Golden is Silents (or, How to START Watching Those Movies Where They Walk Fast)

"Is that one of those movies where they walk fast?"  

Yes, I'd actually heard a fellow film-buff say he'd heard that from one millennial girl who wasn't...that familiar with the essential silent films of the 20's.  He was lucky--When I was growing up, the 70's fascination with, quote, "Old Hollywood" genuinely seemed to believe that every single picture made before 1939 had the Keystone Kops and pie fights in them.  (You're probably thinking of the same Brady Bunch episode too, right now.)

Silent films pretty much disappeared between the TV of the late 50's and the film-preservation of the 80's, with only a brief renaissance in the 70's when Charlie Chaplin showed he was still alive to pick up his Oscar.  But now that we live in a world where they're all available and we choose what to watch, the fault's now on US if we've never heard of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or FW Murnau.  Even without the above stereotypes, it's hard to get into a movie where you don't hear the dialogue to keep yourself from tuning out, and need enough attention span to follow the visual pantomime--It's not so much that, as Norma Desmond said, "they had faces back then", but as Singin' in the Rain's Cathy Selden said, "all they did was make faces".  But those faces could be drama as well as comedy.

I'm just trying to offer a Starter Kit of five watchable, accessible and basic-knowledge titles for those folks wondering where to even start the discussion.  This is not the least bit meant to be a "Best" list or "Favorite" list of standout silent classics--It's a list of training wheels for one's bike, and a Summer-reading list for those who haven't picked up a book until now.  It's a sound-friendly list for first-timers wondering where to first put their toes into the water, and find out it's not as cold as it looks.

- The Gold Rush (1940 sound version, Criterion) 

When Japan first showed silent movies, the intercards were never translated, so theaters came up with the idea of hiring a benshi--A host actor who stood onstage next to the movie, to dramatically read the dialogue and descriptions, but was also "storyteller" to offer his own dramatic narration throughout the entire movie.  ("And so our heroes clashed...Who would be victorious?")

When Charlie Chaplin grudgingly moved the Little Tramp to sound with 1940's "The Great Dictator", and could now add music and sound effects to his previous features, he wasn't sure whether Modern Times and City Lights' "romances in pantomime" would still play.  As 1925's "The Gold Rush" came back to theaters, Chaplin came up with the idea of being his own benshi:  Chaplin, with humorously "epic" tone in his high British clip, reads the dialogue and cards to fit the action, even when Klondike gold-mining starvation forces "the Little Fellow" into desperate straits--

It was the only silent to feature Chaplin's narration, and may not be as iconic as his music-and-sound-effects-added "Modern Times", but it's a perfect introduction.  In the days of silent theaters, the one thing more annoying than cellphones today was audience members who read the cards out loud for fun, or for the benefit of their kids.  It's still the most fun part of watching silent movies at home, especially with your own kids, but here, at least, we have Sir Charles to save us the trouble.

- Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis (Kino, 1984 dub)

There are many (many, many) Metropolis restorations available, but be careful to ask for Giorgio's by name--

Film preservation was barely a word in '84, and silent films even less...And when distributors had to market a re-release of what was then the most "complete" cut of Fritz Lang's 1927 German-expressionist sci-fi social allegory, composer Moroder--who had co-produced the restoration as a labor of love--came up with one clever marketing idea for How to Explain Silent Movies to the uninitiated:  If German expressionist silents were wildly visual, stylized, and dialogue-free stories with music...why, they're JUST LIKE MTV!  And those were magic words to studios' ears in 1984.  In fact, it becomes a pretty darn convincing argument, when Moroder uses an ethereal Pat Benatar to cover Metropolis's subplot of rich-elite Romeo meeting working-class social-reformer Juliet in a future class-divided megalopolis:

Yes, 80's music.  With Pat Benatar.  It also happens to work brilliantly...Quit giggling and get over it.  One scene set in a rich "decadent" nightclub originally featured decadent-20's music in the orchestral 1927 score; Moroder, who knows such things better than anyone should, instead adds his synth-disco beat to the scene that turns the nightclub into the darkest sin-pits of Studio 54, and throws a Freddie Mercury song into the mix.

There are more professional restorations of Metropolis in its purer form out there--Kino also has the crystal-clear two-hour restoration, and the new "Ultimate" two-and-a-half-hour cut with extra grainy newly discovered footage--on the condition that if you watch those, you'll still have to put up with the darn movie.  There's nothing that ruins a classic like an extended Director's Cut with too much personal director baggage, and Lang did not have Subtlety on his agenda when he wanted his Weimar epic to take on the labor unions, class wars and growing moral-upheaval of his 20's-Berlin day.  He's entitled to, but I'll sympathize with the contemporary first-time cold-viewer who says "We DON'T CARE!...Show more of the cool robot!"  As one critic put it, there's the version of Metropolis that's "good for you", and then there's the one you actually enjoy.

This version had to work with what was then the most "complete" existing 90-minute version of the truncated cut that existed since the US premiere, that chopped out most of Lang's soapboxing to focus on the plot, and the pop music heightens the art-deco-fairytale of what the story used to be--In the climax where the poor enslaved boiler-machine workers are led to revolt and smash the city, Lang originally had the music parody them with a storm-the-Bastille march as a silly delusions-of-grandeur labor strike.  Moroder instead brings the full orchestra and a wordless angry-crowd rabble onto the soundtrack as workers storm the elevators up to the city, and the result looks like All Chaos has been let loose.  A more effective image for our Trump-fearing times.

- The Thief of Bagdad (1924, Cohen Collection edition)

Any discussion of fantasy-film history is always going to start with Douglas Fairbanks's then-astounding Arabian epic, for its idea of using, gasp, special effects in a silent movie...And most will probably avoid it because of that, because there's just a general fear of watching anything Historic.  Even if today's audiences might spot wires holding up the flying carpet, or suspect that winged horses are made to fly with double-exposures, the more basic the effects, the more we recognize how "real" it is that this is all happening somewhere on a wildly designed soundstage, and in 1924, that was no mean feat.  Green-screen and CGI have just become Too Easy.

