu-rays, and support commentary tracks, I had to use a piece of software that is so horrid I shall not name it. Versatile it may be, but user-friendly it is NOT. I also learned the Blu-ray is a Sony monopoly, so every disc professionally pressed has to go through a Sony employee for approval. This is why Blu-rays cost so much. High-demand ones are fairly cheap, but the first run of them is expensive because you have to pay for the Sony guy. This is why Harry Potter Vs. Spider-Man’s Avengers is only $3 while Little Orphant Annie is expensive.

I thought that on-demand would be a lot cheaper for raising seed money, and if it didn’t work out, then I wasn’t out the minimum Blu-ray order of 1000. Many people told me, “It’s a boring old silent film! It isn’t even that good! You’ll never sell 1000!” Others said I would probably sell them, but it might take a while.

I thought I’d also try to do some on-demand to see how that went, too. Toward that end, I remastered the Dr. Film TV pilot we made in 2008. If you’ve followed the blog, then you know that we tried to sell this to TV for years and no one cared, and the blog and Facebook page were made to promote the show. The irony is that we tried to sell a show that no network  wanted to buy, but we succeeded in selling the blog and Facebook pages, so we’re still marketing Dr. Film, even though there isn’t a show in the works…

There was no reason to release Dr. Film as a Blu-ray, since we shot it in standard-definition. Glory-June Greiff and I sat down and recorded a commentary track in which we discuss what went in to making the pilot and how we really didn’t understand how to market it. If you decide to buy the DVD, then make sure to listen to the commentary track, because it’s probably even more fun than the show.

My strategy is starting to work! I have been approaching archives to see if they’ll work with me on my next restoration project. Instead of hearing the phone click in my ear, I’m now hearing, “Oh, yeah! You’re the guy who did Little Orphant Annie! That was cool!” So those doors are opening. That means I can start to do more things now.

My last task, after the restoration was done and the Kickstarter thank-yous sent out, was to pick a name for my label. I sweated over this. Dr. Film is a bit silly, but some people know it. Others know me only by my own name, which is important too. I ultimately decided that I’d be Eric Grayson (Dr. Film) to cover both bases. Yeah, it’s kinda lame.

Maybe you have a better idea for a name. I’m always willing to listen. You’ll find me at the next film restoration gathering. I’ll be the guy standing in the corner eating black olives. Come and say hi.

The Invisible Man Returns

ireturns
People from around the world gasp in spontaneous indifference at my absence.

I haven’t written a blog in some time.  In fact, it’s been so long that Google has de-indexed me.  I’m getting emails asking for links to some of my best-loved blogs.  (For what it’s worth, those seem to be Plan 9 from Out of Sequence, Maureen O’Hara Vs. the Egg People, and The Marx Brothers Explain Copyright Law.)  There’s a subtle plugola that might get just those blogs reindexed!

People are also asking me where I am.  I’m on Facebook and on the Dr. Film Facebook page, but no blogs.  Why would that be?  Well, frankly, I’ve been underwater with work and I’m only now coming up for air.  Writing a blog like this takes concentration, and I’ve been saving that for paying work.

Let me answer the questions I have been receiving:

Q1: Is King of the Kongo coming out on DVD/Blu-Ray soon?

A: No.  There are extenuating circumstances and I can’t go into them here.  A Kickstarter campaign would not help.  YouTube won’t help.  There are some problems.  That’s all I can say.

Q2: Have you found any more sound discs for Kongo?

A: No.

Q3: Are you working on any more preservation projects?

A: Yes.  I’m hoping to raise money for some.  I’m hoping that I can get Little Orphant Annie, the basketball films from Milan Indiana, and a film called Little Mickey Grogan restored.  At the current time, all are having some problems.

One of the reels of Little Orphant Annie awaiting the word to restore it!


Q4: Are you doing crowdfunding for these?

A: Maybe.  Some of the issues involved are deeper than just funding; again, I can’t go into them here.

Q5: You keep talking about a video streaming project?  Have you given up on that?

A: No.  We’re moving forward on it and it’s being developed.  I’m hoping to get a federal grant for it.  I listened to what you guys said and I’m going to try to fund a 501(c)(3) broadcast and streaming station that will be aimed at promoting literacy about older films and film preservation.  If I can get it off the ground, it will be called VintFlix.  We have the page reserved already.  It will take more funding to get going than I can get on Kickstarter.  I’ve been in contact with the National Endowment for the Humanities and they are saying encouraging things.

Q6: Is the Dr. Film show dead?

A: It’s not a bit well, but I wouldn’t say dead.  We are still talking about a podcast, but I haven’t had time to do one.  If VintFlix gets off the ground, then the Dr. Film show will be on it.

Q7: You promised to write a blog on digital vs. film on the Facebook page, but you haven’t.  Where is it?

A: I’m working on it.

Q8: You say you’re busy.  Does that mean you’re making a lot of money?

A: No, I’m fulfilling obligations and doing publicity for other things.  I would never recommend doing what I do unless you’re unbalanced like I am and just need to do it for some reason.

Q9: You’re doing shows and personal appearances?

A: Yes, a great number of them and in several cities this year.

Q10: Are you appearing as Dr. Film?

A: No, as myself.  If you’re interested in booking me, then you have my contact information in the Dr. Film main page or the email link at the upper right of this page.

Q11: I saw your King of the Kongo presentation at (wherever you saw it).  Can you bring that to my theater?

A: Yes.  Contact me.   The episodes are available on film or DCP.

Q12: I saw your show on the history of color in the movies.  Can you bring that to my theater?

