TCM – Dr. Film’s Blog & Marketplace

Cinema at a Crossroads

I think we’re seeing the death of classic cinema. I really do. You’ve heard me rant about this before. We’re seeing that the only 5 great films that everyone wants to see are Casablanca, Singin’ in the Rain, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, and Wizard of Oz. After that, the Godfather films are OK, and then Cinema begins with Star Wars.

I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t know what can be done. One of the main arguments, which I absolutely hate, is that these movies are no longer culturally relevant and are such relics of the past that they should no longer be seen, because no one cares. Nor should they care. The 5 movies listed above (I refer to them as the Holy Quintet) are exceptions because they have passed the cultural litmus test of history.

I hate that. I know I said that, but I wanted to accentuate that I hate it.

You can argue that TCM keeps cinema alive, and to an extent, they do. But they only keep some cinema alive, and they only have 24 hours a day. I have also complained, with some validity, that they show Casablanca too much, whereas they could show a lot of other stuff and do classic cinema a lot more service.

But then if I owned Casablanca, I’d show it a lot, too. It’s a fine picture, but it’s got to bear the burden of representing most films made before 1977.

There’s a vast array of silents (TCM only shows silents 4 times a month, at midnight on Sundays), B pictures, cartoons, serials, short comedies, and such that never get seen. That never will be seen. Stuff that’s fun, entertaining, and would even, dare I say it, “educate” people. The collectors have some, the archives have some, and the studios have some.

There’s always archive.org. I don’t like it. 90% of it is junk with terrible compression rates and bad quality. It fosters the idea that all old movies look bad. Then there’s YouTube, which, well, is pretty much the same. That’s not to mention the fact that piracy on both sites is rampant. I had to alert Kino to a site that was bootlegging Seven Chances with Bruce Lawton’s commentary and my color restoration on it. YouTube took it down, but the same guy got a new address and put it right back up. He put ads in it.

But it’s free!

Netflix isn’t the answer. Why? Because increasingly it takes movies (and I mean even recent ones) off the server and replaces them with binge-watching TV shows. They started off kinda cool, but died away quickly.

I had a lot of hope for Filmstruck (and, full disclosure, I was working on a deal to supply them with some silents and other materials), but AT&T killed it. Why? It wasn’t making enough money. (And, yes, that means that the deal is off.)

You see, no one sees classic films.

So no one watches classic films.

So no one buys Filmstruck.

So AT&T cancels it.

The saving grace about TCM is that it was stipulated in the sale to Warners that TCM had to stay on the air as a commercial-free classic film network. And that keeps it on.

This is causing me to want to ramp up a service that I’ve wanted to do for some years. I think of it as a public service, because it would provide a venue for NON-SUCKY transfers of films that TCM doesn’t show, which, let’s be honest, is about 80% of everything.

And I know you’ve heard me talk about this before, too. But I back-burnered it because I was busy with other projects, like Little Orphant Annie and King of the Kongo and the Milan High School games.

TCM has kind of the right idea with its educational program advocating The Essentials (again, full disclosure: I don’t have cable, but I travel extensively [I have a collection of half-used hotel soaps to prove it] so I see them on the road fairly often.) But I see TCM as almost a graduate-school of film with the very top echelon of films. They don’t offer a lot of things that people don’t know anymore.

What were the major studios? What’s a cartoon? What’s a serial? How were they shown? Why did these get made? When did color start? Did silents always have music? These are questions that people ask constantly.

How do I know? I hear these questions all the time. People are interested. I’d love to have a streaming service that housed forums where historians talked about things like this. It’s not out there. It’s going away.

I used to complain that when I worked at classic film houses, they would run all fifties all the time. Then, the boomers got old and stopped coming, and we skipped the 60s and 70s, so it’s all 80s all the time. One place I know shows Ferris Bueller and The Goonies several times a year. They say it’s “hipster-friendly.” But the hipsters don’t know any older films, so why the heck would they come to see them? A lot of them don’t have cable, and so they only see bad quality on YouTube, if they even have knowledge enough to search for it.

I would have started my streaming service a couple of years ago, but I had another problem. I do a lot of tech, but I can’t do it all myself, and I have a tech guy who needs paid. I have a grant writer who is trying to move into other things and won’t return my calls or emails, so basically I have to find another grant writer or be rude and obnoxious to the one I have.

This project is too big for just me; I’d love to have it as a cooperative among film collectors, archives and even studios that will play nice (accent on the play nice.)

But I need $ to get it going, and it’s a chunk too big for Kickstarter. I’d like this to be a public interest 501c3, because, increasingly, I believe that classic film is being culturally neglected and needs a champion out there to make it accessible. I’d like to have a free section and a paid downloads section.

