Moguls & Studios: Part I

Before I get into the meat of yet another series, quick congratulations to the Toronto Underground Cinema, which is a year old.

I interviewed co-owner Charlie Lawton prior to the cinema’s grand opening in 2010, and it bodes well that the city continues to enjoy a diverse group of indie cinemas that are giving cineastes what they want without ersatz IMAX-ish screens, re-rendered 3D engagements, and charging admissions a few hairs below $20 smackaroons.

I think the studios were salivating over the potential of prices cresting into the $20+ range this year, but that hasn’t happened… yet.

See Jack smile... until you utter the word "No."

Moving on, I’ve uploaded a review of TCM’s Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood [M] (Warner Home Video) which provides one of the best overviews of the industry town’s development, particularly for mid-level and newcomers to film history.

I still find it ironic that the total vertical integration model could never be quashed by the U.S. Government. In the forties, studios were slammed for block-booking and later told to divest themselves of their theatre chains in the forties (aka the Paramount Decree), but by 2011 the companies have evolved into the convergence models dreamed up by their founders; they don’t own talent agencies nor groom their own stable of above-the-line talent anymore, but in terms of production, from the point of pre-production seed money to the Blu-ray / DVD you’re watching right now, it’s all one fluid system.

One theme that comes up in the series’ finale, and raised again in the related panel discussion on the DVD set, is Hollywood’s predictable response to Something New – which isn’t exclusive to the mogul mentality.

Fear came from free radio shows, sound films, widescreen processes, Technicolor, free TV, pay TV, home video, DVD, and digital technologies, resulting in a knee-jerk reaction that ‘it’s all going to kill the movies as we know it.’

Series writer / producer Jon Wilkman makes a sharp little point in the DVD set’s last panel discussion: the various trends and challenges over the past decades have brought the industry full circle to a point no one quite expected.

Moguls & Movie Stars begins with stills of curious people looking at stereoscopic photos through a viewer, and maybe 100 years later that personal relationship with media is back, akin to you holding up an iPhone or any smart phone, and looking at media. It’s gone from images held in front of you to movie palaces and grand audio-visual experiences, and now people are comfy watching media whenever and however they want – and that lack of control scares the establishment.

It’s not knowing what you want, how you want to see it, and what to charge. Should it come with a digital copy, or should you be able to download the file from a studio server with an access code? What should be the final price? Will there be user fees? Expiration dates? And what will our viewing behaviour be like 2 years from now?

Behaviour and technology go hand in hand, because they feed off each other. We need something better or less annoying, and along comes a solution. The problem is sort of like the old axiom where four other screenwriters are working on the same idea you’re pounding out on the keyboard; many talented minds are trying to figure out ways to make things better and faster for themselves, and the solutions sometimes run contrary to issues of ownership when those ideas go mainstream.

Wilkman’s series is both a fun history lesson and a stealth cautionary note to the establishment to learn from the past and adapt instead of quash threats, because history has shown some of the biggest perceived challenges opened up substantive income streams; only a few practical minds recognized that selling product to TV and producing original content for multimedia platforms was a good thing.

Walt Disney didn’t have a massive studio in the fifties, but he had a back catalogue of titles and characters he could exploit in movies and TV, and moving production to the Idiot Box probably saved the company because it pushed its product into the living rooms of families, and fostered the Disney brand - from movies, music, shows and toys and a merchandising empire unequaled by anyone, including George Lucas.

(Of course, I could raise the issue of the Disney empire lobbying successfully to extend the copyright law from 50 to 70 years after a creator’s death, but that just creates an upset tummy, whichever way one leans.)

Moguls & Movie Stars marks the first of another ongoing series here about movie moguls and studios, and if you read the review, you’ll find at the end a series of titles – biographies, documentaries – also of note, some of which I’ll cover now and then with references to extant books worth snapping up.

Incidentally, the best series on the studios, incidentally, was published more than 20 years ago in a large coffee table size by Octopus Books. Each volume contains a detailed preface on a studio’s founding, and chapters that assembled films produced and also released by said studio per decade. The films are accompanied by a photo, and a concise yet compelling synopsis. Each chapter includes a decades highlights preface, and the indexes offer title and personnel searches.

Awesome series for bibliophiles which spanned Columbia, Disney, MGM, Paramount, RKO, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Bros. A rival publisher stole some thunder with their own tome on Twentieth Century-Fox, but it’s a tepid effort.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Turnabout North of the 49th

'No screwball comedies for you!'