What singles out the Cohen Collection Blu-ray issue from any number of public-domain others is that their edition takes its print from the 1975 British restoration where Carl Davis, the reigning god of pretty much all silent-restoration scores, composed his original orchestral score "from themes by Rimsky-Korsakov".  
And you know darn well which themes--As pops-classical pieces go, RK's "Scheherezade" always did sound like a Great Movie Soundtrack from some great silent Arabian Nights epic, and you wonder why the heck someone simply didn't turn it into one before...It was always just part of the story:

It was William Cameron Menzies' boldest visual design for fantasy movies up to that time (outside of anything coming out of Germany) and his stylized too-gigantic-to-be-real palaces, city and treasure caverns were a confessed influence on Disney's animators in designing their animated "Aladdin".  And in the famous opening scene, where Fairbanks as the swashbuckling Thief bounces over jars and onto rooftops and canopies to grab a day's lunch and duck the city guards, we dare you--defy you--not to start singing "One jump, ahead of the bread line..."  Except that Davis's music is already too good to miss.

- It (1927, Kino)

[Currently OOP, but available on YouTube]

At some point, any conversation about silent movies is also going to try and make fun of Clara Bow as "the gal your great-grandpa had a crush on"--Even the name conjures up flappers in pearls or big bathing suits.
But it wasn't just voting that was changing women's roles in the Jazz Age; the search for thrills was sparking the first hints of a sexual revolution, and even stars who weren't "forbidden" sexpots like Louise Brooks or Theda Bara could throw good clean hints about wanting a little fun with the new times.  Clara Bow was Paramount's more clean-cut mainstream A-list star, but what made her the star was an energetic presence that still has contemporary appeal.

For one thing, Bow is cute.  Look at those eyes--Those WERE the inspiration for Betty Boop, and you know it.  But unlike Betty's pop-kitsch, Clara lives up to the title of the story:  The "It" of the 20's, as defined by scandalous authors of the time, was the now modern idea that just the natural confident chemistry of an "indefinable something" could make a girl sexy and attractive even without piling on the glamour.  In other times, we'd make the same claim about Meg Ryan, or Audrey Hepburn, or Flo the Progressive Insurance Girl.  
And if that was It, the "It Girl" had it--Clara's comic timing absolutely takes hold of the screen and strikes a blow for the regular middle-class girl, as a smart-thinking shopgirl tries to land her handsome boss, ends up on the wrong side of social do-gooders when she has to mind another girl's baby, and makes the most of the Misunderstandings That Ensue:

Bow's character seems smart, independent and self-possessed enough to have come just as easily from a sound comedy of the 40's or a rom-com of the 80's, which makes you wonder how different the girls your great-grandpa did have a crush on really were from our own time.  If girls in the 20's didn't have "It", you probably wouldn't be here.

- Seven Chances (1925, Kino)

Every silent comic inspired at least one great cartoon character--There's a lot of Chaplin's well-meaning Tramp in the Pink Panther, and everyone in the 30's called Mickey Mouse "a little optimistic Harold Lloyd".  And Buster Keaton lived in the same universe as Wile E. Coyote.
Nothing was small in Keaton's surreal world, and no good plan went unpunished without epic catastrophe.   Most silent comics might be chased down the street by one character.  Buster would routinely be chased by two hundred.
Any more iconic Keaton image could be featured on the list--the house that almost falls on top of Buster in "Steamboat Bill, Jr.", or why not to sit on a locomotive wheel from "The General"--but I'll pick a personal choice here:  In the days when silent comedies were the stuff excerpted on cheap kids' TV, with either wacky or straight narration, I remember my first introduction to Buster's kamikaze slapstick was "Chances"'s ending chase, as his character has seven days to marry and inherit a fortune, puts an ad in the paper for a bride, and finds he's suddenly become a lot more...popular:

Yes:  Cliffs and boulders.  All that's missing are the crates of Acme Dynamite.

----
There's five for a list, and that's good enough for a week or two of viewing.  There are plenty of other First-Time Essentials for the silent-viewer-in-training that could flesh out a ten-list, like why Harold Lloyd was hanging off that building by his fingertips from "Safety Last!", or Hitchcock's first take at suspense in "The Lodger", or the rest of stylized German expressionism from the wild fantasy of FW Murnau's "Faust" to the comic satire of "The Last Laugh".  Maybe I'll get to those later, but my job here's done for the week.
Even just in silent comedy, there's nothing wrong with walking fast or running from large crowds--Benny Hill discovered that early on.  But the technical lack of sound wasn't an artistic lack of genre, there were romances, horror, history and drama enough to take any viewer by surprise no matter what jokes he's bringing with him to fight back.  
All it just takes is that first hesitant spoonful--Although, unlike medicine, you probably shouldn't close your eyes to take it.

Theater Roots, Pt. 2: The Fine Arts

When I started a series on the great formative theaters of my moviegoing years, I took it for granted that most of them would have been gone by now.  The old local theater in Acton, MA, just a twenty-minute walk away at the back corner of a quaint strip mall, where I first saw the trailer to Raiders of the Lost Ark, had long since been demolished.  

An entire chain of eight 1-3 screen theaters just a train ride away in downtown Boston, where I saw the other half of all the great 80's movies I didn't see back home, all disappeared one by one in the 90's, to become one big 20-screen plex on Tremont St.  And even the Harvard Square Cinema that looked over the Square in Cambridge wasn't around to show daily classic college-town double features anymore, even after it'd turned into an AMC 5-plex.

So when I set out to write on the Fine Arts theater in Maynard, MA, I grit my teeth, Googled to find a vintage photo, got ready to tear a piece of clothes, and discovered...a website of current showtimes.  It was still around.  The Fine Arts lived.

From what I saw, the theater had a longer, more storied history than I was aware of:  The theater had been considered a showplace of Boston's MetroWest suburbs since 1949, and one of the major movie palaces of the area in its day.