Actually I have a pretty detailed plan for it, if I could just get anyone to care. I’m notoriously bad at marketing (as I’ve pointed out many times), but I really think we’re at a time when culturally we NEED something like this.

Or else it will go away. Like Filmstruck did.

Anyone got any ideas? Let me know. My email is up at top, and the comments will be open for a while, plus you can always start a discussion in the Dr. Film group.

I have a lot of failed, or to put it charitably, incompletely successful projects (if you don’t believe me, I have 400 copies of Little Orphant Annie to sell you), but I don’t want this to be one of them.

One Year Later and the Dust Settles

Last year, on this very night, I was writing a really cool gag post on London After Midnight. I knew it would be a perfect thing to post for April Fools Day. This is also Lon Chaney’s Birthday…

I cooked up an elaborate fraud and posted it, neither the first nor the last of such things, and I made it really sound believable. That was the problem, I guess.

It wasn’t the first one of these I’d done. I always posted something cool on the old alt.movies.silent newsgroup, but that’s now been overtaken with spam and endless posts about whether Irving Thalberg was the spawn of satan (I kid you not on that last piece… I gave up on it after about 20 of those.)

I’d never done London After Midnight because it’s so obviously bogus, but I had a couple of nice pictures and a good lie cooked up, and what fun it is for April 1st.

To add to the fun, and make it clear that this was a joke, I added a news item about the Dr. Film show being picked up by TCM. If you follow the blog and the site at all, then you know that this is something that is likely never going to happen, and that was the whole joke of it.

Well, the TCM message boards got hold of it, and they went nuts. I got emails from all over the world, my readership skyrocketed (only for a day, mind you), and people told me that I was the spawn of satan (and here I thought it was Irving Thalberg.)

Of course, I didn’t post it to the TCM board, and I wasn’t even a member. I had to become a member to post a response to my lambasting. It was generally felt that I was trying to get publicity for a weak and/or failed web site and that this was going to put me on the map.

Genius idea… wish I’d thought of it. Didn’t work anyway.

The net result was that my blog posts have gained some traction, but only later in the year, I still get an occasional nastygram from someone on the TCM message boards (which I can’t do anything about), and Dr. Film didn’t get any more recognition than it had ever received… and that was pretty minimal from the start.

Oh, yeah, there’s one more upshot. There’s going to be no April Fool joke this year. I can’t stand the noise. I had a good one, too.

Last year’s blog:
HERE

And the firestorm from the TCM board (again from last year… note that this is reverse chronological order from newest to oldest.)
TCM HERE

Will the April Fool return next year? I’m not sure yet, but I wouldn’t count on it!

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!

Why Ted Turner is Cool

Ted Turner has, at least in the eyes of film fans, perhaps the worst reputation of any living person. The commonplace idea that I hear from fans is that he is assured of a place in Film Purgatory for his colorization efforts and that he only really deserves praise for Turner Classic Movies, which was something he didn’t care about very much.

Bunk, I say. Bunk.

Let me address a minor sticking point here: some of my dear readers may say that since I’d like to sell my pilot for Dr. Film to Turner Classic Movies, then I probably am giving a suspect opinion so that I can butter up a potential buyer. Again, not so. Ted is long gone from any active position at Turner Classic Movies, and I’ve been singing Ted’s praises for years, far before Dr. Film was even a gleam in my splicing block.

Ted may be the single greatest contributor to film preservation in the history of the 20th Century. He’s certainly in the top 10. Don’t believe me still? Here’s why:

MGM has had a troubled history since the late 1950s; they had a big sale of their studio memorabilia as early as 1970 and they were bought and sold and bought and sold and bought and sold (I think that’s actually the right number.) At a particularly low point in 1986, Ted bought MGM—the entire studio, films, buildings, everything… lock, stock, and barrel. People said he was crazy.

That wasn’t the first time. Turner bought a floundering TV station in 1970, renamed it WTCG. It was still broadcasting in black and white, so he held a telethon to raise money to get color equipment. He sold bumper stickers and sold ad time cheaply just to keep cash flowing. People said he was crazy.

He was one of the first people to buy space on one of those giant, old-fashioned satellites. These are the ones that used to litter the countryside at every hotel with a FREE HBO sign. But Turner’s station was just up there for free, not some premium channel. He generated his money from ads. People said he was crazy.

Turner dreamed of having a media empire, and he had only a measly UHF TV station and a space on a satellite. He renamed his station WTBS, nicknamed it the Super Station, and then set his sights on another goal.

He started another station, this time on satellite only, and called it CNN. It was a 24-hour news channel. Everyone said he was crazy. There wasn’t enough news for a 24-hour cycle, they said, and tiny Atlanta, Georgia was too remote from the hubs of the universe (Los Angeles and New York) to get any decent news coverage. I remember people making fun of him.