TCM’s salute to Hal Roach this month is a great intro to the producing force that brought Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together to create one of the greatest comedy teams in film, not to mention countless other teams, troupes, and series that were released by various studios (mostly MGM) during Roach’s heyday, the 30s and 40s.

TCM, in effect, is one of the few – if not the main – source for classic Hollywood films that used to air in prime time and after hours on indie stations when they weren’t showing syndicated programs. Many film fans in a pre-home video era could see classics in second run theatres, 16mm rentals, or by staying up late at night to catch the huge variety of titles sold to TV back in the 50s in large packages.

In the present era, where so much product is out there and more old product had fallen into the public domain realm (well, sort of, considering copyright limits keep getting extended beyond reasonable periods) you’d think whatever is listed on TCM isn’t subject to rights issues between Canada and the U.S., but that ain’t so.

Most of the Hal Roach titles screening in January aren’t available to Canadian subscribers, and with few stations here showing old movies in such volume and variety, and so little classic films being released on commercial DVDs in North America by the major studios, Canadians are being left out.

Usually what happens is a substitute title is slotted where the problem title was supposed to be. TCM doesn’t change their ‘coming soon’ bumpers because the material ultimately comes from a main feed, and there’s no sense in changing all those bumpers for a market 1/10th of the States.

The most amusing example of a singular film that never makes it to air on TCM’s Canadian channel [TCM-C] is Carol Reeds The Third Man. Actually, many of Reed’s late forties/early fifties films get blocked, because there’s either no rights holder in Canada, or someone does own the rights, but is a pinhead for not being aware of their ownership and/or for not negotiating some agreement to permit said problem title to appear here.

Third Man as always been a headache on home video here because the DVD and Blu-ray were imports, and from the angle of the film’s last distributor, Criterion, the film had a limited availability because the Blu-ray went OOP within a few years of its release. The title is currently available on BR only, via Lionsgate (courtesy of their Canal Plus agreement), and Maple carries it domestically, but in terms of TCM-C, it’s blocked out.

This of course brings me to Hal Roach, whose films were primarily distributed by MGM as well as RKO – two libraries mostly owned by Warner Bros.

Or not.

Roach’s original Little Rascals shorts are distributed on home video by the Weinsteins, whereas the later forties shorts are via WHV on their Warner Archives on-demand brand. Most of the Laurel & Hardy feature films are available on DVD via KINO (who also have distribution in Canada), and some of those titles do appear on TCM-C.

The silent shorts are available from Image, but the sound shorts are apparently owned by Hallmark in the U.S., and to the immense annoyance of fans, the label’s done nothing with the films.

25-30 years ago, the sound shorts used to air on NBC’s Buffalo affiliate weekends, and I’d tape those beat-up 16mm shorts each week because they literally went through the A-Z catalogue of available titles, and the roster was considerable.

The only way to buy those shorts today are on Region 2 European DVDs, so this past Xmas I splurged about $35-40 on a complete set from Britain, courtesy of Universal. These shorts were part of TCM’s Hal Roach salute, but they were also blocked north of the 49th parallel, leaving Canadians out in the cold again.

Topper (1937) is probably my favourite comedy because years ago I rented it with my dad from the Fairview library on 16mm, and watched it endlessly. TVOntario also aired the film, in addition to the sequels Topper Returns (1941) and Topper Takes a Trip (1938) as part of Elwy Yost’s Saturday Night at the Movies and Magic Shadows series.

The first and third films are available on DVD via Lionsgate in the U.S., and the third also came out solo via Image, but the second film is apparently in rights hell. All three films aired last week on TCM, but TCM-C blocked them.

TVO aired the films a few times when I was a kid, and 30 years later the movies are without an owner in Canada. Weirdly, one can see a scene from Topper in TCM’s Media Room gallery. You can glimpse it, but it’s still forbidden fruit because of rights mismanagement.

TVO also aired One Million B.C. (1940) with Victor Mature (“Loo-a-na!!!”) and silky Carole Landis, but that title is also part of the no-show rule, as are several series I’ve never even heard of, including the Thelma Todd-Patsy Kelly shorts, the Todd-Zasu Pitts shorts, and more painfully, something called Screen Directors Playhouse where major A-list directors (Leo McCarey, George Marshall, Ida Lupino, Fred Zinnemann and John Ford, to name a few) helmed episodes of this short-lived, 35-episode TV series.

