Lion, For Adoption, Needs Good Home (or, How to Stream the Exact Same Movie in Six Different Places)

Say, did I ever tell you about my cool psychic powers?  No, really, they're awesome, I'll prove it!

Go look up your favorite independent streaming service, like Amazon Prime.  Or HuluPlus.  Or PlutoTV.  Or free Vudu Movies on Us.  Now without looking at the catalog, I'll guess which major-studio movies are on it this month:

(hominahominahomina....)

...Aha! I'm guessing that Prime or Hulu is currently showing the complete collection of 007 movies!  

And no, no wait--I'm seeing....kids cartoons!  Your service has All Dogs Go To Heaven 2, and the Care Bears Movie, and Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue!

And...I'm getting a color....pink!  Does a Pink Panther have any significance?:  A Trail?  A Curse?  A lost Son, perhaps?  And a number is coming in clear now..."1984"!--Was that a significant date, like a birthdate?  Was it your big brother?  I see you going on a long journey, with a friend, and...driving off a cliff?--Oops, sorry, that's "Thelma & Louise".  And...no, so much pain...oh, wait, that's just "Troll 2".

Okay, you got me:  It was a trick.  Whatever service you picked, they were probably all playing there.

And I'll make another guess--Right now your most immediate question is not why someone would guess them, but why four or five or six major streaming services would all happen to be showing the EXACT SAME MOVIES at the EXACT SAME TIME!

But that's not really the question to ask.  The important questions to ask are A) why those exact same movies all happen to come from the same studio, and B) why four or five or six major streaming services don't quite seem to be showing movies on a regular basis from any other studio.

If you're one of the Kids Today who grew up with streaming, it's something you probably don't notice at first. (Unless you happen to have Amazon Prime, and then, you'll happen to notice it.)
But for us old vets of three Format Wars growing up, it's a pretty common sight of the postwar reconstruction and one we've gotten used to by now--Create any new home-theater business, and the first rushers-in through the door, who don't really understand the format before trying to cash in on it, will believe that any movie is a "classic" if they can get their hands on it and sell it.  In a word, Public Domain.  It's the stuff you can sell a hundred times, and never have to pay anyone back for, because ownership troubles due to age or copyright loopholes let you use it for free. 

When studios were slow to jump onto DVD in the late 90's, but eager bottom-feeders were quick, we struggling DVD adopters could look at a box of "50 Greatest Movie Classics On three-disk set!" at Suncoast or Wal-mart, and pretty much rattle off the public-domain titles ahead of time from rote memory.  
Can I still do it?--Let's see:  (takes deep breath) A Little Princess Royal Wedding D.O.A. Charade Suddenly It's a Wonderful Life Beyond Tomorrow When the Clouds Roll By Night of the Living Dead This is the Army Carnival of Souls House On Haunted Hill Little Shop of Horrors Africa Screams Jack & the Beanstalk My Man Godfrey His Girl Friday The Lady Vanishes The 39 Steps Meet John Doe Nothing Sacred Cyrano Algiers Stage Door Canteen(exhale) Whoosh...Gimme a second.  The list's gotten longer in those last twenty years.
We learned these from sheer repetition whether we wanted to or not.  EVERY company thought they were the first to sell them, and didn't particularly care whether they weren't the only ones.  As you can expect from the title, they weren't big on restoration-for-disk either, and if you got a silent movie (which was often, especially if they put "Wizard of Oz" on the cover and hoped you wouldn't notice it was in B/W and Judy Garland wasn't in it), you were lucky if you got an organ score that fit it, or at all.  Oh, and colorized of course--Any old B/W movie is always New-to-You if it's been colorized.

Later on in 2009-10, when rumors of vapor-ware said that Netflix and Amazon were planning to invent this new Internet gizmo where you could watch movies on your cellphone or computer--just like YouTube, only with real movies!--other entrepreneurs tried to race to the start too.  Hulu, which wasn't Plus yet, rushed in its new desktop service, on a shoestring startup budget.  Betcha can't guess what most of the available new movie titles were.

Of course, once the industry got going, we started to get movies from real studios--Like MGM/UA for instance.
MGM's catalogue happens to have a lot of diverse miscellanea in it:  For one thing, they became MGM/UA when they merged with United Artists, an independent release company you might remember for vintage James Bond, the Inspector Clouseau series, most of Woody Allen's 80's post-Funny classics and Heaven's Gate.  Orion Pictures came and went during the 80's, bringing us Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Bill & Ted and Dances With Wolves, before becoming a distribution label that bought up many of the defunct little release companies, like the American International B-movies, Samuel Goldwyn's arthouse classics, and the 80's catalog of Golan & Globus's Cannon Pictures. 
That's a lot of watchable library for one holding company to own.  Be a shame if anything happened to it.