A: Yes.  Contact me.  We have to do this one on film, and it doesn’t work in a really huge auditorium.

Q13: Are you affiliated with David Pierce and James Layton, who wrote the book on the history of Technicolor?

A: No, but I know them.  My presentation is entirely different from theirs, although theirs is quite good.   I’ve seen it more than once. (They discuss the history of the Technicolor company, whereas I show examples of many of the different processes, including Technicolor. They go more in-depth than I do.)

Q14: I think your work is very cool.  How can I support you?

A: Buy some t-shirts or send me PayPal.  I’ll send you the address if you’re so motivated.

Q15: We’re not interested in stuff you’re trying to do.  We’re only interested in what you’ve done.

A: Thanks for that.  Would you rather me just wait and post a boatload of stuff when things get resolved?  Part of what this blog is about is the ongoing saga of film preservation and how I’m trying to do it.  It’s a drama.  Have fun with it.  Really.  There may even be a book about it someday…

The Top 10 Film Preservation Stories of 2013

I hate lists like this, but I know people love them.  I’ve deliberately not included material that’s long been available but recently released on video.  These are all things that have never seen the light of day and have been rediscovered this year.  So, for example, Ben Model’s Musty Suffer series doesn’t make the list, because those films have been out there and known about for years (I’ve seen a number of them).  On the other hand, his Accidentally Preserved DVDs do make the list, because they highlight previously unknown films.

I’ve also plugged my restoration of King of the Kongo quite enough for most of you.  We’re doing another chapter, and I’m sure there will be more plugs to follow.  The fact that we’re reuniting the sound and picture for the first time since 1929 is still quite cool.

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A print that appears to be three-color, but with distinctive purple Cinecolor edge lettering. Cool!

AND NOW, THE LIST!
10. Hey, is that SuperCinecolor?  This is film preservation and history for geeks, but in 1948 there was a strike at Technicolor that caused a slowdown in their production of prints.  For a while, Warner Brothers had Cinecolor print their product for them, to the point that a few cartoons from this period are actually credited as being “IN CINECOLOR.”  But Cinecolor was a two-color process, and Technicolor was a superior three-color process.  All the Cinecolor cartoons, when seen today, are three-color.  What’s the story?  Well, this year, a few cartoons popped up on eBay that show all the earmarks of being in Cinecolor (reddish/purple edge codes for one), but are definitely three-color, because they have vibrant blues and greens in the same shot, something regular Cinecolor couldn’t reproduce.  Even stranger, these are 16mm prints.  Cinecolor eventually employed a process called SuperCinecolor, a three-color process, but that didn’t find its way into theaters until the 50s, and then always in 35mm.  So why are these prints in SuperCinecolor several years before?  I’m not sure, but I suspect it involves avoiding patent lawsuits with Technicolor that didn’t expire until a couple of years later.  Wanna hear more about this?  I can elaborate!

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One of the Monsters of the Moon (1939).

9. Monsters of the Moon (1939).  OK, this is a film that I found, but I’m excited about it.  A couple of aspiring filmmakers made a long promotional film based on their idea of Martians invading the moon.  It was a clever mixture of stop-motion and live-action.  It plays like a long trailer, but it was supposed to attract the attention of big-time Hollywood producers.  Unfortunately, the producer it attracted was William Pizor, a bargain-basement filmmaker if there ever was one.  Pizor bought the footage and put his name on it in dim hopes that he could raise money to finish the film. (It should be noted that Pizor was the producer of Murder by Television, which was highlighted in episode one of the Dr. Film TV show, which you’ll see if I can ever sell it!)   Monsters of the Moon never went anywhere.  The only known copy of the film ended up in the hands of Forrest J. Ackerman (long-time monster fan and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland), who took the footage, recut it a bit, added some girly footage at the end, and showed it at the first WorldCon in 1940.  He lost the film afterward, finding it again a few years later, when he gave it to (please hold your hisses) movie mogul Raymond Rohauer, who added some titles, showed the film once, and kept it.  Ackerman saved stills of the film and touted it as one of the great lost films.  It showed up on eBay this year, in its original form, with Pizor’s name on it, proving that there was actually more than one print struck.  What will become of this?  Stay tuned!

8. Accidentally Preserved.  Ben Model is a marketing genius.  Many of us who do film preservation work have stacks of one-off films that aren’t “cool” enough to merit video releases.  In many cases, they’re the only surviving prints of a particular film, but, as I always say, “It’s the law of supply and demand.  You may have a unique film, but if no one cares, then it still has no value.” Ben and I agree that an important part of preservation is presentation.  If no one sees the films you’ve preserved, then they might as well be lost.  Ben has done something I’ve never been able to do, and that I’ve not seen anyone else do, either.  He’s made people care about oddball silent shorts, and he’s getting people to buy DVDs.  That’s really, really great, folks.  It means that more stuff like this will become available.  It helps everyone.

stooges-brophy-hello-pop7. Hello, Pop (1933)  This has been a great year for recovering Technicolor footage.  Few people know that The Three Stooges worked for MGM before they went to Columbia, the studio where they gained fame.  MGM even made a few early two-color Technicolor shorts with the Stooges and their then-leader, Ted Healy.  The MGM Stooge shorts tend to be highly variable, and  today Ted Healy comes off as abrasive and annoying.  Still, this is an important stepping-stone for the Stooges, and there are very few two-color Technicolor shorts that survive.  Always a poor judge of comedic talent, MGM fired the Stooges and kept Ted Healy.