Which was a surprise--To me, growing up, it had always had a more comfortable feel, tucked just off of Maynard's two main streets, where the small town began turning into private houses and house-based businesses.  The unprepossessing outside--in the good way--looked like someone's modern ranch house that had been remodeled into a theater...Walk inside, past the local-theater entrance posters that always suggested an "old fashioned theater", past the working old-school popcorn machine that the theater kept around for atmosphere, and the main theater had the big-stage remnant of the 1949 movie-palace theater it used to.  Down a hall, and tucked just up the corner along the edge of the building (by the glass exit that showed the small-town parking), was a small hundred-seater screen for revivals and foreign arthouse films.

And after having to cross the iron bridge and leave the Seneca Falls Strand as the one "Theater where I lost my moviegoing virginity", it was that little theater down the hall that had most of the movie memories for me.  The good movies were all at the local Acton theater, like every other theater, but Fine Arts was a local regional Boston/MetroWest chain in Newton, Maynard, Waltham and the University section of Boston that showed the "prestige" films, the Oscar-bait and the breakout foreign/indies.  The Fine Arts chain was considered the best place you could go see movies if you had a chance, provided that they were actually showing something you wanted to see.  And most of those were in the big theater.  

An independently-owned theater or local chain could pretty much do what it wanted, as long as the manager could bid to get hands on it and book it for show.  To get a good play of all the good titles coming out, some movies only played a week, or two weeks, at the manager's discretion, and every Fine Arts theater gave you a calendar of what would be showing there that month, and when it would leave...If they said that "The Deer Hunter" would only be playing for one week, one week was what you had to see it.  In between, they could also show anything they liked as filler--Which could not only mean discovering an underplayed critical favorite, just because the management thought more people could see it, but also showing some college-town classic films on the Tuesday-Thursday nights before the big movie came in on Friday.  Had to show something.
One other hometown advantage a local-chain theater had, was that being relatively independent, and booking their own movies, they weren't as beholden to pay their "duty" back to the studios in crippling percentages of ticket sales, to boost hit studio profit numbers.  The theater just had to keep itself operating, and make enough money to show something else--You didn't so much buy a ticket to the movie, as you bought a ticket to the theater, to watch a movie.  Which meant that the theater could sell you ten tickets at once, for anything you want to see that month...What did it matter, as long as the cash was paid?  It was a little easier to do back in the early 80's when first night ticket prices had gone up to $3, but for me, I always KNEW what present would be in my birthday and Christmas haul:  For the insane (to me) luxury of $30, a Fine Arts 10-ticket card--punched off for every movie like a train ticket--would keep me in moviegoing clover for the next three to four months.  You can do that today with refillable gift cards at chain cineplexes, if you don't mind paying $100-150 to relive the thrill, but the fact that you already had your tickets, not the payment, made moviegoing more of an impulse.  If the little down-the-hall theater was showing a rare MGM revival, deciding to go out to see it was same "huh, haven't seen it!" impulse as streaming a movie on Netflix, which was also "free" for the taking.

And there were a few old revivals floating around back then--MGM and Columbia had TV income to fall back on, but TV didn't show Gone With the Wind, and only showed Wizard of Oz once a year.  I remember my dad telling me for my own good that I should see Forbidden Planet if I liked those cool sci-fi movies of the late 70's--And if it was showing at the Theater 2 in an MGM double feature with The Time Machine, well, there ya go.  It was free and it was Tuesday.  The 1940 Thief of Bagdad I'd never seen until a big restoration; Duck Soup and Horsefeathers might be shown together, and even if it wasn't the first time watching it, it was still fun to hear a modern audience react to Groucho's uncharacteristically contemporary snark.

It wasn't the TCM Fathom classic screenings at Cinemark mall plexes--A small corner sixty-seater, with no stadium seating, wasn't a "showplace" of movies, it was a place where you got together to watch them.  It was small enough to watch old movies even if they weren't new hits, just because you wanted to be part of an audience watching them.  You walked out of the theater onto a woodsy street, to the town's meter parking lot just across the way, and maybe even talked about how fun the movie was if you hadn't seen it before.  Most people don't do that today.  They're too concerned about the trouble it took just to get to the theater, and how to get out of it.

I'd drifted away from the theater when I'd drifted away from MetroWest, further out in the state at the end of the 80's.  If it was a surprise to find out thirty years later that the theater was still around, it was a bigger surprise to find out what had happened to it:

As the industry fell away from independently owned theaters, and the Fine Arts chain folded along with every other chain theater in downtown Boston, the theater kept its name as just Maynard's local first-run three-screen, showing the big hit movies you didn't have to go all the way out to the big plexes in Framingham to see.  But the old building was in a state of decay, to the point that the owners pretty much let it go to ruin, finally selling the building in 2012.  (Even a small cafe restaurant that used to sit next door, where most would have a croissant and coffee before the movie, was now a dirty vacant eyesore.)

New owner Steve Trumble made news for the "insane" decision to buy and restore the theater building and projection system, and by that point, restoration it needed.  DESPERATELY.

Maynard Wicked Local, Dec. 11, 2014

Why would he take on a challenge to restore a theater where locals had complained for ten years about the decay, where every hallway, every ceiling and every wiring looked like it would be better demolished for public safety?  Because, as an area native, he remembered the theater.  "I remember exactly where I sat when I saw my first James Bond movie," Trumble commented in interviews about why he took on the project.  

Funny you should mench, Steve--I remember exactly where I sat when I first saw Forbidden Planet with my dad.  It was three or four rows down from where you're standing, in fact.  
Everyone remembers a local theater, if it's about the theater and not the movies.

It's good to know the local independent or semi-independent theater is not dead.  Starved, wounded, throttled, neglected, and forced to show Suicide Squad today, but not dead.  It lives because people want to see it alive, and don't like to imagine what happens when we make them extinct.

Trumble spent years of construction money to bring back the Fine Arts he remembered in Maynard's town square, and even promised that Theater 2...well, now it's Theater 3, would continue to show occasional old-film revivals, DVD and TCM be darned.  Even if, when he started, the lack of old prints kept by current studios on digital-projection meant that Saturday Night Fever and Spaceballs had to be considered "old classics".

