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.

Back-to-School Edition: Why Won't Johnny Watch B&W?

Okay, so I had to take the summer off.  Even activists need a little inactivity.

Came back to find the "China" thing had mercifully cooled a bit, now that Wolf Warrior 2 had suddenly scared the crap out of every studio in town over August ("Uh-oh, they, uh, like their own movies now?"), and more and more brave souls were coming forward, like Bill W., and forcing themselves to admit that, okay, maybe Tom Cruise in "The Mummy"'s new Dark Universe did actually ffff.....f-f-f-f-fffffffff.....flop. 

And picking on Sony taking their big one-two summer punch with "The Emoji Movie" and "Valerian", leading to an analysis of why Sony now seems to be beating Fox as the new failed-franchise Sad-Sack studio still running to keep up with the Big Five's joneses (the one hit they had last summer didn't even belong to them anymore!), just seemed like kicking it while it was down.  At some point, the discussion would have led to mentioning Ghostbusters again, and, well.  Bury the dead, or at least wait till after the Jumanji movie.

But, to quote the elder Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in again--A new headline hit the movie discussion forums over August.  And just in time for the kids going back to school.

If you're wondering about the title, it's taking its play from Rudolph Flesch's 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read, a bold manifesto that showed teachers and educators that kids weren't learning to read because they weren't being shown any reason why reading was interesting--The use of recognize-and-repeat in "See Spot run. Run, Spot, run" (rather than learning the basic "C-at" phonics that the Electric Company taught us) made learning to read a droning chore, and kids were falling behind in their verbal scores.  Among Flesch's new ideas, what if we had more intuitive beginning-level easy-readers that were fun reads for kids to show more enthusiasm learning on?...Say, maybe that funny Dr. Seuss fella from the Bartholomew Cubbins books could try writing a few "cat" and "hat" books for first-graders!

And new literacy in the last half of the 20th century was born.  But now the 21st century is facing a new kind of illiteracy:  Kids who didn't read books in the 50's were never half as openly, combatively, or stubbornly martyr-complexed or smug as 18-24 yo.'s--the dreaded "Millennial generation"--who claim they've never watched an old classic film in their lives.

According to an unscientific survey conducted by FYE media-store chains last August--maybe not Nielsen, perhaps, but it got the discussions started across the net--conducted between 1000 over-50 movie fans and Millennial 18-24 fans, the results weren't promising:
"Millennials Don't Really Care About Classic Movies", NY Post, 8/16/17

- 30% of the young audience polled had never seen a movie from the Black & white era.
- 20% said they feared one would be "boring"
- Only 28% said they had ever seen Casablanca, 16% said they had ever seen Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West", and only 12% had seen Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window".
-The most classic movies the young audience had claimed to have seen were those their own theater/DVD experience personally remembered from the 90's and 00's, including The Matrix, The Dark Knight and Return of the King, with, of course, Disney's "The Lion King" for most-seen "classic" film.
(C'mon, you're going to worship Quentin Tarantino, and you've never seen an actual real-life Leone film?  And no Rear Window?...Seriously??  I knew the plot at ten years old, from a Flintstones cartoon!)

The discussion so far, on most news and film forums, has gone in the usual directions:
The older folk shake their head, the younger folk protest "Don't stereotype us!", and then fall back on asking what's so great about the movies they "should" watch, anyway.
This seems to be the main stumbling block that's been the hardest to overcome:  How do you sell an audience, of whom less than half has ever actually seen "The Sound of Music", on the idea that maybe Terminator 2: Judgment Day might not be one of the Ten Greatest American Movies Ever Made?  (Although I'll grant that Back to the Future may be high on the list.)
The issue is the same as putting a book in the hand of a grudging fourth-grader who won't read anything else after Harry Potter:  Don't lecture them that they're not reading.  Find out why they're not reading...And put something within reach just different enough to show them why they were wrong.  And then, of course, gloat later.

To this end, it would first probably help to take on the Millennial's main arguments against having their parents' classic movies forced upon them--or "Pre-1970 movies", as the term has now come to call them (because pop-culture didn't exist before the 70's, of course), point by point:

1.  "But I don't WANNA watch Citizen Kane!"  Well...you don't have to, y'know.  No one's forcing you to--And that seems to be the main perception at the very top of Millennial's fear-list:  That embarking on a self-help kick for watching Old Movies(tm) will become the same punishing highbrow foreign/classic syllabus as the Film majors.  Engage in any film-stubborn debate with the right age, and wait for the K-word to appear as the big demonic straw-elephant in the room.