And for MGM, UA and Orion, just about anything did.  Long story short:  Sold off in the 70's, their classic 30's-60's library bought up by Ted Turner and Warner, and the new production division changing a variety of hands throughout the early 80's, to be revived as brand new labels in the 90's.  A string of disappointments in the 00's, however, and MGM finally folded in 2010, taking "Hot Tub Time Machine" on the way out with them.

That put a lot of catalog titles out of the market and up for grabs, and it's not only in the subscription streaming market that we've been seeing a lot of the hopeful grab for them:
- Digital channel ThisTV was an early-10's digital-broadcast splinter-channel that tried to revive the idea of a commercially-supported all-movie TV channel...If you didn't mind that just about every feature movie came from MGM, UA and Orion's indie-acquisition catalog.
- New "Independent label" Blu-ray disk companies like Twilight Time have been picking up the studio slack and releasing vintage catalog on physical-disk that studios had lost interest in--I was glad to finally get my hands on TT's Blu copies of "The Bounty", "Rollerball" and Woody Allen's "Love and Death", until I saw those same movies turn up on the usual streaming suspects, remembered which studios they had come from, and realized..."D'ohh!"
- Ad-supported streamer PlutoTV, trying to spin a hipster parody on Ted Turner's old holiday marathons of "A Christmas Story", last year offered its viewers the "All-day Thanksgiving 24-hour Robocop marathon".  Clever, yes, but why "Robocop"?...Take a wild guess and tell me.

There's some minor relief on the horizon, that Paramount seems to have fallen on the dustbin too:  Paramount, losing interest in releasing their 80's catalog for disk, sold the rights to Warner back in the late 00's, and no prize for guessing what Warner did with them...Which explains the sudden recent appearance of "Clue", "Clueless", "School of Rock" and "A Clear and Present Danger" among the orphanage of Usual MGM Suspects.  
It may not be a solution, but you have to appreciate the problem that if studios won't release their iron grip on their own content--content they still dream we audiences will come to their private websites and pay for, rather than own on respectable formats or enjoy in the mass media--our only hope to enjoy a new resurgence of restored bigscreen 20th-cty. mainstream-studio movies is to hope they'll all be neglected and abandoned into some wider market where people actually have access to them again, from services that don't particularly care how they show them.  Rather like the abuse they used to suffer from local TV stations, that just wanted to show them with commercials.
Obviously, that's not THE prime solution to the problem that film buffs hope will come out of this.  We're hoping for a few better options than that.

While it took the first few years for a new audience to discover the Wide, Wide World of Streaming, and make a show of spurning our expensive cable companies, it's a hard fact, but one new streaming audiences may have to come to grips with:  By the time we took the leap of falling in love with it, the movie sources had dried up, and the party was over by the time we walked in the door.  We only think we're watching the movies we want to see, when we're in fact watching the only familiar movies we can FIND.
And while it's nice to turn on a free or ad-supported streaming service on a channel-clicking evening and see them playing "Fiddler on the Roof" or "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" for being a late-60's/early-70's United Artists film, or to see "Teen Wolf", "The French Lieutenant's Woman" or Cannon Pictures' "Runaway Train" show up for being 80's MGM films, when they're the only major-studio films that start showing up every month, one might have reason to harbor suspicions that Something's Up.  

It's not so much fun enjoying them when you stop to realize that we're only getting streaming cinematic entertainment in our homes as a result of six or seven starving raccoons all diving the exact same dumpster for free goodies.

Will You Accept This Flower From the Holy Cult of FilmStruck? (or, Fury Hath No Vengeance Like a Netflix Cable-Cutter Betrayed)

And just when--like Jason Robards at the end of "A Thousand Clowns"--I'd thought I'd finally run out of things to say.

Okay, it'd been a while, and I'd been thinking of retiring from the blog--Not because an Activist ever gives up the fight (although finally losing the fight for 3DTV was a heavy blow, and I'm not being ironic about that), or because movies were getting better (although seeing "The Mummy"'s failed franchise now firmly established in industry culture as a national punchline gives us hope), or even because of laziness...Oh, like you never fell behind on a blog!  But simply because I'd thought I'd run out of Universal Truths to shout from the wilderness on street corners.  Reducing the many problems in our current movie and home-theater scape to simple explanations, how many times can you say "It's Warner's fault!", "Still trust China?", or "How desperate can Sony BE?" and not sound like a record player with its crank broken?

The good news is, things have started to change.  Even if, occasionally, during the transitions, they start changing into bad things...Or at least very, very frustrating things, that make you risk head injury with the sheer force of your facepalm, or from banging it against walls.