In the late 1980s, with CNN a success, Turner fought for squeezed space on the large satellites and got another station on the air: TNT. He did every deal he could with as many carriers as he could to get it on the air. People said he was crazy.

But I jump ahead of myself. Remember I said that Turner wanted a media empire? He dreamed of owning a movie studio and making his own movies. In 1986, with MGM in the doldrums, having merged with United Artists, also in the doldrums, underwater with debt from films that failed to make money, Turner thought it might be a good chance to buy the studio.

It didn’t work out. Many people claim that Turner was acting as a corporate raider, just cherry-picking the items he wanted from the studio, but I tend to believe that Turner hoped to maintain the studio as it had been. For whatever reason, Turner and his investors sold off the studio and its assets one by one, except for one item: MGM’s film library.

In the mid-80s, with one station, and another planned, it made sense for Turner to have access to a large film library, and MGM had it: the entire Warners library pre-1948; the entire MGM library to 1986, and the entire RKO library. All of this material was deemed worthless by most experts. It had been played to death on local television over a period of 30 years. There was no real home video market for any but a few titles.

Amazingly, Turner did what no one else would do. He poured money into preservation. New 35mm prints were made for distribution to theaters. MGM’s restoration efforts, which had started years earlier, were stepped up and enhanced. Turner entered the home video market, even the laserdisc market, which was just starting. Anything that even had a chance of selling was issued.

When TNT (Turner Network Television) launched in 1988, Ted scheduled it full of films that hadn’t been seen in years. They were all transferred from beautiful 35mm prints. That lasted until he found he could make more money with newer material, so the movies got forced out. Those were great days at TNT, though, because there were movies shown there that have rarely been screened since. In the early days of the channel, everything was fair game.

There was a channel dedicated to older films at the time, and that was American Movie Classics (AMC). They even had a long-term lease on the RKO package that eventually expired and reverted to Turner. In those days, AMC was commercial-free, its fees paid by the cable companies who carried it. Turner started Turner Classic Movies in 1994 following AMC’s model. He also made sure that anyone picking up TCM had to pick up WTBS and TNT as well, guaranteeing that he’d have some extra income from the movies.

Ted felt that the best thing he could do was treat his investment with respect so that he could make as much money off it as he could. I say more power to him. Some people look at classic film as some supreme royal sacrifice, something that one does just for art’s sake. Turner did it and made it pay. And he made it pay the right way. Restoration, video availability, cable showings, 35mm booking prints.

We only need look to the example set by Hallmark recently for the other end of the spectrum. They purchased the Hal Roach back library, rather unenthusiastically, as a tax loss investment. They were begged to release Laurel and Hardy films, maybe some Charley Chase titles. SOMETHING. Eventually, Turner Classic Movies got a package out of them. Hallmark couldn’t be bothered to look through what they had. They didn’t care, and the materials languished. Thank heaven UCLA now has all of it and is giving it the care it deserves. The problem is that this stuff could have made them money–maybe not a lot, but some.

OK, I avoided talking about colorization, but here goes. I hate it, I’ve always hated it. It looks fake. Turner’s pushing it was obnoxious, and I didn’t like it. I never saw a single picture that looked better with it, although I’d nominate the nasty color version of King Kong as the worst one. That being said, it’s an interesting technical experiment.

I’ve always rather suspected that Turner never really wanted to change the world with colorization, but only to get some publicity with the idea. After all, boring old movies never get any press, and he sure got it. He ruffled feathers in the process, but that never bothered him.

Eventually, he even got a chance to make his own movies, and they’ve gotten a fair amount of respect. Maybe he was right the whole time about needing a studio.

(As an aside: you want loyalty to friends? Ted’s your man. Anchorman Bill Tush [with a short u] started with Turner in the WTCG days. He stayed as a news anchor until Ted gave him a weekly show in 1980, a groundbreaking original comedy. When that didn’t gel, Tush got a cushy job at CNN that lasted for many years. Ted takes care of his friends.)

Having accomplished what he set out to do–creating a media empire–Turner sold his stock to Time Warner and cashed out. Turner, for all his flamboyant crazy behavior, seemed to run his stations more efficiently than the conglomerate does. The crown jewel in the collection is probably still Turner Classic Movies, which showcases classic movies from most of the major studios. I love the irony that Warner Brothers bought back their own, “worthless,” catalog of films when they bought Turner Broadcasting. Who’s really crazy?

Turner strikes me as somewhat of a throwback to the brazen showman/marketer types like Merian C. Cooper in the 1930s. Turner had a vision, and was going to pursue it. He was loyal, but anyone who criticized him could be stepped on. Quality was paramount. Even if it was pro wrestling, he wanted it done well.

We could use a few more people like that. Viva Ted.