Keep in mind, if you're at the age where you're in college, just come out of college, or either way just made it through high school, you've been actually forced, at various points in the recent last years of your life, to read Julius Caesar, 1984, Pride & Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, and at least one Franz Kafka or James Joyce novel, without the clarity or courtesy of being told WHY you should.  Beyond a make-or-break term paper where you're presumed to suddenly have the same enlightened analysis of the book on first read that hundreds of literary critics before you have expounded upon.

And then, when those same Grown-Ups tell you you haven't watched very many "great films" made before your birthday, what's the first one they tell you to respect, watch and analyze?--Or at least the first one you're afraid they will?  Like your high school Lit class, your first worry is "Does this Famous Book have a plot, so I'll have something to take my mind off my assignment while I'm reading it?"

Here, don't worry, you're clear:  This one passes the "Things actually happen in it" test, and, one might add, with flying colors B&W.

Y'know...there's nothing WRONG with Citizen Kane.  Do a lot of pundits commanding you from on high to be amazed by the first use of "bold cinematography and editing" in the 40's just somehow, in some way, not excite you?  Try Orson Welles' character instead.  In telling a non-linear fictional story of William Randolph Hearst--of whom to say was "the Rupert Murdoch of his day" would be putting it mildly--Herman Mankiewicz's script, mixed with Welles' own smooth, literate sardonic-velvet from his post-radio bad-boy days, fairly drips with acidic irony:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhb3U2cONs  There's a very good, and very deserved reason the real Hearst took the movie so personally.

If the idea of watching a 40's film avengingly analyzing the rise and big ironic fall of an egotistic but ultimately insecure self-styled tycoon, who believed he could personally manipulate the world around him "like a modern feudal baron" for its own good, sounds a little, um, familiar right now, well, it should.  A lot familiar.  Even if you've never heard of Patty Hearst's Granddad, but you've heard of Ivanka's Dad.

And, yes, it's got a lot of those neat cinematography shots, editing, and set ceilings that all the fancy people talk about, if you're into that.  What you may instead be surprised by is just how darn good it is by the last reel...An experience you may or may not have probably already had in Lit class with Dickens or Orwell.

And as for going on to "snooty" critics' "overpraised" great-film-syllabus recommendations of Vertigo or The Seven Samurai...heheh.  Why is this expert smiling nastily?

(But don't worry, even I won't make you watch Death playing chess in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", if that's what your imagination's also afraid of.  This isn't college and you don't have to agree with anyone older than you, but you're still not going to get anything over a C- if you didn't do a little homework before the lecture.)

2.  "They made movies in B&W because they didn't HAVE color back then!" - Well, that's certainly a profound observation.  But when Millennials use it as a reason not to watch B&W, it's more of a social criticism.  It's a weapon used by the belief that only people of a certain age were able to master the technology of the late 90's and 21st century, and those who didn't just couldn't get into the big Pirate Treehouse Club.  Apparently, B&W films existed simply because older people's eyes were different way back then, and couldn't see color like we can today...Sort of like dogs.

It's a reason used to say that the movies that are readily available at hand--the overexposed studio-marketed 80's classics and current blockbusters--are easier to watch than those that take effort and film knowledge to track down, so watch in amazement as I download last summer's hit on my smartphone!  Wow, you've got Disney's live-action Beauty & the Beast, right there in your hand!...It's magic OUR generation never had!

The problem, however, is one that's frequently brought up with remakes--Particularly the remakes of old films the same audience actually is sentimental for.  Movies that had genre coolness, but were "handicapped" by the fact that they couldn't use CGI, or faster editing, or that Sean Connery's 007 couldn't do the same wild stunts that Jason Bourne could.

There's a love/hate relationship, in that admitting that old films had great appeal, and how wonderful it must have been for an earlier generation to see 80's films, or even 30's films, in theaters, as good...But not as good as WE could make them today if we tried!  And then when they do, they discover it was a lot harder for somebody else, who was good enough to make it look too easy.

This brings up the old observation that anything you can do is not always what you should, and what you should do is that much more of a challenge if you can't.  It takes a bit of life experience to know the difference, and maybe someone before you who had, did.

Pursue Millennial Fear #2 into a corner, and the cornered animal will in the end strike back with "Eh, Grandpa can't handle what the new kids on your lawn are into, didn't get your Metamucil today?"...Tribalist trash-talk?  Oh, now that's just being childish.

3.  "The only good B&W films were Psycho and Young Frankenstein!" - Ah.  So, there are good old B&W films you don't mind watching, and bad ones you'd never touch with toxic gloves.  It's not a double standard, we actually have some dividing line between one and the other.