The current showtimes show all three theaters filled with the last of a busy summer's hits, but a quiet September and October is on its way.  Meanwhile "Fans of Films" screenings still show up as a filmgoer event on Tuesdays and Wednesdays once a month.

Make it Goldfinger or Duck Soup, Steve, and you've got a deal.

Gotta Dance! (No, seriously, there IS a reason!)

There is one truth about old movies that science has yet to explain:  If you want to convert one stubborn unbeliever to vintage films, show them 1952's Singin' in the Rain.  You could show them Gone with the Wind, or The Maltese Falcon, or Double Indemnity, or anything else off the AFI 100 list, but for some reason, Singin' is the one with the highest instant conversion record.  It just works, with uncanny mind-enslaving skill.

It's not hard to theorize why--Under Stanley Donen's characteristically playful direction, the script was by "On the Town"'s team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and like most of Comden & Green's scripts (The Band Wagon, It's Always Fair Weather), there's a healthy dose of snarky fun poked at the phoniness of the show-biz industry, and characters who aren't quite what they've fraudulently cracked themselves up to be:
The movie opens with a comically garish over-the-top satire on 1920's Hollywood red-carpet premieres, into a montage where Gene Kelly, as silent Hollywood's biggest Cheshire-grinning insincere matinee-idol star, gives his fans a somewhat, er, embellished story of his rise to stardom ("Dignity...Always dignity") as we see his version clash onscreen with the less-dignified truth.  And along the way leads into the "Fit as a Fiddle" number where Kelly and Donald O'Connor as corny vaudeville performers turn song-and-dance-man tap into synchronized athletics.
That's the first eight minutes, folks.  Count 'em.  Ninety-five to go, and it's got even more surprises up its sleeves from there.

Singin's unquestionably one of the great ones off the Great lists, but it still doesn't answer the question:  Why always THAT one?
Think it may have more to do with the audience than the film itself--Most first-timers don't expect to be quite so, well...blitzed with a sudden attack of almost contemporary humor, followed by Kelly and O'Connor's creative tapping that wasn't quite Fred & Ginger in top hat and tails.  It usually comes as a complete surprise to them to find a musical with that much story to its story, with the silent-parody plot...And frankly, may not have expected that much humor, as they may not have been expecting humor in an old MGM musical at all.  It's rather like the fear you may have had being forced to read Great Books in high school and freshman class, before discovering they had enough of an actual story to make a Great book a good one....Well, what did you think was on all those pages?

Although I had less personal success converting my own dad, who didn't know ahead of time what the movie was about, or all the classic-clip fuss was about either.  To get him to watch, I explained the plot of Jean Hagen's Oscar-nominated comic antagonist and the wiseguy silent-Hollywood satire, but his cold-feet curiosity still couldn't get past the one question:  "Yeah, but why was Kelly singing in the rain?"  Um, he was happy, I had to answer, he'd just realized he liked Debbie Reynolds.  (The gimmick was that the songs in Singin' were all reimagining pre-existing Arthur Freed and Nacio Brown song hits from the 20's out of context, and when Kelly imagined a scene for the title number, he told now-producer Freed, "It'll be raining, and...I'll be singing.")

When MGM's 1974's compilation-film "That's Entertainment" came out of nowhere to be one of the surprise box-office smashes of the troubled Ford-administration era--with a tagline distinctly historical to its time--it created two things:  One, it created a mania in our culture for reappraising the "late show" movies of the 30's, 40's and 50's, and a trendy fascination about the "Old Hollywood" that was facing destruction in '73-'74--From back in the days when, presumably, stars were more elegant, movies more watchable, and more of them were made on schedule to fill big velvet-seated theaters.  The second--since the focus had been on MGM musicals--was that it created a backlash of parodying Old-Hollywood era musicals and sanitized Hays Code-era movies as being just too danged happy and virginal to live in the troubled days of energy crises, inflation, political coverups and the sexual revolution, and popularized a social criticism of Depression and wartime people "escaping their troubles" at optimistic movies...Idiots.  And heaven help the early-50's movies, from the days of Betty Crocker housewives and duck-and-cover.
One reason for the latter, was that being a compilation retrospective, "That's" did not show the whole films in context with the original films they came from--It just showed the Good Bits.  And speaking from my own experience at least...Good Bits can be a bit confusing to the uninitiated.  What was created was the confused belief by the public that musicals of their parents' day must have apparently been nothing BUT strange overproduced production numbers thrown at a cringing audience, like the Ziegfeld Follies or a 70's TV variety show.

Some current generations may dismiss most of the old classic 20th-century catalogue (or at least anything made before the Big 80's) as "toothless", but if you're afraid to watch, don't worry, they won't bite--There's a context for everything, and it just takes a little bit of subplot to tie it together.  Everything happens for a reason, and it's usually sure to tie itself up by the climax.  That's how Hollywood worked back then, when there were studio moguls to make sure it did.
For an experiment, let's take THE most demonized, parodied, ridiculed, icon-referenced, giggled-at and generally straw-man-symbol persecuted scene in MGM musical history:  Esther Williams' "smoke" number (it wasn't a specific song) from 1952's Million Dollar Mermaid.

Isn't it silly looking?...Everyone's so HAPPY!  The Technicolor is crazy!  All smiles, all happy, and no one's makeup is wet and sparklers don't extinguish, through the miracle of reversed footage. I mean, making movies around a pool just for a swimming star to swim in?--Why, that's as nutty as the time they made movies around an ice rink just for a skating star to skate in!
The closeups of smiling extras, forming those kaleidoscopic patterns with their perfect legs, seems to be held up as the most instantly recognizable icons of all the artistic "excesses" of Busby Berkeley musicals..Despite the fact that Berkeley did not direct the movie, Mervyn LeRoy did (Berkeley was only hired as "Musical number designer", and it's considered that MGM held back his more insane/abstract visual ideas compared to Warner and Fox), and only two or three musical numbers appear in the entire movie, all as "onstage" productions.
Among other parodies of the number over the years--by everybody from the Village People to The Muppets--the most recent was in Joel & Ethan Coen's 2016 "Hail Caesar", where Scarlett Johansson as the faux-Williams actress on set has to cut the number's take short before her high dive because of a sudden gas attack...Yuk yuk.  And then a set assistant has to remove the actress's tight-fitting rubber mermaid-tail, with audible "pop"...Oh, my sainted aunt's sides.  Nothing's more rollicking than somebody with issues.