6. Whoozit (1928) If you know me or read this blog with any regularity, then you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of comedian Charley Bowers.  Among the most neglected of silent comedians, Bowers’ work has been passed over because nearly all of it has been lost.  Over the past 15 years or so, bits of his work have been popping up piecemeal, and they reveal an artist unlike anyone who came before or since.  That’s not superlative, folks… Bowers was unique.  Whoozit is Bowers’ second film under his contract with Educational Pictures.  He’d been with FBO the previous year, and those films had been successful, but they bounced him out anyway.  Contemporary reviews claim that this film is better than There It Is (Bowers’ first at Educational.)  Given that There It Is is now considered a minor classic of silent comedy, I have high hopes for Whoozit.  Thanks to preservationist Serge Bromberg and the EYE Institute for digging up this gem.filmdaily4344newy_0718

5. Dearth of a Salesman and Insomnia is Good for You (both 1957) These are both short films featuring a young Peter Sellers, who was just beginning his career in feature films.  If that isn’t cool enough, they were both co-written by the legendary Mordecai Richler, author of the Jacob Two-Two series and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.  I  have a feeling that these will be just plain hilarious.

4. Their First Misunderstanding (1911) What’s not important about this film?  Pretty much everything is.  It’s an early film from Independent Motion Pictures (IMP), which became Universal over the next year or so.  It’s the first film in which Mary Pickford got billing.  It was directed by George Loane Tucker (Traffic in Souls and The Miracle Man) and Thomas Ince (Civilization).  Oh, and it co-stars Owen Moore, who was married to Pickford at the time.  I can’t wait to see this.

salamander3. Dr. Who: The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear.  In the 1970s, the BBC stupidly erased a big chunk of the Dr. Who episodes from the 1960s.  The first doctor, William Hartnell, was affected badly, but the second, Patrick Troughton, had the majority of his episodes destroyed. The BBC had sold 16mm prints to TV stations in Africa and New Zealand (as well as others), which is where a few episodes have been found, but there has been a discernible slowdown in recovered episodes in the last few years. Philip Morris (not the cigarette company) has been traveling the world literally being a filmic Indiana Jones to find abandoned TV episodes.  He’s been kidnapped by pirates and arrested many times.  Morris found 9 episodes (almost two complete stories) and returned them to the BBC.  They paint a new portrait of Troughton’s Who, since he gets to play multiple parts in one (and quite well), and we finally get to see the first appearance of stalwart Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (here not yet ascended to full rank.)  Great shows, so lovingly restored that they look like BBC 2” tape from the 1960s even though they came from 16mm kinescopes.

2.The Mysterious Island (1929) This has been available for years, but only in black and white. The Czech film archive has located an original Technicolor print. Sure, this is a disappointing film, with an early music-and-effects track (and some talkie sequences). Two-color Technicolor was a novelty at the time, and particularly a film that had a measure of underwater footage (although much of it here was faked.)  This is important as one of the first MGM talkies, one of the first Technicolor talkies, one of the first color/sound science fiction films, and it was directed by Benjamin Christensen (at least in part) before he was ousted from the project.

1. Too Much Johnson (1938) has got to be one of the Holy Grails of film preservation.  The only print was thought to have burned in the 1970s, leaving it a big question mark in the career Orson Welles.  OK, we know it’s not a great picture: it was intended to flesh out a play that tanked and Welles was threatened with legal action on it anyway.  It was never shown in public, but what was a movie with the Mercury Theater people shot three years before Citizen Kane like?  The mind boggles.  I haven’t seen this yet, but I’m looking forward to it!

johnson

Islands in the Stream

I get complaints when I write a blog about the Dr. Film show.  People like the blogs about classic films better.  Someone wrote about the “existential whining” that he didn’t like.  Well, this is going to be another one of those blogs, but it affects what we’re going to do with the show, which means classic films and restorations you won’t see anywhere else.

A lot of people come up to me, especially at conventions, and ask, “When is the Dr. Film show coming on?”  Some think it’s already on.  Some think it should be on, and are surprised it isn’t.  Still only know Dr. Film from the blog.  This blog has gotten surprisingly popular.

The Dr. Film facebook page is pretty popular too, and the show isn’t.  It’s because no one has seen the show.  On the Facebook page, we talk about preservation issues, and there are plugs for new projects and odd copyright problems.  It’s a neat forum. In a very strange way, a way I never expected, I’ve created a community around a show that doesn’t really exist, and a fan base and people who come together over something that has never developed.  I’m not complaining, but it’s surprising.

You see, I put up the blog to promote the show, which I figured would get popular and then we’d have more people clamor to see the show.  And the Facebook page was put up to promote the blog and the show.  But we only have the pilot, which was shot in 2008, finished in 2009, and remastered/recut in 2011.  That’s it.

If you’ve been a loyal follower here, then you know what I mean and how we’ve struggled with this.  We’ve been completely and utterly ignored by cable and broadcast.  Few people will even give us a chance by watching the show.  I really don’t think we will ever be on an over-the-air broadcast or cable network.  I want to emphasize this.  I just don’t think we’re high-profile enough.

There’s been a continuing thing, something that I get asked all the time, “Why don’t you just put Dr. Film on YouTube?”  I don’t do that because I can’t afford to.  YouTube is dominated by teenagers, rich folks, and the chronically unemployed.  I don’t qualify for the first two, and hope to avoid being the third.  The economics of YouTube are awful.  I’ve looked into it, and with the viewership I’m likely to get, it’s impossible for me to make enough money to justify expenses.