Pursue this argument into a corner, and most Millennials are happy to explain why:  The movies were newer, and CHOSE to use B&W, you see, to show off...They could do that, if they wanted to.  It's not like one of those old musty-dusty films from Reason #2, that hobbled along in technical obsolescence.

The one argument you don't tend to hear is that there was some culty-reputation preceding the movie that made them sit down and watch it as part of American mass pop-culture, and lo and behold, the movie turned out to be good.  Stuff actually happened in them; one was a horror movie where things turned out to be scary, and the other was a comedy where things turned out to be funny.  And once the Millennial had watched it, it became his film to adopt, one that rebelled against the system and did things its own way, unlike all those others that had to do what they did back then.  It may not have been in color, but like the 10-yo. says after falling off his skateboard, the movie MEANT to do that.

So, no chance that you might find the same personal "adopting" discovery in a movie that didn't "mean to" use B&W, and made the most genius use of what they had?  Or was making movies with a little hip informed experience just an idea that somehow sprung into human consciousness after 1955?

4.  "What do old movies have to teach us today, anyway?  They put all the women in housewife aprons back then!" - And here is where the argument finally starts dropping its big, loud, ugly penny.
The basic foundation of the Millennial is one that's been raised on thirty years of Historical Revisionism since the 80's--in which we were told how many slaves George Washington owned, and every "shocking" bad thing our forefathers ever did to women, minorities, natives, and other countries--and not very much actual history of causes those people stood up for, or things smart people occasionally did right.  When you hear one story over the other long enough and not both, you tend to believe the one you hear...And if you're at the age where college independence makes you want to Change the World personally, the first thing you're going to want to change are the crimes committed by the fact that Americans in the 20th Century Were Evidently A Bunch of Major Racist/Chauvinist/Imperialistic Jerks.  
And if you can't make actual guilty heads roll because they're, um, already dead, the other weapon is dismissive historical-revision laughter at the naivety or un-PC of any idea that YOU weren't enlightened enough to live to figure out.  And maybe if hip people laugh at it long enough, Bad History will eventually slink away into the shadows and disappear.

Persuade a Millennial to watch Gone With the Wind, if ("if"?) he hasn't yet seen it in its epic-roadshow entirety.  Take a guess why he hasn't watched it, and then take bets on what's the first thing he'll say when you ask him why he hasn't watched it.  The reason he'll likely give you is that he believes it's a movie he shouldn't watch, followed by progressive and self-righteously historical arguments why it's a movie that now, in 2017, NOBODY should watch, so don't go around faulting him if he hasn't.  Well, that's taking a bold stand against dogmatic thinking, isn't it?
I confess it's not my own personal favorite either, but certainly not for any reasons regarding racial stereotypes or defenses of racist American history...Let's face it, either you like spending four hours cataloguing the dysfunctional relationships of a spoiled brat, or you don't.  But one thing I will grant in the movie's favor--Those amazing sunsets.  (Yes, in Technicolor!)  And why Clark Gable was the Coolest Male Human Alive in the 30's.
I'm not watching History.  I'm not watching a Confederate-Sentimental Defense Of Segregation.  I'm not watching the Relics of Destructive 20th Century Thought.  I'm watching a movie, featuring amazing sunsets, amazing Max Steiner music, and starring the 30's coolest man alive.  To be a movie fan is to know how to do such things, and you can learn from the masters, or you can learn from your local hobbyist who got the knack on his own.

There is one bit of sunlight on the horizon:  Millennials don't like being called "Millennials".  They say old people "unfairly stereotype" them too much, in thinking that they have smug persecution complexes, hate old people, and wave smartphones in their faces.

And when Millennials want to combat the stereotype that they "Don't watch old films", they immediately rush out to go see one, so they can be Cool and Different from other nasty old Millennials, so there.  Where we now run into the problem that they don't know WHAT to watch, or WHERE to go see one.