So, what fresh flippin' Technicolor heck IS going on in the number?  Well, that might involve seeing the other 105 minutes of the movie:

The story of "Million Dollar Mermaid" is a straightforward Hollywood showbiz bio of marathon swimmer Annette Kellerman, "the Australian Mermaid"--who first popularized one-piece sport swimsuits into fashion--who went on to invent the water ballet as a star of New York's Hippodrome in the 1900's.
Yeah, but why's she coming out of the pool with sparklers?  And what's with the trapezes?  And the guys in thongs? Um...it's supposed to be one of the shows she did.  At the theater, 'n stuff.  Albeit embroidered upon with a bit of Busby Berkeley license, to liven things up for the movie audience a bit.
(For the record, the real Kellerman wore a mermaid tail in many of her stage ballets and silent films, but Williams in the two hours of "Mermaid" does not.  Kellerman's tail costume was relatively loose-fitting, so neither one had to worry about gas.) 
If it's any consolation to realist cynics, the movie even ends on a relatively un-happy note, with the on-set accident that occurred during filming of Kellerman's 1914 "Neptune's Daughter"--And worse yet, with Williams' Kellerman happily marrying Victor Mature's character, who's been shown to be thoroughly reprehensible up to this point and only lucked into his own real-life fame as a show promoter by accident.  The real Kellerman, btw, didn't think much of Hollywood's version either.

See how it works?:  The goofy stuff is a little more complicated now.   Attaching a plot to an old movie is like newspapers giving a face and a name to a crime victim--A symbol is now a person.  A statistic is now a story.
And in the case of movies, there are a lot of stories, since most of them had to fill the remaining 90 minutes or two hours past the one or two minutes or so that compilations and retrospectives may have forced down your throat.
It's the first tease you learn when you open the Pandora's-box of vintage classics:  The movie you THINK you know, you probably don't.

And it's the first truth in the curiosity that leads to learning, that You Wouldn't Believe What You Don't Know.

The TV Activist, Pt. 2 - I'm Your Binge-Pusherman

Admit it:  When you were kids, it was the one thing you couldn't get that you dreamed of having more than you ever needed for the rest of your life.  
To be able to buy out the toy store.  To have your own basement video arcade.  To be able to stay up till midnight, even on a school night.  To have Richie Rich's pile of cash, when your allowance didn't go far enough.  To have a fleet of sports cars instead of a bike.  Or, like Vern in "Stand By Me", to be able to eat cherry-flavored Pez as the one food anyone ever needed.
And if Mom said that you could only have one or two Oreo cookies with your milk after school since dinner was at 6, you dreamed of the moment you could sit in the corner with the entire package and no milk.  That meant adulthood, and that meant independence.  No more of this "under the same roof" stuff.

When Netflix brought on its Instant digital-subscription service in 2010--inspiring Amazon to follow suit, and Hulu to Plus itself and realize no one was watching video on their desktop--we were introduced to a new independence:  TV episodes you could select off the rack.  No more commercials.  Start and stop times by the remote that let you take bathroom breaks, and let you start over if you rushed back at 8:01.  Why, it was even better than the Tivo.
Most of us had already been watching ad-free multi-episodes off of vintage or season DVD boxsets, but now to have the whole run of the series in front of us for the taking...Back then, Netflix was still connected with StarzPlay, and here I'd had those entire runs of Maverick and Have Gun Will Travel to choose from.  Watching one half-hour a night for a week was now possible, or even two if I dared.  Even if TVLand didn't show them anymore, the streaming services did, so there.
Now, I'm not that extreme a binge-watcher, when I look up reruns on the Big Three...Well, I'm just not.  Attention-span, y'know, I like variety.  I usually line up a half hour of this, and a bit of disk-movie of that, and by then I probably have to get a snack or hit the toilet, and forget what I was in the mood to watch next.

With more and more titles disappearing from Netflix in 2016, I'm more conscious of not gobbling up and finishing anything that I'm not sure will be replaced any time soon--There's still those two other Star Trek series and those last five seasons of Cheers left on my queue (never paid much attention to the Sam & Rebecca arc when it was on, so this'll be all new), and that's good enough of an emergency survival ration alongside the PBS documentaries and those in-between seasons of X-Files for the next few years in case nothing else new or good ever shows up for weeknight viewing.  Waste not, want not.

But to the binge-watcher, wastefully gobbling an entire season like a 4th of July hot-dog eating contest is not only a manly test of endurance and dedication, but a proof of loyalty and enthusiasm as well.  Look up the newest eagerly-awaited season or debut series on Netflix, check the reviews two or three days after it hits, and see how many reviews say "I just binge-watched the series, and it was great!"  To the fan, the entire 13-episode series had to be experienced in two days.  Not 13 weeks.  DAYS.  The entire season arc, from start to finish, had to be completed instantly, in its entirety, before it could be talked about.

Tell a binge-series fan that it might be bad, or wrong, or greedy or childish, and you will see them react as if you criticized their religion:  No one would want to angrily defend their right to couch-potato their favorite TV series, but to criticize the idea of binge-watching was not just behind the times, it was a personal slight on their own modern connected lifestyle that freed them from their parents' generation--It was yet more persecution of the Poor Misunderstood Millennial by the old fogeys who had inflicted the damage they were escaping in the first place.  As if it seemed to be attacking the VERY FOUNDATION of the Internet generation's brave new TV world of selective choices without commercials or airtimes.  Suggest the old-school idea of watching one episode a week, and June Cleaver might just as well be back vacuuming the house in pearls while John Ritter tripped over the couch to laughtracks.