And then people tell me, “But people will see you and you’ll be famous!”  Well, I don’t care about that.  I want to a) show old movies and b) not go broke doing it.  Those are my goals.  I really don’t care if no one knows who I am.  If I have to be a little more “known” in order to accomplish my goals, then that’s fine.

One of the things I do to accomplish my goals is to study the marketplace, and I see odd things happening, especially in social media.

I noticed my friend Archie Waugh doing something that I’d never even considered with Facebook.  I’ve never met Archie, but I’ve known him for years, even before Facebook, because he is a long-time silent film fan.  But Archie is geeky (I consider this a good thing!) in a number of areas, and one of his favorite ways is that he’s a big Godzilla fan… not just Godzilla, but all of the Japanese monster and TV shows.  Properly, they’re called Kaiju.

Archie hosts a group that gets together every Saturday night and they all pop in a DVD at the same time and then start talking about it as it runs.  They used to use Facebook’s chat function, but they grew into their own chat room that one of the members puts on his own server.  And they’re not making fun of the movie (although sometimes they might kid it a bit), but they’re talking to each other and enjoying the film and sharing an experience…

They’re not seeing each other, but are spread literally all over the world.  They’re a community, and more to the point, they’re an audience.  They love to do this!  I’ve polled them about it.  It runs counter to my way of thinking, because I go to a movie so that I don’t talk to other people, so I can immerse myself in the experience.  I don’t like to share that with others.  But it’s not all about me.

This is a new kind of audience.  It’s a different kind of audience.  I can see why some people utterly fail to accept this.  The texters hate the immersion people and the immersion people hate the texters.  And I hope there’s room for both in the world, because there are just too few people who are interested in some things to make an immersive audience pay off.  If there are 10 people in each big city, then you may get 1000 people in a virtual audience, but go broke doing a movie roadshow.

I hate that.  I love the movies, but I have to face reality.  I hope that some of the texters can become members of the immersive audience and vice versa, but neither is going away.

And that brings me back to Dr. Film.  If YouTube doesn’t work out economically, then what about some sort of internet streaming?  Netflix was not interested.  Well, I’m not sure whether they were interested or not.  I never heard back from them.

I thought, well, OK, we can stream the Dr. Film show on a private YouTube channel and do an Archie-style chat along with it.  I even spoke to Archie about it.  I almost did it, looked like everything was coming in place, but…

People yelled at me.  Some people had seen the pilot that we shot, and a few hated it.  The complaint was not that the idea was bad, but some people hated the feature I’d picked, and a few hated the video transfer I’d gotten.  The statement was that it was like one of the Star Trek pilots… they were good enough to incorporate into the run of the show, but you wouldn’t want to show one for your first episode.  The complaints were loud, and I listened.

Now remember, by this time, years have gone by.  I’m thinking we just trash the show.  It was fun, it was a good idea, but it didn’t work. That idea didn’t set well with people either!  Meanwhile, the blog readership expanded, the Facebook memberships went up, and we still had no show.

I thought, well, OK, we can try to make some more shows.  By now HD has taken over, so we need more equipment and more expensive film transfers.  That’s OK, I can work that out…  I applied for grants, and, gee, I got none of them.  People don’t really understand what I do.  It’s not “art” to them.

I kept thinking that I needed my own internet TV station, and I was looking into that.  I knew that it was possible to make a private station with a dedicated server.  I’ve seen a lot of them, and I know that many are on Roku.

And then there’s this other problem: most of the TV stations on the internet are BAD.  The classic movie stations rely almost exclusively on material that’s been cobbed from archive.org.  I’ve lived through this before: it was like when Goodtimes video came out and flooded the marked with awful-looking public domain movies.  They were cheap, but they gave headaches to those of us to tried to be a little more up-market.  I can’t always be Kino or Criterion; there simply are some things that look bad in the surviving prints, but I’d like to show them anyway.  I just don’t want to be painted with the same brush as Alpha or Goodtimes, who seem to go out of their way to get bad material.

So I thought about offering Dr. Film as a streaming service ala Netflix.  I did a survey there, too.  People told me that they wanted free, please free, we have no money.  Well, that means commercials, which I can do.  But an equal number of people said, NO, please have a monthly subscription.  It was evenly split down the middle.

Ben Model is at least somewhat successful with his Accidentally Preserved DVD sets.  I helped him work on those, so it’s possible that we could just produce Dr. Film shows and put them on DVD.  But I think that’s silly.  We don’t have the kind of following to make that work.  Ben’s DVDs sell because people know Ben and people know that they’re getting rare films on the DVDs.  I don’t think Dr. Film would sell because not enough people know what it is… at least, not yet.

And then I see that Netflix is dropping a chunk of its older movies because no one cares, and no one watches them.  It makes me ill.  I know there is an audience, maybe a small one, for classic films.  And there’s a lot more out there than what gets shown on TCM.

Part of that audience is on the Dr. Film Facebook page.  Another part of it reads this blog.

I have a number of ideas that I’m mulling over.  I need your input on these.  I’ve got technical skills but not a lot of cash.  Please let me know what you’d like to see.  If I initiated a Kickstarter program, I’d also need to know that you or your friends would donate to help cover startup costs.

MY FIRST IDEA: A 24-hour streaming TV channel, all movies made before Star Wars.  We’d have serials, cartoons, shorts, and features, but also shows that were made exclusively for the channel that are about older films.  Everything from film, nothing from archive.org!!!  Movies would be from my collection and from other collections.   Everyone who contributes films will be paid, no matter what!  (It’s important!)  Dr. Film would be a part of this network, and it would air probably once a week.