The instinct is to look up where a classic film is streaming, but the new 21st-century reality is that you don't find very many of the essential-list AFI 100 Classic Films on streaming:  They're certainly not on Netflix, and studios don't make money on them--They'd much rather you buy the new hit blockbusters they're still trying to pay the bills on, and have the live-action Beauty & the Beast playing on your very own smartphone.
The next instinct is to wait for them to show up at a theater, and TCM and Fathom screenings have started to make those trendy again in the shopping-mall cineplexes, especially during a lull seasons for the new hit movies.  But the hard business truth is that seats have to be filled, and there's usually more tickets sold to The Princess Bride and Fast Times at Ridgemont High--great "Old films from the 80's", as the age group calls them--than for Double Indemnity or Gunga Din.  Only a 30th, 40th, 50th or 75th Anniversary, to help sell the disk release, will usually get any "unmarketable" old classic movie back into the plexes for a night or two only.  (Although, ironically, take a guess WHO'S the reason most old films aren't showing at random for free on local TV stations anymore, where anyone can see them.)
But if it's cool to be curious again, curiosity won't kill you.  It's still a night at the movies, after all, and yes, Things Happen In Them.  You might even find a few at the library, for free, on those old disk things, if nothing's playing on Fathom this week.

As a wise saying once taught me at the same age, "Never proudly show off in public what you DON'T KNOW. It's darned hard to try and impress someone that way."

Wishing You a Merry Val Lewton Christmas

It's hard, slaving over a hot keyboard during the holidays--Christmas isn't a time for brandishing Activist causes, it's the season for peaceful classic-movie-watching on earth, and goodwill to studios, even to crazy, neurotic, spin-doctoring, Blu-ray-genocidal studios that banish every old classic movie to their MOD Archive like Mad King Ludwig.

I just wanted to find a nice sentimental Christmas-movie cause to stick up for.  I was feeling too good to bring up my old nails-on-chalkboard grudge about people who have never seen Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby in 1942's "Holiday Inn" because they think Crosby sang "White Christmas" only in the corny fading-studio 50's-G.I. Danny Kaye/Rosemary Clooney movie where, like, it's in the title, and it's Technicolor...Next year, definitely.  (Although with the stage show on Broadway for the season, maybe a few movie-illiterate folk will have heard of it now.)

It was too much work to do a post sticking up in defense of 1985's "Santa Claus: the Movie", in praise of the Alexander Salkind days when big-budget movies spent their money making big REAL soundstage-and-matte sets of Santa's workshop...

And I didn't see any point in digging up the already Internet-beaten fan debate about whether the first 1988 "Die Hard" (back when Bruce Willis played hip "regular guys", and still had hair and an actual working sense of humor) is a, quote, "Christmas movie", since to my mind, there is no debate:  It is.

But, with the smells of a fresh ham roasting in the slow-cooker, I decided to take it easy on the column this week, and save my holiday time for putting my feet up with the old Blu-rays and vintage DVD's.

And one that I always reserve for Christmas--or at least always tell people I do, just to see the look on their faces--is the heartwarming family holiday warmth of Robert Wise's The Curse of the Cat People (1944), from the director of "The Sound of Music".

Okay, cue the people saying "The What of the Who?"  And thereby hangs a tale to send you to the library's video section.  (Or to Mad King Ludwig's dungeon of the Warner Archive.)

To explain why, to the uninitiated, goes back to Jacques Tourneur's original Cat People from 1942:  In the story (later remade into overbearingly pretentious and point-missing kinkiness by Paul Schrader and Natassja Kinski in 1982), our hero Kent Smith meets mysterious foreign Irena, played by Simone Simon...But she tries to avoid marriage, claiming her ancestors were under an ancient were-panther curse.  Smith humors her "delusions" but when he turns to attractive co-worker Alice Moore to get Irena some help, Moore discovers--in one of the most film-school studied scenes in horror movie history--that jealousy has claws.

The creepy, atmospheric B/W thriller became a huge hit for RKO, and, like many a studio today, the studio now thought they had a franchise.  Every Hollywood studio hoped for a new "horror" line, now that Universal had broken the supernatural envelope with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and RKO thought they had a new horrormeister in producer Val Lewton.  The chief moguls at RKO pitched one cool Horror-Sounding Title after another at Lewton, hoping lightning could strike as many times as they wanted, starting with a sequel to their big studio hit.

But here's where kicks in what could be called "Val Lewton pranks RKO":  Lewton was a producer of eerie atmosphere, B/W shadows and lurking fears left to the imagination, and he didn't want to do lurid studio Universal-envy monsters...So, he found a way of sabotaging them by making stories in own style, and justifying the titles so the boss didn't complain.  When RKO threw "The Leopard Man" at him, he delivered the story of a circus performer who owns a leopard (which escapes into a sleepy border town), and when they pitched "I Walked With a Zombie", Lewton put George Romero aside to deliver a romantic potboiler set against Jamaican voodoo--"Jane Eyre in the Caribbean", unquote.