Now that the cookie-jar has been opened, that seems to be the main fallacy that most of us still haven't seem to have grasped in the new age of a la carte subscription-streaming viewing--In our entertainment viewing, we genuinely seem to have lost the ability to conceptualize the difference between having all of something available, and consuming all of something available.  Or between being able to consume some of it or all of it.  
Streaming television brought us freedom, but it's our fault that we still see only the child's idea of "freedom", not the adult's. 

Marketers now recognize the trend, although they're not sure whether to parody it as mindless indulgence, or accept it as what the In Crowd does.  One company that poked some fun at how much they benefitted from the trendy new personal compulsion to destroy one's sleep and social life was the obvious one:  Visine Eye Drops.

The words have literally now become synonymous in our culture:  "To watch" a series is now "To binge-watch" it, and vice versa.  Television can be consumed in no other way...I mean, whaddya, nuts?
If a new season brings three or four new "edgy" Original Programming series to Amazon and Netflix, the hype machine is ready to give us the word.  If it's already been on the air and escaped our notice, it'll be--and I quote--"The hit show you SHOULD be making your next binge-watch!"  Because, like the addict, after the last rush is gone, there must always be The Next.
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/11-tv-shows-from-2014-you-should-bingewatch-right-now/
http://www.thewrap.com/tv-shows-you-should-binge-watch-right-now-from-oitnb-to-better-call-saul-photos/
Now, over the years of old-school network viewing, I've been told many presumptuous and personally-intruding things by network publicists, announcers and commercials about what they'd like me to do in regards to my viewing habits:  I've been told to "don't miss" a show and "join them later" for it, I've been told to "not touch that dial" in order to watch the next show, a while ago I was told to "NB-See Us this fall", and in the occasional rerun, I've even been told to "tune in tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel".  And I've taken it all in the spirit of good hyperbolic fun.  
But I can't think of a time any publicist has ever actually crossed the line and judgmentally told me how I SHOULD be managing my time and living my viewing lifestyle, for their benefit more than mine.  And on no other appeal than that everyone else was doing it.  But then, I was an adult, you see, without my parents, and if all my friends jumped off the roof, I was now free to do so, too.

I challenge the reader to name one single product that has ever actually seriously advertised or endorsed overdosing on the product to unrealistic extremes--The makers of sleeping pills certainly don't.  The makers of Lay's potato chips were only joking when they bet us we couldn't eat just one.  The newest variety of Snickers candy-bar isn't advertised as "The one bar you HAVE to gorge yourself on twelve of!" and even Budweiser beer disclaimers us to "Drink responsibly", knowing that every fraternity college student will gladly do so.

There are two theories for why "You should" has now become "You must", or at least "Well, duh, you already do, don't you?" in the media.  
- One, is the same theory that makes studios believe we're so in love with our cellphones, we'll watch all our movies there, and so in love with social media, we'll rush to tell all our friends about it, and throw the last baby out if the bathwater happens to be a bit soiled:  They don't really have a clue.  

Entertainment executives and marketers aren't really what you would call technologically current:  They may play with a few apps on their Android smartphones, and feel they're in touch with the trendy young anonymous public, but they can't quite put it into normal social context about WHY the public does it.  All they see is that something happened to create a Trend while they were unawares that took off like wildfire, and they don't want to be burned--Since they're not sufficiently qualified to explain the trend, and they're too outnumbered to outwit it, they must be, like the Simpsons quote, "ready to welcome their New Overlords".  

If the execs see that the public has tossed over the free networks for the new world of subscription binge-watching, well, heck, THEY love it too!  C'mon, fellow trend-setting kids, let's all sit around and...binge-watch something on Hulu!  It's the new trend that will put everyone else out of business, so you won't catch us being behind!--Uh, will you?  And then we can discuss it with all our friends on Facebook, and get them to join our Saturday-night binge-watching parties, so we can demographically measure how many there are of you...Er, us!
And nothing kills a trend faster than the public trying to calm down the sudden forcible and overly-friendly mainstream invasion of what had once been their own private indulgence, and reality-check them "Hey, it's okay--We don't really love it that much, 'kay?"

- The other, is the main force that drives most movie and TV entertainment in the 21st century:  It works out to the studio/network's corporate advantage as well.
If you still watch broadcast TV--and that's an understandable "if"--you may notice we've lost a few things since the 90's.  We've lost opening theme songs, as shows now open with a title logo and credits over the opening dialogue.  We've lost end themes, as shows now push scrolling names silently to the side or bottom while they air the promo ads that used to appear between shows.  Oh, and that's the other thing, we've lost any commercial break between the end of one program and the beginning of another.

The idea was to remove anything that would even distract us to change the channel, before the next show would hook us like an elusive rainbow trout.  Because broadcast TV has sponsors, and sponsors need viewers--Network needs viewers watching, and they need viewers hooked. Network TV was grooming us for binge-watching ten years before such a thing had been invented or even imagined.
Cable networks were already imagining it, as they also found that ratings-boosted "blocks" of their most house-marketable shows, by airing two or three episodes of Duck Dynasty or Deadliest Catch back-to-back to appeal to their largest section of franchise fans, also ate up big convenient chunks of the daily schedule that might have otherwise had to be filled by expensive movies or other licensed shows.  Look over most cable TV listings today, like TVLand, TLC or USA Network, and you'll see an average channel's day consist of six different cult-hit series--Air three popular episodes in a row, and it frees up your schedule from that nasty problem of having to make any OTHER shows.
Netflix, in 2010, thought it had a clever way to make viewers watch their TV-episode reruns--Fans complained about fast-forwarding through every opening-credits, so the service added a feature that would "squash" the end-credits TV style, while it showed a ten-second countdown that would automatically jump past the credits and straight into the action of the next episode, without having to click a button.  And so a habit was born:  One episode stuffed onto your plate immediately after the last, and only ten seconds to refuse the waiter.
That's how the trend first started, folks, in case you ever wondered:  Not fandom stunts.  Not compelling storylines.  Not the new freedom of selectable viewing.  Just people too in love with a new technological format, and too lazy to click one darned button.