I could work something out so that we could have a subscription version and a free version of the same network.  The subscription people would see the shows uninterrupted and then have a cartoon at the end of the show, all real content, no ads.

As cool as I think this might be, it is a marketing nightmare.  The problem is that there’s already so much dreck out there that we’d have to find a way to differentiate this network from all the other cheesy networks.  Do you have ideas on how we could promote it?  Please tell me!  It would be a lot of work for me to set this up and maintain it, so we’d have to have some viewership to make it worthwhile.

ALTERNATIVELY:   We just admit that the whole idea is limited, but we have a following with the Dr. Film sites.  And then we have a site that would ONLY be Dr. Film, nothing else, but shows could be streamed on demand with or without commercials.  This one is less work for me, and I suspect less cool for you.  But I don’t know.  You tell me.

I sometimes will just have the TV on in the background and come in and out on it when something caught my interest.  People tell me that this JUST ISN’T DONE anymore.  It’s all streaming on demand, all the time.  You tell me!

In either case, I’d probably expand the Facebook presence a little bit and put in a chat function on the Dr. Film page so that people could discuss the shows as they are watching.

What do you think?  What would you like to see?  Feel free to post here, on the Dr. Film page, or email me and give me ideas.  If this really is a community, let’s let it function like one!

Guest Blog: I Believe in Dr. Film!

This week’s guest blogger is Glory-June Greiff, longtime supporter of this endeavor.  Her unedited words begin after the period at the end of this sentence.

Dr. Film is discouraged and has for a long time now wanted to give it up, take the website down, move on to other things (not that he isn’t already, having accomplished two significant restorations in the past few years: the two-color sequence of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances and Chapter 5 of the first sound serial King of the Kongo).

“No one cares!” he cries.  I continue to encourage Dr. Film to keep trying, and it has nothing to do with the fact–full disclaimer–that I portray Anamorphia in the pilot of Dr. Film, shot some years ago.  So he challenged me to write a guest blog about why it is important that he continue.

It’s true that a part of it is because I dearly love old films of all stripes and I am concerned that they are simply disappearing from the scene.  Growing up, old movies were all over TV, just THERE, not just relegated to a cable station, or worse, something you find on the Internet and watch on your iPhone.  The loss is personal, but the loss to American art and culture is far greater.  Some arbiter decides that, say, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton are the finest examples of and thus represent silent film comedy, are the only ones worth seeing.  Never mind the others, lesser known, perhaps, not because they are unworthy but because many of their films were lost or, at best, are difficult to find.  The same is true of every other film genre.  There are so many wonderful movies out there and many that are less than stellar but still worth watching.  An example that jumps to mind is a low-budget action movie made in the 1930s called I Can’t Escape, which I caught because Eric Grayson showed the film for his vintage movie series at the Garfield Park Art Center.  The film stars a very handsome actor named Onslow Stevens, whose career slid soon after.  It beautifully captures the desperation of the Depression and boasts some gorgeous Art Deco sets, a nice little picture worth seeing, if nothing else, for the way it presents the context of the 30s so well.  But the way things are, unless you make a heroic effort, you will never see movies like these.  As with much of history (that’s what I do in “real” life), it’s only the winners you hear about.  And “winning” is often a fluke.   In the case of old films, we know about many actors because their films, or at least some of them, made it to television in that golden age I mention.  And the old copyright bugaboo played a huge part in which of the old films became known as “classics” and which lay moldering in a vault.  Or burned.  Intentionally.

Film history is fascinating, but I’m already a convert.  I began to read about old films, their actors and even their directors at an early age.  I was very fond of the Universal horror films and 50s sci-fi, so I actually had a subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland, which in turn led me to the library to find out more.  Like many who grew up in the Depression, my mother found escape by going regularly to the movies, and she told me about them and the actors when we watched the old films that, as I said, were always playing on television.  In memory of Mom, I am especially fond of her favorite, Jean Harlow, the sizzling blonde bombshell of the 1930s, who died tragically young at 26.  My father loved the Errol Flynn swashbucklers and westerns, and oh yes, I had fantasies about Flynn (okay, he was already dead, but oof!) and I still can recite about half the dialogue of Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood.  Over time I got to know the character actors, such as Alan Hale and Guy Kibbee and Una O’Connor and Una Merkel.  Though I may have taken it farther than many, the thing is, these films were out there, and the majority of my peers also knew who Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis et al. were.  In those halcyon days, almost everybody knew, too, of the classic horror movies, to the point where plastic models of Universal film characters made by Aurora were immensely popular.  Heck, I even still have a bubble bath bottle made to look like the Frankenstein monster.  On TV local and syndicated characters such as Sammy Terry and Svengoolie hosted classics like Frankenstein and Dracula, interspersed with their endless sequels and B movies featuring haunted houses and raging gorillas.  We were exposed to all of them.

Dr. Film is not in competition with old time horror film hosts like Svengoolie, although he takes the idea of humorous hosting from them.  And obviously he is not the debonair Robert Osbourne or Nick Clooney, although he certainly has the chops.  The character Dr. Film may be mildly obnoxious and a figure of fun, but the man under the fez is a knowledgeable film historian.  He knows his stuff and perhaps even more important, he loves films!  The passion is a necessary component, I firmly believe, in sparking people’s interest in films and film history.  And film history is our history.  In addition to being entertained, we can learn a great deal watching films of another era.  Conversely, we can get so much more out of any number of films if we know what was going on in the country at the time.