Lewton had been hoping to move on to "Amy & Her Friend", a heartwarming family picture about a little girl and her imagination.  But, when RKO's moguls pitched the "next hit followup, 'Curse of the Cat People'", Smith, Moore, Simon, and Lewton-regular Calypso singer Sir Lancelot had all been contracted.  So, Lewton simply changed the names, inserted his usual strategic justification-line in the script ("Ever since his first wife, it feels like there's been a curse on this house...") and the hit Cat People sequel was now the heartwarming story of Amy and her Friend for parents and children alike.

In the now-altered "sequel", Kent Smith is married to Alice Moore, after Simon met her end (or did she?) in the first film.  He's too busy with his job designing boats than to look after his shy young daughter Amy (played by a realistically sullen Ann Carter), who's misunderstood by the other kids at school and retreats into her overactive imagination.  In fact, whereas most dads might play along with their little girl's fantasy lives, Smith frustratedly seems to rage at Amy's pretend view of the world--"She's just like Irena was, believing things that aren't true!"...There, see how we got more of the "sequel" into the script?

Amy's only friends seem to be a reclusive grandmotherly ex-actress in the mysterious house nearby (and whose colorful senility about the past seems charming at first, but soon develops a dark Lewtonian edge, like seeing Norma Desmond played by Angela Lansbury), and Amy's claims of a beautiful princess in white who's become her "imaginary friend".  From child-perspective, we don't see Amy's friend onscreen at first, until she sees an old photo of Simone, and says "'But that's her!  You know my friend, too!"'

How could she have known, Smith wonders?  Hehehh...But since the story is mostly from Amy's fantasy POV, we're never allowed to know just quite how imaginary her "imaginary" friend might actually be.  

(As I described the story to one newbie, "Imagine if Val Lewton had remade 'My Neighbor Totoro', and turned it into a spooky B/W 40's RKO film."  Complete with a Totoro-style climax where Amy's parents search for her in a Christmas blizzard, and things still take an eerie, even if family-friendly, Lewton turn...)

Which brings us to our scene, for Season's Movie-Activist Greetings:  

As the parents welcome their upper-middle-class upstate-NY friends in on Christmas Eve for a caroling party, Amy lives the bane of all our neglected childhoods...The Grownups' Party.  

Until Irena (or is it Amy's imagination?) comes to the rescue:

Yeah.  Like the spooky hot French imaginary might-be-ghost babe says:  Merry Christmas.

The Late-Hour Comforts of the Movie Loft

Activists aren't born that way.  There has to be some traumatic event that they spend the rest of their lives pursuing to avenge.

Way back when I first settled into a new apartment--sweet liberty with a rent check, the man-and-his-castle away from the dorms--and had that new improvised home-theater den, I found myself lured by that question...The one that just about everyone asked when they got their first place, their own TV to go with it, and were now their own parents to dictate their own bedtimes:  Great, can I stay up and watch late-night TV now?
The forbidden-fruit temptation we were told as school-night kids through the 70's and early birth-of-cable 80's was that rare movies and classic reruns, like elves, only showed during that magic time after the late-night talk hosts, when everyone else slept, and if you set your VCR, you could maybe catch one.  Grownups, who of course got to stay up all night, knew about them, but being grownups, either didn't think it was important, or kept it to themselves as one of their grownup-secrets.

The change to a new world without bedtimes never hit us until we got out of the college dorms and into our new solo places.
And then--after we got that new flatscreen that was going to change our apartment life forever--we lonely single guys set ourselves in the recliner, readied the remote, Coke Zero and microwave popcorn, surfed the channels and found...news.  World and national news.  News ALL night, on every network affiliate.  Straightforward important news on the CBS affiliates, and funny quirky news on the ABC affiliates, where the hosts and set crew were all chummy, laughed at the headlines and at each other's jokes.  And the independent UHF stations, which were now affiliates of Fox and CW, were showing infomercials, if they didn't have Seinfeld reruns to fill the void.  (Reruns from before 1994 had long since vanished off of free television.)  A few years earlier, before NBC jumped onto all-night news for its affiliates, we would have been able to watch antisocial-looking cowboy-hatted gamblers staring at their cards, for all-night championship sessions of Texas Hold-Em Poker that lasted until the 5am morning-affiliate news--We didn't know whether it was just one game, or a championship, whether they were just looping episodes at random, or whether they just didn't have homes or lives to go back to.