Screening this week is Turnabout, a 1940 screwball comedy in which a bickering couple make a wish that’s granted by a Buddha-like statue in their bedroom, resulting in each person inhabiting the other’s body. I haven’t seen the film in maybe 30+ years, and it’s also being blocked in spite of being aired, er, 30+ years ago on TVO.

I did read the original novel by Thorne Smith (same author of the Topper novels), but it’s a terribly dated, awfully sexist artifact with a one great concept and one good paragraph about manicuring toes.

The programming switcheroo isn’t just native to Roach’s catalogue – the aforementioned Carol Reed films (several distributed by MGM) – are blocked, as are some odd pre-WWII Paramount titles owned by Universal, such as the classic Fredric March-Veronica Lake fantasy-comedy I Married a Witch (1942), which also aired a great deal on TVO when TV sets were made of bricks, people sat on piles of loose straw, and TV signals were broadcast using aluminum-coated fishing wire that received aural blips and bleeps from some big-mouth on the corner block, shouting into a wide-rimmed megaphone.

Which begs the question: exactly whom does the copyright rules serve when 60-70 years after a film’s release, it can’t be shown by what’s become the central specialty broadcaster of classic films?

And in the case of the Laurel & Hardy films, it’s even more daft that the American home video distributor is sitting on the catalogue as the North American fans of the iconic comedians age, and at this point have bought domestic grey market or legit releases from overseas. The fans sort of win in the end, while the U.S. owner snoozed, and lucked out.

That’s a case of owner apathy – which happens with equal banality in Canada when a rights holder blocks the release of a home video title with which they’re not doing anything themselves, or produce their own substandard edition – but in the realm of broadcasting, it’s a more cruel cheat because unlike a DVD or Blu-ray, you can’t ‘import’ a signal.

As much as I enjoy TCM, it is consistently disheartening when my eyes widen after spotting a particular title, and then get really small from a growing frown after checking the Canadian schedule and finding not Laurel & Hardy, but substitutes Wheeler and Woolsey (who are perhaps 1/100th as funny and L&H).

Copyrights should be set at 50 years after a piece’s release. You, the owner, have 50 years to make money, archive the best prints and transfers, and create a nest egg for future endeavors. After that, you must compete within the international public domain and prove to consumers your print is better than the others.

It’ll ensure the film doesn’t disappear into oblivion, is priced according to a fair market value ($10 versus $20-$30 as an on-demand import), and forces rights holders to manage and exploit their wares, because there’s nothing more frustrating for fans of any creative work than seeing it blocked, or breeding dust in a file cabinet.

As more classic, specialty and antique titles make their way to digital and on-demand formats with region-specific distribution channels, there is a trend underway that’s very disturbing: the trove of films that once glutted TV and later home video is being redirected into controlled venues that cost more than the product is generally worth.

And it will backfire once the fans willing to pay a premium have reached their own saturation and budgetary limitations.

There is a theorem in which the doubling of an item’s price might cost a vendor 50% of its clientele; the vendor still makes the same, but he's pushed away clients who won’t come back, and will seek other and cheaper products.

The thrill of the search stems from hard work and discovery, not getting as far as the front door and finding it locked, with some partially hidden figure clearly asleep, and completely oblivious to your politely persistent knocking.

No one benefits from this silliness.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Four Days. Classic Films.

Sunday marked the end of TCM’s Classic Film Festival, a four-day event spread out over a handful of movie palaces in Hollywood that premiered with a digital screening of the restored Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born (1954), and closed with Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).

Being about classic films, the festival was, in some ways, a test as to whether a brand name (TCM) could be used to not only showcase (mostly) film print screenings at premium prices in theatres, but help publicize the latest film restoration by studios prior to home video releases.

Star is a high-profile work headlined by one of cinema’s major icons (Garland), whereas Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) is an oddball work by a little-known director, originally distributed on DVD by indie label KINO.

In the past, restoration of classics such as Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Anthony Mann’s El Cid (1961), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi noir Blade Runner (twice), Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo / The Leopard (1963) toured the world as regal, limited run engagements in major cities. And on the big screen.

Less glossy reconstructions and restorations – Erich Von Stroheim’s silent classic Greed (1924), or Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) – more or less slid straight to cable TV and video, respectively, if indeed they were given film festival or limited runs in select cities.

Flip to 2010, and as the major chains continue to devote screen time to blockbusters and 3D escapism, it seems likely that, unless there’s a local film society in your home town, you may not see the latest crop of restorations – even the high profile gems – on the big screen.