But hey, if we're all having fun, it can't hurt anybody, right?  Well, that would depend on who or what you see as taking most of the damage.

Broadcast and cable networks no longer make series to satisfy their audience, to make them feel happy or resolved at the end credits--They now seek to do the very dictionary opposite:  They set out to create serial episodes with teasing, unresolved stories that don't make the viewer feel resolved, but tantalized to want the next episode, and the next after that.  Each episode is not a story, but only a chapter in a story leading for months up to "The shocking season finale!"...Which, of course, will be no finale, but the "shock" will be some unexpected jumped-shark twist--such as revealing a good character to be a bad one, or killing off various members of the cast like stray dogs at a shelter--which will entice the viewer into waiting six months for the next season, and demand the show escape cancellation by the network heads.  Other shows, like AMC's American Horror Story, having completed their closed season-story arc, have to start over from scratch with a completely new story, since there was nothing to tantalize that renewed-option contract with. And most viewers, of course, must punish themselves and wait the year building themselves to that fever pitch, especially if, with Netflix or Amazon-original series, they consumed the previous season in one gulp, faster than the producers could film new ones.

The new glut of serial-arcs believes it's following the ground broken by the linked storylines of "24"'s season-long cases, although the public had already been hooked on the Laura Palmer murder on "Twin Peaks" eleven years earlier...And even that believed it was parodying the small-town soap-opera world of Peyton Place.  Even our 70's prime-time soap opera addiction made a brief comeback when a TNT revival of "Dallas" in 2012 brought JR Ewing back to the new world where liking grim, humorless, amoral ensemble serials was acceptable again.  (And who apparently survived his ambiguous gunfight with his "angel" at the end of the 70's series.)
A hundred and seventy-five years ago, Charles Dickens wrote his novels as serials, and fans reportedly gathered at the docks waiting for the last chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop, shouting out "Did Little Nell survive?"...Change that to Jon Snow from "Game of Thrones", and you have the average TV-fandom magazine article today.  Only it's not always the public writing it.

As we move into the fall season, some network execs, such as at ABC and TNT have expressed their idea to move back to "closed-ended" episodes, saying that the current crop of open-ended serials have saturated the market, made series hard to distinguish themselves, and left viewers...unsatisfied. 
But for the most part, the networks have now discovered you have a weakness, and that you can be exploited by it, even if you have to willingly destroy body and soul to pursue satisfaction for it.  If you can, there is a word for what that makes you:  An "addict".
And if their plan is to profit by it to keep their industry alive, that brings up a very obvious word for what that makes them.

Y-your Movies AREN'T Here, They're In Mr. Warner's House!

When I discovered in last week's post (well, I didn't find out, that was a few years earlier, I just pointed it out a week ago) that I shared a common childhood upbringing with George Bailey of the Bailey Savings & Loan, a sudden flood of TV-indoctrinated Jimmy Stewart dialogue inspired me to try and illustrate one of the key points on the Movie Activists' key battlefront.  It's frightening how many people still don't grasp it, are blinded by the shiny promises of advertising copy, or pretend it's not really as frightening as it is.

For those who haven't seen the film (okay, just go with me on that one), the scene in 1946's "It's a Wonderful Life" has Stewart's character, who gave up his boyhood dreams to run the town's traditional bank, trying to establish reason as Depression-era crises put the bank in jeopardy, and start a run of customers demanding their cash back.  (A bit of sermonizing Frank Capra not-so-subtly wanted to slip into the script as '46 America was already facing postwar economics.)  A crisis the town's rich-nasty Ol' Man Potter, of course, plans to exploit for his own business domination.

Even during the 00's economic Meltdown, when Americans were trying to re-educate themselves about basic financial issues, news hosts often found how many people still didn't grasp the basic concepts that most of us should have learned the year we got our first independent summer jobs mowing lawns and drawing cappucinos as teenagers:

Let's say you put a thousand dollars in the bank.  (Again, just go with me on this one, if you have to.)  

At no point will any specific part of your money actually be IN that bank:  If you sign your name on a $5 bill hoping to find it again, it will probably be handed off as change to a total stranger by the next teller transaction five minutes later.

Apart from safe-deposit boxes used for private storage by customers, only a fraction of the bank's assets are ever physically in the bank vault for use at any given time.  The rest is used for the bank's investments, housing loans, local business loans, other customer transactions, and all other business by which a bank generates its interest and income.  

Unlike Scrooge McDuck's money vault, cash assets are not intended to sit in one place and grow moldy, since, as Mr. McDuck told Huey, Dewie and Louie, your money has to circulate, circulate.  

When you deposit a thousand into the bank, what you are actually doing is signing a contractual agreement with the bank that you are allowing them to use your money as they see fit at all times, without your permission--In return for which, including some interest into the bargain, they will recognize $1000 of their assets as reserved for you to use for whatever checks, debit-cards or ATM withdrawals you may need to.  And, of course, you may need to pay them a monthly fee for that privilege, unless they offer you a waiver by following certain obligations to their advantage you also have to voluntarily agree to--Such as keeping a minimum amount of your money in the bank or making a mandatory minimum of business transactions with them, like online bill-pay or direct-deposit.

If you think the money's "yours", try walking past the guards into the vault, picking up the cash, and taking it back with you.  They may object.

That's one thing you can't do.  Here's what the banks can't do (at least with active accounts):

They are never allowed to simply say, at any point convenient for their own business, "Our branch had to downsize the number of accounts we held, so your account was one of the ones our computer deleted, and we just absorbed your money into our assets.  Sorry if that leaves you without a cent, but nothing personal, we just had to make cutbacks."

No matter what happens, you are guaranteed by law to get your money back--Even after the Depression days of the Bailey S&L, FDIC now government-insures every customer will be reimbursed for his savings/checking accounts if the bank goes out of business.  And you don't even have to go across the street to Mr. Potter's.

Studios and digital-movie providers are not banks.  There is no rule that oversees them.  As private entrepreneurs in a new field, they are allowed to make up the rules and be laws unto themselves.