Dr. Film may love movies, but he is discriminating.  If a film is bad, he will tell you, and he’ll point out some of the silly mistakes and cheap tricks to catch as you watch.  But no matter how bad, he doesn’t mock the film during its showing as some hosts do, a practice I find obnoxious and brought to its nadir by Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Recently, for the first time in decades, I watched The Beginning of the End, a pretty awful 1950s sci-fi of the giant-insects-caused-by-radiation variety.  In the 50s, scientists were usually the heroes, for this was the era of early space exploration; schools pushed all the sciences heavily, and men (and a few women) in such fields as biology, chemistry, and astronomy were admired.  So it was in this movie, even though it had been the scientist, played by Peter Graves, who inadvertently caused the gargantuan locusts who ultimately invaded Chicago.  (I’m not making this up.)  Unintended consequences was the not-so-subtle theme, one that still resonates today.  I bring this up because my viewing was marred by the movie host, who, having  decided the film moved too slowly, would jazz it up with goofy sound effects and comments.  Dr. Film would never do this.  Movies are ever so much more interesting if you have a little background, and that is what Dr. Film provides, gradually whetting your appetite for more.  It may be more Onslow Stevens or more 1920s animation (much of which is truly bizarre) or lesser known works of well known directors or forgotten silent film comedians like Charley Chase or Max Davidson.  I am the richer for having seen these, I clamor for more, and shows such as Dr. Film would like to offer are a means of doing so.  Only, no one seems interested.

I feel like Peter Pan when Tinkerbell was fading away.  If you believe in Dr. Film, clap your hands!

“The History Not Found in Books”

Sometimes, when I least expect it, I hear a nugget of wisdom that just keeps me thinking for days. On March 28, I attended a lecture at Indiana Landmarks about historic buildings. This will be of no surprise to the folks who know that Indiana Landmarks promotes (among other things) preservation of historic buildings. The lecturer was Henry Glassie, a really top-notch guy who gave a smoother lecture than I ever could. (Full disclosure: Indiana Landmarks is also hosting a showing of my restoration of The King of the Kongo in July of this year, but I’m not shilling for anyone.)

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Henry Glassie (picture from Indiana University)

Glassie spoke about surveying historic buildings in Virginia, and he had traced the designs to countries that had had similar designs in Europe.  Barns and houses, primarily.  He noticed that there was a definite pattern in the buildings depending on where the inhabitants had originated in Europe.  He also noted that the folks in the American South had cleverly adapted some of these buildings to make newer and more useful designs, while retaining the original character of the older design.

Then he started speaking about what happened to these buildings over time.  You may know that a lot of barns are endangered today simply because we don’t know what to do with barns, since farming is now industrial and not familial.  And modest old houses are a bit of a problem as we move into larger McMansions to hold all of our stuff.  Glassie noted that all of the houses he had surveyed… all of them… that represented what is perceived as the popular cultural history of Virginia, had been saved, and in many cases restored. The others—the little dwellings, the sheds, the outbuildings—were either gone or in worse shape than ever.

The plantation houses, the houses of the rich, the story of Gone With the Wind and all that goes with it… those were saved. The smaller houses, the ones for poor families, the odd barns, the work buildings… those were being demolished, because no one wanted to deal with them.

“It’s important to save some of these,” Glassie said, “because these buildings tell us of the history not found in books.”

My mind spun!  I loved this idea.  I knew exactly what he meant.  We preserve the popular stuff, the stuff we know about, the stuff we can still identify with, and the rest gets swept under the carpet.  It doesn’t fit in with our idea of the past, so out it goes.  Who cares if it documents a truth that a clever historian can read and decode?  It doesn’t fit our narrative, so begone!

And immediately, I realized that this is the kind of film history I practice.  The film history not found in books.  I realized that this is why the “Holy Quintet” of classic films annoys me a little (Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, and Singing in the Rain.)  Those stories have been told.  They’ve been retold.  They’re part of our narrative of film history.

This is why, in popular culture, Gone With the Wind is the first Technicolor film ever made.  Who cares that Becky Sharp came four years earlier?  And what of the two-color Technicolor that dated back to 1917?  It may be true, but it doesn’t fit our narrative—out it goes.

The trouble with this is that what doesn’t fit the narrative doesn’t get seen, and what doesn’t get seen doesn’t get preserved.  It’s the same with films and buildings.  In the words of Hannibal Lecter, “We covet what we see.”  And if we don’t see it, then we don’t care.

OK, it’s a little granule of a thought, I admit, but it’s a powerful one.  The history not found in books.  Wow.  I began to realize that I fight very hard to tell film history not found in books.  I find so many fascinating nooks and crannies that I want to share them.

I’m kind of the opposite of the traditional film history guy: If the story has been told, then I want to move on to a new story.  Yeah, I know about the script troubles in Casablanca or Buddy Ebsen in The Wizard of Oz.  What else is there?

I remember when I first started showing the pilot for Dr. Film.  People screamed at me.  “OK, we like what you did with the characters, we like how you did the show, but the feature you picked, Murder by Television (1935) is terrible!  You should take that out and put something good in, something like White Zombie (1932).  That’s about the same length and it’s at least a decent movie.  And since it stars Lugosi, you’ll only have to re-shoot the ending, so it’ll save the whole show.”

But I didn’t want to do that.  I refused to do that.  I have a very solid concept for Dr. Film and White Zombie wasn’t it.

