{"id":801,"date":"2018-11-02T12:27:55","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T16:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=801"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:13:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:13:38","slug":"cinema-at-a-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=801","title":{"rendered":"Cinema at a Crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think we\u2019re seeing the death of classic cinema. I really do. You\u2019ve heard me rant about this before. We\u2019re seeing that the only 5 great films that everyone wants to see are Casablanca<\/em>, Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/em>, Gone With the Wind<\/em>, Citizen Kane<\/em>, and Wizard of Oz<\/em>. After that, the Godfather films are OK, and then Cinema begins with Star Wars<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what to do about this. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

I hate that.\u00a0 I know I said that, but I wanted to accentuate that I hate it.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> too much, whereas they could show a lot of other stuff and do classic cinema a lot more service.<\/p>\n

But then if I owned Casablanca<\/em>, I\u2019d show it a lot, too. It\u2019s a fine picture, but it\u2019s got to bear the burden of representing most films made before 1977.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2019s fun, entertaining, and would even, dare I say it, \u201ceducate\u201d people. The collectors have some, the archives have some, and the studios have some.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always archive.org. I don\u2019t 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\u2019s YouTube, which, well, is pretty much the same. That\u2019s 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<\/em> with Bruce Lawton\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s free!<\/p>\n

Netflix isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t making enough money. (And, yes, that means that the deal is off.)<\/p>\n

You see, no one sees classic films.<\/p>\n

So no one watches classic films.<\/p>\n

So no one buys Filmstruck.<\/p>\n

So AT&T cancels it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is causing me to want to ramp up a service that I\u2019ve 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\u2019t show, which, let\u2019s be honest, is about 80% of everything.<\/p>\n

And I know you\u2019ve heard me talk about this before, too. But I back-burnered it because I was busy with other projects, like Little Orphant Annie<\/em> and King of the Kongo<\/em> and the Milan High School games.<\/p>\n

TCM has kind of the right idea with its educational program advocating The Essentials (again, full disclosure: I don\u2019t 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\u2019t offer a lot of things that people don\u2019t know anymore.<\/p>\n

What were the major studios? What\u2019s a cartoon? What\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

How do I know? I hear these questions all the time. People are interested. I\u2019d love to have a streaming service that housed forums where historians talked about things like this. It\u2019s not out there. It\u2019s going away.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s all 80s all the time. One place I know shows Ferris Bueller<\/em> and The Goonies<\/em> several times a year. They say it\u2019s \u201chipster-friendly.\u201d But the hipsters don\u2019t know any older films, so why the heck would they come to see them? A lot of them don\u2019t have cable, and so they only see bad quality on YouTube, if they even have knowledge enough to search for it.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019t return my calls or emails, so basically I have to find another grant writer or be rude and obnoxious to the one I have.<\/p>\n

This project is too big for just me; I\u2019d love to have it as a cooperative among film collectors, archives and even studios that will play nice (accent on the play nice.)<\/p>\n

But I need $ to get it going, and it\u2019s a chunk too big for Kickstarter. I\u2019d 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\u2019d like to have a free section and a paid downloads section.<\/p>\n

Actually I have a pretty detailed plan for it, if I could just get anyone to care. I\u2019m notoriously bad at marketing (as I\u2019ve pointed out many times), but I really think we\u2019re at a time when culturally we NEED something like this.<\/p>\n

Or else it will go away. Like Filmstruck did.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I have a lot of failed, or to put it charitably, incompletely successful projects (if you don\u2019t believe me, I have 400 copies of Little Orphant Annie<\/em> to sell you), but I don\u2019t want this to be one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think we\u2019re seeing the death of classic cinema. I really do. You\u2019ve heard me rant about this before. We\u2019re seeing that the only 5 great films that everyone wants to see are Casablanca, Singin\u2019 in the Rain, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, and Wizard of Oz. After that, the Godfather films are OK, … Continue reading “Cinema at a Crossroads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,207],"tags":[192,62,191,154,18],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-films-pocket-rants","category-film","tag-att","tag-classic-film","tag-filmstruck","tag-streaming","tag-tcm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":806,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions\/806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}