I knew something, whether it was progress or television, had forever betrayed my childhood:  What was the point of becoming a grownup if there was now no longer anything worth staying up past your bedtime for?
Growing up in the 70's, if you wanted to describe something Humphrey Bogart would do, you didn't talk about "old movies" or "classic" movies, you talked about "the Late Show" movies.  Because that was all they were--Pop-overexposed oddities from another time, that kept corny traditions of gangsters, cowboys, detectives, and bathing beauties diving into swimming pools alive as a cultural mythology, and that TV stations showed as an excuse to let local businesses pay the station bills, for lack of anything else to show at that hour.  And now that the VCR and Turner Classic Movies culture had hit in the late 80's, and these "silly" movies, once the stuff of Carol Burnett Show parodies, all had names, reputations and classic moments for us to take a second look at, there was no more need for stations to treat them as useless filler anymore.
When I started a blog, the first simple question I wanted to ask was "Hey, where'd they go?"  And I soon found the question was one it would take a year's worth of columns to answer.

Way back before TCM gentrified the old classic movie onto tier-cable channels and took it out of the hands of the common man, every city once made a deal out of their time-filling movies--It was the station's identity.
Those in the NYC/New Jersey area, on Sunday afternoons, prime time and late nights, would hear the Max Steiner strains of Tara's Theme, as WOR-9 would present the Million Dollar Movie.

And in Boston, there was the happy, comfortable theme and cozy cluttered hobby-den sets of the Movie Loft.

There were actually two Movie Lofts in 80's Boston, both hosted by local-celebrity Dana Hersey, back when local programming still created local celebrities.  WSBK-38, as the local UHF Red Sox station, hosted recent popular 70's/80's movies at during the 8pm prime time--While WCVB-5, as the ABC network affiliate, used its library of 30's-40's movies as late-weeknight pre-signoff filler, and would be more the place to find Ronald Colman in Random Harvest or Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear.  
The movie host was the important part for any station, since most of us at that time in history just didn't know one old movie from another--Hersey, like TCM's Robert Osborne or Ben Mankewicz, was there to put a movie into context, and sell us on why it was unique enough or historical enough to spend two hours with.  Like the Mary Tyler Moore Show world of homemade stations putting on their own show, stations might have the local film critic moonlighting on movie-night introductions, or, like Hersey, just the station's voiceover announcer with a face, to give us that cool, comforting introduction to the alien world of Your Parents' Movies.  
Either way, it made old movies more democratic:  You weren't watching black-and-white late at night just because you might have been an insomniac or had no social life, you were watching because a few isolated people at the same dislocated hour had found that these things were actually pretty good, and now sought them out.  And to watch the station's announcer in a comfy turtleneck express some genuine enthusiasm about the hidden appeal of tonight's John Wayne western or Susan Hayward romance suggested that he had personally been converted in his moonlighting station-job along with the rest of us.  It can happen to anyone, and those of us who'd caught the disease knew how.



Of course, maybe nostalgia's making it better than it is.
It used to be the iconic image of the Lonely Single Guy, to be clicking channels in the late hours finding nothing but news and infomercials, because the mating females had passed us by in the herd.  But that was usually because there was nothing to find.
Local TV stations didn't have a higher purpose in airing movies, they just had to fill time or sign off early.  Most were used as an excuse for local businesses to buy time, if the more valuable 6pm news slot was too expensive--And to the 70's, the cliche'd joke image of the Late Show also translated as "Crazy local used-car salesmen making desperate fools of themselves"  Most fans raged at scenes cut or time condensed to give more time to the used-car hucksters, but that was a world before movies were preserved on disk, and it was less easy to shrug the tradeoff of "Whaddya want for free?"
But what late-nite local movies did do was UNITE the lonely people--the single guys, the desperate businessmen, the all-night firemen and ambulance drivers--in that time when the rest of the world was shut down, and give them some part-time dream to share the next morning.  If being up at 1 or 2am meant you could see Bogart or Cagney display the male image of the 30's or 40's, it was a sort of secret cult of those looking for enlightenment and searching through rare books to find it.  Like the Edward Hopper painting, it was an all-night cuppa joe and a story.

We don't have late-night movies anymore.  Movies are far too valuable corporate property to go selling to little stations, and most stations have long since abandoned local programming that doesn't make their news division look more competitive.  (WSBK-38, after being absorbed and orphaned by UPN, later brought their Movie Loft brand back in the 00's as a guy-manchild slob joke, with two slacker hosts introducing Adam Sandler "guy movies" from 90's Paramount, now that that was the reigning misandric/self-loathing joke about guys on couches with their loyal remotes.)
Late-night movie viewers are pretty much left to themselves to recreate those days from scratch.  We do, however, still have the three key ingredients:  We have couches and sets.  We have movies (on disk).  And we have nighttimes.