When you give up the right to own a movie on disk by buying a digital title on Amazon or Ultraviolet's cloud library instead, you are sacrificing your right to all personal ownership of that movie, and are contractually buying a right to watch it on the provider's library, for as long as it's available.  And no guarantee is ever offered that it will be.  Trust them.

As part of the new "Digital locker" system of movie availability, Ultraviolet assures us that with all your movies overseen by one central company, you will have, quote, "enduring right" to see those movies on any streaming company linked to UV, even if failed UV-linked distributor services like Target Ticket and MGo eventually go out of business.  

It just keeps slipping their mind to answer the one other obvious question that springs up:  What happens when Ultraviolet goes out of business?  

(The usual answer by most of the press-reps and defenders is, well, that won't happen, because their successful profits went up last year!  Oh, good.  Load off my mind.)

Many studios are now interested in the Digital-locker industry, because it allows them tighter control on their movies.  In the old days, when a customer bought a movie on Blu-ray, that disk was now on his shelf for its indestructible life like a book, and there was nothing the studio could do or say in the matter...They couldn't obtain a search warrant to bust down his door and get it back, after all.

With the new tighter in-house control of digital movies, studios can update the movie's availability for the locker:  When a rare title falls out of print with expired license issues for the studio, it can simply be removed from the catalogue, as if it was never there.  Nothing for Legal to worry about. 

Availability can even be controlled for promotional purposes:  When Fox realized that 2015's "Fantastic 4" would have a troubled box-office opening and objections from fans, they helped remove competition for the opening by temporarily removing 2005-7's earlier (and marginally better, although not by much) Fantastic Four movies from their catalogue for those first troubled two box-office weeks.  That's one advantage to having a monopoly, that one gets to control reality in whatever ways one wants.  

Warner, the former owner of Flixster (now only a 30% share with the majority being sold to Fandango, under Comcast/Universal), has been a very eager promoter of UV's system, and frequently promotes the ease of pre-ordering movies while still in theaters, to give them an early idea of how many physical disks not to manufacture and sell at their own loss.

Walmart owns the Vudu streaming distributor, and even offers the Disk-to-Digital service in their stores to allow customers to convert their disks to streaming for a nominal fee, if the digital format is available...Why pay for your own disk a second time in digital format?  Because it offers more convenience.

Both services have found a unique slogan to repeat in their press copy for cloud digital-locker streaming:  "All Your Movies, Forever".    

And the problem with that slogan is that it's a lie, and not a lie.  It is, in fact, THREE lies.

Wikipedia's listing on UV, for example, notes some selected drawbacks:
- Not all film studios participate in the UV ecosystem
The Walt Disney Company does not provide UV rights with their digital content. Walt Disney recently launched its own competing digital rights locker called Disney Movies Anywhere (powered by keychest) that works with iTunes, Vudu, Amazon Video, and Google Play.
- Not all UV enabled films are available to stream from all UV services
Due to contractual agreements between the studios and the streaming services, some titles are only available to stream from select UltraViolet services. Some titles may not be available on your particular service of choice.

Let's recap:  Not all titles may be available for sale or play in your region.  Availability of titles are at the sole license and discretion of the studio.  No refund will be granted if a movie is no longer available for play on the catalogue, or if the central locker management goes out of business.

You won't find them All.  They're not Yours.  And you have no guarantee they'll be there Forever.  (But, um, they are Movies, so guess that's one out of four they got right.)

And the reason it ISN'T three lies is that by dictionary definition, a "lie" is deliberately deceptive.  When the fib-teller genuinely believes it himself--because he doesn't really use the technology himself, isn't up on the basic details, and just repeats what bit of sales copy he's heard from other reports--it's not lying.  It's either wishful thinking, just not knowing what the heck he's talking about, or being just plain crazy.  But at least being dangerously naive isn't illegal.

As a physical-disk fan, I confess I'm more in the economic theory of Scrooge McDuck:  I love gloating over piles of the shiny round silver things I own, and collect rare treasures, but I also know they must circulate, circulate--I loan copies to friends, get them hooked on titles, keep them available in case anyone needs them, and donate any spare unwanted disks to the library, as charity for other folk in need.

But as to the popularity that we should let anyone else own our movies, because Warner and Walmart persuade us that every physical disk we buy is a cluttering millstone in our house and would be more valuable to us thrown away than alive?...Well, d-don't you see, those ol'-man studios aren't selling their digital accounts to us, they're buying us!  And why?  Because we're cutting in on their business, that's why; they want to keep you watching their availability of titles, at the prices they want to charge, while they don't have to pay a cent of their own, and make themselves a bargain--They know our disks own the movies and they don't!  And that's what's got 'em scared!

If those studios get a hold of the movie distribution industry, w-why, there won't be another classic movie ever put on disk again--They've already got everything tied up everywhere else, with their movies locked out of HBO, Netflix, the TV networks, the whole deal!  You, Mr. Martini, you remember having to watch those movies on Amazon's library, with those plain old broadcast-HD prints that weren't any better than you could get on cable, how much did they make you pay for those?  Had to buy them, didn't you, because they didn't feel like they wanted to rent them to you?...And you, Bert, remember having to pay $29 for that Vudu "bonus combo", that stuck on just one or two little extra featurettes that were on the disk anyway, a fat lot of good they cared about what you wanted!

A-and how'd you like that new streaming option that was going to make your movie look "better than in the theaters", because they told you everything was going to be on UHD streaming, but you didn't have the right bandwidth connection for it!...And when you finally got one, watching the darn things shot your overuse bill to where you couldn't afford to do it more than once a month, and then the ISP started cutting back your connection!  Think a disk would've put you through all that?

Now, now, folks, we can get through this all right, but we gotta work together, if we care about this town!  We have to remind ourselves what's really important, we gotta have faith and love for our movies, or darnit, we're just gonna end up losing EVERYTHING!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to my collection:

(goes to shelf, picks up disks of House of Wax 3D, and Disney Treasures: Dr. Syn)

(mwah!)...Oh, you beautiful darlings.