Rewind This! Page #10

corporation, you know,

is made up of lovely people,

but that whole idea of

The Disney Vault,

"We're putting The Lion King

back in the Disney Video Vault

so you can't buy it again

for a while."

It's a completely artificial

sense of scarcity,

designed to create a completely

artificial sense of demand.

Studios are now

completely dominating

what is available to you.

And they are completely in

control of what you can have.

And they can give that to you

and they can take that away,

like a malevolent god.

It infuriates me. The notion of

somebody else having control

over my access to media in

general bothers me.

When I read the story

about the Kindle

and how all the people who

had purchased,

it couldn't have been

a more ironic title,

George Orwell's 1984,

woke up one morning, because of

a licensing disagreement,

it was gone. It just wasn't

on their Kindle anymore.

That's terrifying.

That is absolutely not

in the spirit of

purchasing something.

That word becomes

meaningless at that point.

You don't purchase

digital media. You rent it.

And it's at their pleasure.

The reality is all physical

media is going away. All of it.

On a business standpoint, if it

takes off, it'll be good for us,

because we won't

have manufacturing.

We won't have to do all those

extras and the supplements,

and the interviews,

and the documentaries

and the paper labeling,

and the shipping.

So you think about it, and it

sounds like a great idea.

But then, it kinda goes against

what I like.

And, you know, collecting.

With Netflix, with torrenting,

it's hard to want to go out

to a video store.

Like its hard

for me at this point.

I don't really go to the video store

as much as I'd like to anymore.

This is where we keep

most of our video tapes.

Sadly, I had to, the other day,

move them all

to make room for Blu-Ray...

boo ray.

If DVD was a short lifespan,

Blu-Ray's gonna be, like,

gone before you know it.

Honestly the primary reason

to keep something physical

is nostalgia.

We'll continue to put out

physical media

until the plants close.

My 18, 19 year old students,

who love film,

are passionate about film,

seem to have no interest

in having a video collection.

You can't begrudge

this generation

not wanting to collect this,

because it's too accessible.

It seems to be splitting

down the middle,

to people who are going to go

to the ends of the earth

to keep the old stuff,

the old ways.

And then it's the other side

that are just-

they don't want

anything anymore.

It's gotta be non-physical media

that they can keep

on a hard drive

or just have it streamed to 'em

and forget about it.

And then the other guys that are

going to build a shrine.

I have more than enough to keep

me busy for 10,000 lifetimes.

Um, for future generations,

I don't give a f***

about those people.

I love streaming

as a technology...

I'm gonna hang on to my DVDs,

I'm gonna hang on to

my Blu-Rays.

Just as as much as I love

iTunes and Spotify,

I still have a record player,

because I like it.

People stopped buying video

as soon as the content

was cheaper

and even easier to consume.

And then we found out that

the masses don't care

about bonus features

or optimum quality.

It's only the collector market

that does.

Netflix Instant is a

really important step

towards what the studios want.

And I think what you'll

eventually do is

you'll have a pipe

that comes into your house,

and you will subscribe to

whichever libraries you want.

The MGM library,

the Warner Brothers library,

the Sony library.

That's where we're headed,

we're headed towards...

no money on their end,

in terms of physical units.

I mean, I imagine it's just all

gonna be on access eventually.

Well technically, it already is,

but people some people

don't wanna admit it.

We're talking about VHS, but I

only have video tapes

because that's the way that

I can find that movie.

And if that came out

in a different manner,

like, if that was available on a

DVD, or only on Blu-Ray,

I'd watch it.

I mean now that I'm a

film programmer,

I'm more aware there's films

where the filmmaker doesn't have

any other materials.

So essentially, until somebody

finds a negative, finds a print,

the best source in the world

is a VHS.

Which is a little scary.

Video preservation is the

nightmare in the closet

that no one is talking about.

Everybody likes to talk about

film preservation.

Martin Scorsese is out there,

you know,

proclaiming the love of film

and all this,

but in actual fact,

everybody knows that in

Scorsese's back closet

he's got a lot of videos

that are just a hot mess.

I think that most people

that really started collecting

in the 80's

are probably going to see,

at least,

two out of ten tapes begin now,

30 years on, 20 years on,

to really not be playable.

And maybe that's one of the

reasons

that nostalgia for video is

going to be so

incredibly poignant,

I think, going forward,

is that we're gonna have such a

great, great statistic of loss.

It seems like

with each iteration

in home video technology

we lose a chunk of the library

of amazing films

that are out there.

I don't understand

how people can ignore VHS

because there's such a huge,

huge percentage of movies

that never came out

any other way.

So if you're even, like,

a casual fan of movies at all,

you should have a VCR.

You should be actively

watching stuff on VHS.

There are hundreds of

thousands of thousands of movies

that never made the jump to DVD.

Think that the fact that

it never jumped to DVD

that they were poor quality

to begin with.

No matter what genre of

film you're interested in,

you're going to find things

that are only on VHS

within that realm of interest.

So if you like silent film,

there's gonna be some

obscure Russian short

that's only on some tape on

a back shelf of a video store.

If you like 80's comedies,

there's gonna be

hundreds and hundreds

of just the most ridiculous

boner jams

that you can only watch on tape.

To select what you love

by it's format...

cuts you off from something that

you might enjoy...

more than anything you've ever

seen in your entire life.

I think that stuff is the-

stands outside of my objections.

That's very important

that there is a document

of all those countless hours

of rare stuff.

In any form whatsoever...

even VHS.

When it struck us that

other people could have fun

watching movies

that were only on video,

we started Video Hate Squad.

And we had our first show,

and we got the

whole audience there,

we have a VCR on the stage

so we always put the tape in the

VCR in front of the audience

so they're all

part of that moment.

Even better than that,

is that all over the world,

there's other people

that did the same thing

at the same time,

'cause there's this kind of

a zeitgeist

where people are realizing,

"Hey, there's a lot of value

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