I like White Zombie.  It’s a fine film.  Lugosi is great in it.  It would make a fantastic episode of Matinee at the Bijou.  And, for the record, I like Matinee at the Bijou.  But Dr. Film isn’t Matinee at the Bijou.  It’s seeking to tell the untold stories.

In the opening credits, the members of the Midnight Film Society slink into their chairs and the narrator solemnly intones, “…they screen the unseen…”

White Zombie isn’t unseen.  It’s one of the most common Lugosi films out there.  If you’ve seen 15 Lugosi films, you’ve seen White Zombie.  Since I don’t have a fantastic rediscovered print like Tom Holland found, I didn’t have anything unique to show.

As this little nugget of truth continued to worm its way into my skull, I came to realize just how much I love the untold stories in film history…

I lobbied last year (and this year) to restore The King of the Kongo because it represents so many untold stories: What was Boris Karloff doing in movies before he was famous?  What were the early sound serials like?  Did early part-talkies use undercranking?  It isn’t a great movie either, but it deserved to be restored.  It needed to tell its story.

Max Lerner once said, “History is written by the survivors.”  Film history is too.  I love DW Griffith, but is he really the father of film?  We’ve found out recently that other people at the same time were doing innovative work as well.  Griffith had the advantage of being preserved and available because of MOMA and Library of Congress, but it’s only recently that we could see early works by Raoul Walsh or even Cecil B. DeMille (whose early work is really cool… before he started making stale costume dramas that made more money.)

We know Fritz Lang (survivor) but not Paul Wegener (most films lost).

We know Willis O’Brien (survivor) but not Charley Bowers (many films lost).

We know Laurel and Hardy (only one short lost) but not Max Davidson (fewer shorts, and several missing).

The stories of Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford are changing as we find their early work to be more interesting and significant than we had thought.

MGM star Clark Gable we remember, but what of MGM star Lee Tracy?  There was a time when Tracy was a much bigger star.

I find myself drawn to these kinds of things.  I find that the films in the popular culture, the ones written about in books, are often no better than the obscure little pictures we’ve never seen.

Alternate title for Merry Go Round from 1932
Alternate title for Merry Go Round from 1932

A couple of years ago, Universal reprinted Merry Go Round (1932), which might as well have been a 1945 film noir.  Universal had a stupid policy in the 1960s and 70s: if it wasn’t a monster movie, or it didn’t have Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, WC Fields, or the Marx Brothers in it, then it wasn’t worth reprinting.  This meant that scads of great titles from Universal and Paramount (Universal owns the Paramount library from 1929-47) are sitting unseen in vaults because they were deemed unmarketable.

Merry Go Round was a great story of double dealing, corrupt city officials, shady lawyers, bed-hopping, etc.  Just the kind of thing that would be great cinema in 10 or 15 years.  And we’d never heard of it.

Because we’d never seen it.

Because its story wasn’t told in books.  (And there was no reason to tell its story in books, since no one had seen it.  Sitting there in a film catalog, it doesn’t look particularly interesting.)

OK, maybe I screwed up in showing Murder by Television on Dr. Film.  I personally find this an “are you kidding me?” moment in Lugosi’s career.  He’d just done The Raven at Universal, and now this?  Why?  And you unravel the answer: he needed  cash, so he would take work anywhere.

Sure, it’s a bad film.  But why it’s a bad film is really fascinating.  And I find it a fascinating film to see for its badness.  That doesn’t mean I only want to show bad films.

And it certainly doesn’t mean I want only to show good films.

It does mean I have no interest in showing Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain, and Citizen Kane.  Come to think of it, lump White Zombie in with them.

I’m still fascinated with film history–obscure but interesting and worth revisiting—the history not found in books.  If Dr. Film ever makes it to air, then you can expect to see more of these kinds of stories.  I’m happy to leave the mainstream to Robert Osborne.  He’s better at that than I am!

To Free or Not to Free? That is the Question

I’m frequently bombarded with ideas and new concepts.  I try to incorporate them in my marketing approach for the Dr. Film show.  Since we’ve not (yet) been successful in selling the show, I study people who are successful at marketing to see what they’re doing, and I learn a lot in the process. I thought I’d pass on some of it to you.

A couple of years ago, I was projecting a film festival, running a bunch of films that were not very interesting.  I’m always a sucker for something different and unusual, but I wasn’t finding it on this day, so I had to keep reminding myself that this gig would pay for a big chunk of the month.

SitaPoster
Official Sita Sings the Blues poster.

The last film I put on was called Sita Sings the Blues.  It delighted me.  You want something different and unusual?  This was it.  A beautiful animated film, using Indian-style art, with music by Annette Hanshaw, a long-forgotten singer from the 1920s and 30s.  You wouldn’t think the styles would mesh, but they did, and really well.  The art was great, the plot engaging.  I loved the picture.

I filed it away in my brain and forgot about it.  A while later, I read something that said Sita creator Nina Paley had had trouble licensing the rights to the music.  The real soul of that movie is in the songs, and without them, it would ring pretty hollow.  Some time later, I heard that a deal had been reached.

I looked on Nina’s website to see what the story was.  What I read was quite fascinating.  And now, we take a little diversion, but I promise I’ll come back to this.

The most frequent criticism I get about the Dr. Film show is that it should be free on the internet, that it should be a YouTube channel, because only there would it find an audience.

I always have had a problem with this reasoning. I love old films and I love to share them and to tell their stories.  But I can’t go around putting stuff on YouTube for free.