Whether it comes on disk, on cable or on streaming (if you can find it), a vintage black-and-white classic makes more sense after midnight.  The world isn't in Technicolor during the single-digit hours, that's something bright and happy and lit by sunlight.  Most people think their dreams are in black-and-white, or maybe they just remember them that way.
It's a bedtime story for those too old for Goodnight Moon, and for those no longer with anyone to tell them.  After the real world has gone to bed, like good responsible morning-people do, it's time for the Unreal world to spin some stories that are just a little larger than life, when you're in the right mood not to question it.

Don't believe me?  Try the experiment for yourself:  
Take the first 30's, 40's or 50's vintage movie off the library shelf that piques your fancy, and save it for midnight.  If you have a significant other, let them share it, and if you have kids, save it for that Magic Hour after bedtime...See if there isn't that extra bit of intimate emotional connection with the movie when the rest of the world isn't around to make its demands on your daily grownup life.
It may end up being just a little bit better.

My New Regular Friday-Night Thing

When I moved out to a new apartment just within walking distance of the local Northampton, MA Forbes library, I discovered there are a few good advantages to Location. 

With many parents and impoverished college students in town, a constant demand for Friday movie-night titles, and no Blockbuster after the last one closed down some five or six years ago, I'd discovered that around 3-4pm, just before 5pm closing, there tends to be a "Happy Hour" of local browsing customers socializing at the Audio-Visual section on the third floor.

A corner section reserved for their DVD's.

Entire walls of DVD's.

Walls and walls of DVD's.

(This is just the feature-film section, by the way; the foreign, documentary, and TV-boxset sections were elsewhere on the floor, and the children's/family/teen titles were in the Children's section on the basement floor.)

One display showed the theme that month, Escape/Adventure movies, along with a few handpicked staff favorites:

The Great Escape (obviously).  Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Zulu.  The Man With the Golden Gun.  Cocoon.  Key Largo.  And a few staff-picked recommendations of Gold Diggers of 1935 and Evil Dead II.  

I'd been on a 70's Golden-Age kick for my last few visits, and since the first Godfather had been checked out, I settled for finally taking a look at Robert Altman's "Nashville", and two other lesser-known Warner Archive titles from '78 that some generous souls had tried to find a home for.  I decided not to rent the next volume of Columbo reruns from the TV section, as three hours of quirky semi-improvised tower-of-babbling 70's Altman had already put too much on my plate for the week.  

Being a library, their rental terms were reasonable:  7-day rental, with optional 7-day renewal online.  No deposit required.  Holds, special-orders and waiting-list titles available at the front desk.  Cost:  FREE.  (With $1/day late fee.)

Before the now-ancient days of disk-by-mail, there was just as much of a rush at the local strip-mall Blockbuster Video on Friday night, but it never had the welcoming feeling of being personal--Like the Starbucks coffee on Main Street or the Wal-mart, it was the corporate boot-footprint of mediocrity stamped upon the identity of your hometown, to make it no better or worse than a thousand others.  No matter how glitzy, modern or brightly lit the newest ones were, there was a dispiriting feeling of soul-crushing tackiness to it that said "Abandon all taste, ye who enter"...And the window-banner promises of "More copies of the hits you want, first!" rubbed your crowd trend-following in your face, and made your movie-night urges feel as if you were cattle in a production factory who were depended upon to be harvested to fatten starving studios.

Customers were strangers--and so were the movies, in blank uniform cases--and you saw your neighbor having to compromise his taste for the one recent-hit movie he didn't want, just because ten other strangers that day had taken the one he did.  You judgmentally grumbled that someone as philistine as him deserved to settle for watching The Day After Tomorrow, just because your own pride dictated that you had to go home without that copy of The Bourne Supremacy you'd hoped to pin your weekend movie-night on.

And if they couldn't rent you a movie, they'd rent you a game, darnit, sell you some merchandise, or even a box of popcorn, just to keep the overhead.  

The more that "Big Blue" began Wal-mart'ing the local community-hangout storefront rentals out of a town, the more a debate started to rise among renting film-buffs:  Namely, whether the brick-and-mortar DVD-rental industry "should" philosophically be an archive for curious film-buffs to look up old titles on demand, or a studio-serving second-run theater to give you your last chance to pay Fox a little extra money to see Titanic fresh out of the theaters, before it retires to cable.
Blockbuster, in their press, proudly sounded off that they were on the side of the studios, as it was home-theater's symbiotic duty to be--People wanted The Hits, and they'd pay for the company that brought them the current, hippest, hottest ones.  The library, OTOH, like the independent mom-and-pop store, had no choice but to be what it was...The repository, the wine-cellar where you went to look up a title you didn't know, where they kept it in case anyone should ask for it.  