The good news first:  The once "No end in sight" Disk-vs-Digital War is starting to have an end in sight...And it don't look good for Digital.  Apart from the near-collapse and re-patching of the Digital-locker sales industry last summer (which is too good a story and will have to merit another column), Streaming is starting to take its lumps, too.  A boom-market that once promised every studio and every content owner could build its own private vanity streaming network, and have the world beat a path to its door, is starting to discover that it takes a lot of money to keep a bad idea going, that you only own so much content and the content you don't own is harder to license when everyone else is hopefully holding onto theirs, and that it takes even more money to create "Original programming" to try and be the Next Netflix.  Oh, and that not as many people want to pay for it as you think they will, because they only want one or two, and one of those probably IS Netflix.

Even more refreshing news is that a majority of customers, still clinging onto the 2010 idea that Netflix was a magic Wonka-factory of digitized entertainment that would bring all movies to their door, has started just awakening to the idea that that service isn't doing so hot at the moment either.  Mainstream Hollywood movies have all but vanished from the site, the service is now getting by on its "New TV network" cult of original binge-series fans, new "Exclusive movies!" from Will Smith, Adam Sandler and JJ Abrams are still perceived as "busted!" theatrical failures that got pink-slipped by the major studios in mid-production, and the updates of titles have now been permanently weed-strangled by indies, documentaries, Bollywood, and foreign TV-series imports.  The Big Red Hollywood-feed has now become a charity-bin of streaming, for poor homeless, unwanted movies that have nowhere else to go.

Now, I don't like to be the kind of person who says "I told you so"...Okay, just kidding, I LIVE for it.  But I seem to recall bringing up the point a little while ago.

Back in a column from October '16, I first brought up the warning that Netflix's offerings seemed to have fallen a bit from where they used to be, and the movies just weren't coming in anymore:  Studios, searching for a reason why digital-download sales weren't catching fire, thought that nasty one-price subscription services were stealing their business, and Big N, along with Emmy-winning Amazon Prime, were the new super-trendy rivals whose names they heard in the tech press most often.  The majors stopped licensing their big movie catalogues to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, and as the drought set in, all three animals gathered at the same watering hole of indies and public domain.  (One PD source in particular, but that's another column.)

It occurred to me to ask the fatal question:  "Netflix fans are still in love with the service to show mean old cable companies that they cut the cord...But when they have to bring themselves to cutting the Netflix cord, where will they go and who will they trust?"

Which brings us to the bad news...Okay, the frustrating news.  It's technically part of the good news, but it's still a bit frustrating at the moment.  Because it shows just how hard it is to get the basic gist of the message out, once people get caught up in working out their gut grievances:

As content owners now see more money in merging their services from minor vanity ones into major player leagues, last March, Warner pulled back from its promise to make the new FilmStruck service a collaboration of Turner Classic Movies and Criterion, folded its Warner Instant Archive service, and instead merged the obscure and classic Hollywood titles from their streaming Instant Archive catalog in with the arthouse classics of Criterion--Now making FilmStruck a service where you could watch Kurosawa and Bergman AND "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Rebel Without a Cause".  Gotta admit, that was a pretty sweet deal:  The only two streaming services left worth watching, in one place...Why go anywhere else?  It represented the positive future of the streaming industry:  Titans who owned their own content, and could never be starved out by the big boys because they were the big boys, should join together, instead of scrabbling for little pieces of territory.  The problem, as is starting to become apparent, is that it turned out to be TOO good a deal.

Now, as the Frugal Gourmet used to say, please don't write in--I like FilmStruck.  I even said so, back in November '16, when the service first premiered, that having a source for actual movies would be a new source for people to start that home correspondence film-study course.  I'd like it a lot better if it had working streaming apps for my Roku or Playstation, and I could watch the classics in my living room instead of on my iPad, but it's a start.

But what happens when a lot of less discerning and more unexpectedly stranded Netflix refugees suddenly stumbled upon the combined Elephant's Graveyard and King Solomon's Mines, where all the classic movies went to when they disappeared so mysteriously over the last six years?  They get a little overexcited.

I'll let a flood of adoring posts to Filmstruck's Twitter channel to do the talking--If anyone feels their privacy violated, tell me, and I'll replace it with another quoted Tweet, there's PLENTY to choose from:

Now, as an experienced film buff, there are some words to describe this sudden mass reaction--"Yeeesh!" is the first one that springs to mind.  It's nice to see people Tweeting about their favorite film-class movie--Even if it seems eerily like a de-evolutionary throwback to the dark 70's days when only a small cult of urban intelligencia at revival theaters talked about great movies while the common people were stuck with TV.  But when each and every Tweet personalizes the adoration with "Thank you, FilmStruck!" it brings up the question of how many people had seen these movies before the Nice People brought it to them.  Remember when you were that innocent freshman girl with that first dreamy crush on that free-thinking college professor who first taught you so much about how to see the world?  (Well, I don't, obviously, but...)