As I’ve discussed before, I used to work with a video company, and they released obscure titles on video, films that didn’t survive in pristine form, or films that were a little out of the mainstream.  The company did relatively well, well enough that expenses were paid and there was money left at the end of the year.  Not much, but some.

Then a company called Alpha Video ordered one copy of everything in the catalog, making bad DVD masters that they sold for $1 at Wal-Mart, a price that no one could compete with.

This one move killed the video business, because there’s no room in the market for a middle-of-the-road distributor. It’s either top of the line, pristine prints (Criterion/Kino), or bargain basement (Alpha Video/archive.org). Releasing films from my collection cost me money, so I stopped.  I still love to share movies and save them, but on a more modest level.  I do in-person film shows, and they pay better than video releases ever did, if such a thing can be imagined.

But I still keep an eye and ear out for new trends in distribution.  The world is changing and doing so at a really fast pace.  I realize that the market for Dr. Film is not a large one, so it demands creative marketing, which ain’t my forté.

This is what fascinated me about what Nina was doing.  After she reached a settlement with the people representing Annette Hanshaw, she posted Sita Sings the Blues, for free, without commercials.  You can, if you choose to, donate money to her to support her new projects.  It’s sort of like an online PBS.

The whole “everything is free” nature of the internet just seems to quash any way of making money, and making money is critical here.  If Nina wants to make a new film, she has to cover costs and keep her lights on.  The time she invests in it means time not being spent on something else that might keep the lights on, so it’s important.

This is a key point that I came to in making Dr. Film.  It took me a solid month to edit the single episode we shot.  I was lucky at the time because I had no other work going on.  Today, I couldn’t do that.  I have other work that would prohibit me taking the focused time it would take to cut an episode.  This means I’d have to turn down work in order to make the show.  Or I’d have to hire someone to help me… ack!

Basically, I can’t do the show for free.  It simply costs too much.  I either need a grant, or a donation stream, or a paying customer.  If I put a 90-minute show up on YouTube, once a month, I’d literally go broke.  I could cheapen it and use some of the bad production techniques that mar other YouTube productions, or stick to short clip shows, but I don’t want to do that.  It would save editing time by eliminating Anamorphia, but that makes it a lot less fun, too.  I want to make a good show, not just a cheap show.

I wondered whether this approach is working for Nina.  (Whether it works for Dr. Film is a a different question.) She claims that the approach is working.  I emailed her a bit about it, and she seems preoccupied with other work (which is great!), but the bottom line seems promising.  It’s covering costs, and that means she’s still working, which is really what we want from an artist, right?

Nina’s page also points to a great site called QuestionCopyright.org. This site is wonderful food for thought… they are advocating for a rethinking of copyright law, which is a great idea.  Many are talking about abolishing it, saying that content should be free and that containers (books, CDs, etc) cost money.  It’s an interesting thought.  Do I wholly endorse it?

No, not entirely.  I love the idea, but I remain to be convinced that it’s viable.  I live in a world where I’m struggling to keep the lights on and the heat bill paid.  I’ve had people copy and freely distribute my work, and I got no credit or money for it.

I’m constantly having to fight against the perception that my work is worthless, so I’m pretty hesitant to set its worth at zero.  Sita Sings the Blues is fundamentally different from Dr. Film anyway, because Nina gets to promote her work by showing it at film festivals and such, whereas there’s no real path for me to promote Dr. Film.  I honestly think that a free Dr. Film would both get ripped off (the rare films inside it would be redistributed), and it would get almost no viewings because no one knows what it is.  A double whammy.

But I’m still crazy.  I love old movies.  I still save them.  I still share them on a more intimate basis. I’m going to go on doing it.  You can credit Glory-June Greiff (my long-time co-conspirator and the actress who plays Anamorphia) for keeping the Dr. Film project on the table.  She’s adamant that it deserves an audience.  I’ve advocated giving up on it for years and she won’t hear of it.

Will Dr. Film be out there for free?  You show me a way that I can make them and stay solvent, and I would love to do it.  I’ve got a new distributor talking about the show (can’t discuss it yet), and a potential for a distribution deal over local TV if that doesn’t pan out,  and a further possibility of some grant money that would allow me to shoot more episodes.  The other criticism of the show is that people don’t like the films chosen in the pilot episode. Maybe having a variety of episodes in a package could help sell the idea.

On a different but similar topic.. Penny Dreadful’s Shilling Shockers is more like Dr. Film, and I’ve been studying its distribution system.  It’s more of a classic “hosted horror movie” show, without the educational component or the variety of Dr. Film.  I really like it.  It’s got a lot of heart despite the fact it’s cheap.  The only thing I don’t like about it is that they intercut their segments with awful garbage downloaded from archive.org.  I’ve come to realize that the main advantage I have with Dr. Film is that I have actual film and a knowledge of what is or isn’t public domain.  Penny is getting sponsors and selling DVDs of her shows.  It’s not on YouTube, but on local terrestrial TV, a new small-station phenomenon that is growing, along with occasional live streaming episodes. (I would have put some Penny artwork here but there were no pictures on her site that didn’t come with nasty rights warnings, so that has an impact on the kind of plugola I can give her.)

Going forward, I intend to post a 10 Questions With… highlighting one of the people at QuestionCopyright.org.  I’d love to get more of their ideas out there.  It’s a cool concept, and, again, I advocate copyright reform with every fiber in my being.  I may not go as far as they do, but that’s OK.

Will any of this affect Dr. Film?  I have no idea.  Dr. Film is the show that’s lying on the lab table with an erratic pulse, not quite dead, and not quite alive.  These are just some random ideas on trying to jump-start it.