Looking for movies at a small hardwood-floor library in the local town mansion is a different experience:  Most came there to look for a book, and are pleasantly embarrassed to see others there with the same inspiration.  And seeing movie spine titles on shelves is the same as searching for an old book--Colored titles, each promising a story, are in reach for you to grab one and take a chance, but now with the extra tease of a bit of movie trivia, daring "I know more than you do".  One chatty older woman, seeing me tilt my head and squint over the alphabetical shelf like two or three others, joked about having the same Friday-night hobby, and showed off the copy of Disney's live-action Cinderella she hadn't expected to be on the shelves so soon.  Browsing a town's library is something particularly local and by-the-people, which brings out sudden social instincts of being part of the Hometown Favorite--No two library collections are the same, and those who know where and what to look for go there because they have a sense of what is unique about their own town.

And one other advantage the library had over the old Blockbuster:  No running loop of loud trailers or employee-placating movies on the overhead monitors.  Libraries tend to emphasize courteously quiet solitude and reflection with their customer browsing.  Shh.

Our community library was lucky, being in a New England college-town--For 25 years, the local college-town arthouse theater on Pleasant St. had had the college-town Pleasant St. Video next door.  Passing by the corner past the theater meant seeing that big shop window selling the print posters of Breakfast at Tiffany's and La Dolce Vita, and displaying the foreign/cult films that were the hit renters with the largely 00's-hippie town demographic.  But in June '11, before the independently-run Pleasant St. Theater went the way of other college-town screens that couldn't upgrade to digital projection, the Pleasant St. Video store followed first. It was a turning point for the town, but by that point, everyone knew that brick-and-mortar video rentals couldn't last forever, as even Big Blue had been slain by Netflix-by-mail, and those looking for film-class titles wouldn't be caught dead going to the grocery store's Redbox machine.

All wasn't lost:  Northampton is a charity-cause town, and when the town's biggest supply of foreign and cult-classics was in danger, a movement started to help fund the entire collection's donation to the local library.  Just $8, tax-deductible, would save one orphan film from the used-film sale box, and keep it on a permanent shelf for the entire town.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/06/northampton_video_store_will_c.html  

As you can see, it was a success.  There's now a lot more to choose from.  

As viewers complain that Netflix and Amazon Prime's selections have been dramatically dwindling to a collection of low-rent activist documentaries, micro-horror, public-domain and original series, many still refuse to cancel the services because of the "convenience" of having movies and past TV reruns available as an alternative to cable and broadcast TV. But it also feels like being afraid to cross some last line that can't be uncrossed--We cut the cable cord for subscription, they worry, but when we finally cut the subscription cord, what DO we have left?  

What many aren't aware of is that for most of their working career, those same people's taxes have been paying for another viewing option that's nearly as convenient with greater selection.  And if not "greater", depending on your town, at least a lot more eclectic, with more titles they may actually recognize.  Some might be old, occasionally have scratches from customer use, but in how good condition were the disks you once rented from the shiny Blockbuster?  The point is, being physical disks, they're made to stay on a shelf, and they aren't going anywhere soon.

Which brings me to the reason I posted this on a Thursday, when a Friday might have been more fitting:  An upcoming weekend is a good excuse for impulse.  That's what it's made for.

You may not have checked your local library's DVD (with the odd isolated Blu-ray) movie section, or, like some I'd happened to talk with on the bus, even been aware your library HAD a DVD section.  Trust me, most do.  

Other libraries may probably not have been philanthropically stocked with an entire rental store by an idealistic town, but most probably consist of titles people wanted to get rid of, and donated to city for a nominal tax deduction, rather than throw out.  Each title has a guarantee of being a movie somebody at some point wanted to watch first--And it's a practice you find yourself wanting to pay forward with your own old discarded titles that have been replaced by Blu-ray, just in the hopes that someone else will be as equally surprised by your own discard.  (In the old days, when enthusiastic adopters used to binge-buy Blu-rays, they bragged of being able to sell their old DVD's back to Amazon.  And once the bottom fell out of that market, with a used title now fetching upwards of a dollar at best, they don't say that any more.)

It's serendipity:  You may not necessarily find the title you're looking for.  If you do, more power to you.  But more often, what you may find is the title you never knew you were looking for until you found it.  That's the thrill of the hunt.