Another is "D'ohh!!", for those on the Disk vs. Digital battlefront, who hoped that the Starvation of Streaming would finally drive people to more and more desperate means to find their movies, and spark them to realize if they weren't on streaming, maybe they should give into that new wave of 90's nostalgia for the long-gone corner Blockbuster Video, and go out and find a movie on physical disk again?--Nope, they just stopped online-bingeing Netflix, and went off to online-binge their next new craze.  As Maria says, "How else?" indeed?  Something that, scoff, wasn't on the Internet?

But rather than shake our heads at adoring sycophancy, we should be a little more scared where it's coming from:  People aren't thanking FilmStruck for giving them their movies back...They're thanking FilmStruck for "teaching" them.  They're thanking them for personally making them the better, smarter, more culturally-enriched people they weren't before they started streaming.  

It's one thing for a once Netflix-obsessed fandom to make a great show of tossing over their previous love, shouting "Give us Barabbas!", and making an even bigger show of their new love that solved the problems of the old ones.  It's another thing when audiences stop thinking of the service as entertainment, and start thinking of it as a life-hack.

It's the same saying about religion, that any church will help you find answers in your life, until you start believing that the one church you found, and the wise folks behind it, will provide you with all the answers you were searching for, because you were too lost and unworthy to find them yourself...Because that's when it officially becomes a Cult.  And historically, bad things have happened when Cults show up.

In fact, it's a good thing nobody likely is reading this blog anyway.  If it were, I'd be drowned within minutes by a flood of Butthurt, from folks who believed I was not only speaking bad things against FilmStruck, but that I was implying they were bad people personally for embracing the new awakening it provided their lives with.  If I tried to point out that every single Criterion movie, and many of the Warner Instant Archive titles, were already available on Blu-ray and DVD disk, were for sale at cut prices on Amazon to own forever, probably were already on the shelf at your local public-library system for a free one-week rental, and had been since long before the service even existed, I'd be deluged with posts shouting "You're just a digital hater!  What's the matter, grandpa, still love 'dying' disks, and can't handle the new riches that streaming has brought us?  Go back to your network TV and those cable pirates, we'll watch the good stuff!"  After all, the rule of a cult is, you can speak against the church, but how dare you speak against the beneficent ideals of its founder?  Remember when Ringo Starr was chased all over London by that crazed "Kailiii!" cult trying to kill him in the Beatles' "Help"?--He had it easy.

But that's not it at all, y'see...I'm all for the idea.  I like the merger of two big studios into a big-label player instead of two little greedy delusional ones, and I look forward to--WHERE THE HELL IS THAT PS4 APP, FS, IT'S BEEN TWO FREAKIN' YEARS!!--er, ahem, I mean, I look forward to having more of it available to stream, now that many of Warner's key vintage catalogues, like Fred & Ginger and Val Lewton, now have a home with the Archive half of the collection.

But I know that because I've been pursuing my love of old movies for years.  I knew where to find it by looking for it.  I didn't wait for someone to be saintly enough to bring it to me, I just gave it a grateful nod of good sense that someone got over the whole industry foolishness and found a way to.

Are you, like H. Perry Horton, Maria and Miguel, tearing up in grateful awe that someone brought classic movies to your living room?  At the risk of sounding like Captain Planet, the power to search out classic movies was in YOU.  It was all around you, in those shiny silver things an entire industry tried to tell you didn't matter anymore, because there were so many new things your remote could find.  They never left you all these years, even when you left them, and then your new love left you.  They were still there, because that's the one function they were built to do.

And at the even greater risk of sounding like Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, you had the power to find those lost movies all along.  All you had to do was click your heels three times, get off your seat and onto said heels, and say "There's no place like Blu-ray...There's no place like Physical...There's no place like the Library..."  And then if you ever go looking for your heart's movie classic again, you'll never have to look further than your own backyard.  Because if it wasn't there, you probably never lost it to begin with.  (Or, well, something like that.)

I'm not accusing anyone of deliberately fostering a cult-of-personality with brainwashing, salutes, armbands or red baseball caps, I'm just pointing out the dangers of what happens when they find themselves stuck with one anyway, whether they like one or not.  Intentional cults are evil, yes, but UN-intententional cults are ten times more scary, because nobody can claim they're doing anything wrong.

It's an important thing to tell someone lost that they had the power and the individuality to find their own answers all along, if they just dared themselves to go and look for them.   Because it's one of the first things deprogrammers used to tell confused kids who were in danger of the more familiar kinds of cults that claimed they had all the answers in one easy place.  And which promised to make them new people if they would just turn and reject all those things in their old lives they were so confused and angry about.