The Varsity Cinemas in Toronto did a series of ‘test’ screenings this past winter in which a handful of classics were digitally screened from reportedly Blu-ray discs, but it’s not the same as catching film prints of Jaws (1975) at the now-dead Uptown Backstage with a packed house, Alien (the original 1979 theatrical version) at the now-dead Uptown 1, Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (1971) and Black Sunday (1960), as well as The Brood (1979) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974) at the Bloor Cinema.

The Ontario Cinemathque has themed director retrospectives, but catching a bit of vintage sleaze, gore, or seventies disaster flicks seems dicey, since the product within those genres doesn’t quite measure up to a month-long tribute to Godard, Sirk, Bergman, Kurosawa, or Ozu.

What was screened at TCMCFF was decidedly mainstream and non-chi-chi, and the selection was aimed at the average classic film fan who also spends a fair time watching TCM for a daily/weekly classic film fix. That’s not a bad thing, because the program featured a balance of foreign, silent, cult, previously lost, and AFI-listed films.

Basically something for everyone, including standard classics as Casablanca (1943), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and North by Northwest (1959), not to mention Godard’s Breathless (1960), Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), and the epic Good Earth (1937), a pseudo-Asian drama with white folks hidden under politically incorrect makeup.

Some of the screenings included guest appearances (check out the TCMCFF website for blog and show details) and some related lectures, but by early accounts, the event was a success (see Variety’s just-in report), and a validation of vintage Hollywood fare.

Here’s a question: Can something like TCM’s festival happen in Toronto, outside of the TIFF umbrella?

Are there enough fans willing to bypass a DVD rental just to catch classics on the big screen?

Is it worth a theatre’s gamble to rent a print of Joseph Mankiewicz’ Cleopatra (1963) – all four hours of it – for a one-time screening?

TCM’s festival include Cleopatra on the big screen, not to mention the 1930 widescreen Grandeur version of The Big Trail (which is simply stunning), Elia Kazan’s Wild River (a neglected drama with exceptional colour lighting), 2001: A Space Odyssey (which never came to Toronto during the film’s touted anniversary / restoration run prior to the DVD and Blu-ray launch), a cleaned up North by Northwest, a print of the 1945 blazing Technicolor noir thriller Leave Her to Heaven, the newly restored The Red Shoes (1948), and the recently restored Metropolis (1927).

Those are the film’s I’d have caught, since some are likely once-only screenings.

Studios have a tendency to reissue classics in theatres to publicize the looming home video release, but there are looming issues: unless it’s Casablanca, widescreen and stereo sound trumps an old 1.33:1 black & white film. Why? Because grain is visible in HD, the image is square, and some Luddites do not like black & white when they’ve spent a few thousand dollars on a HD home theatre system designed to bring out the crisply rendered audio and video nuances of a movie.

As studios slowly shift their classic film catalogues away from DVDs towards their own cable channels and digital download venues, they should realize some of the films screened at TCM’s festival could and should be used to publicize film libraries currently emerging as digital broadcasts and downloads.

By making these films available – as prints, or as HD theatrical masters – it keeps the Hollywood catalogue alive, much in the way the Cinematheques around the world reprogram Godard, Sirk, Bergman, Kurosawa, or Ozu. Those films remain draws because the themed screenings keep those films within the consciousness of film fans.

If HD masters were created for broadcast, then they should also be available for rental. Blade Runner, as screened at the Mount Pleasant Theatre in November of 2007, looked and sounded grand in HD, and I can imagine how great The Big Trail, Leave Her to Heaven, Argento’s 1970 debut Bird with a Crystal Plumage (Storaro shot that one, you know), or Rollercoaster (1977) would look in that theatre.

As reported at in70mm.com, The German city of Schauburg will hold a Sensurround film festival, June 5-6, this summer. Battlestar Galactica (1978), Rollercoaster (1977), and Midway (1976) will be digital projections, whereas Earthquake (1974) will be from a 70mm print. The German audio will be accompanied by English subtitles, and the 40 Hz audio will blast from vintage Sensurround gear.

This is happening not in Hollywood, not in New York, and certainly not in Toronto. And people will trek across borders because it’s a unique event, which begs the question again: Can something like TCM’s festival – be it classic, horror, cult, widescreen, or blasted Sensurround – happen in Toronto?

Four days. Rarely screened classics. In Toronto.

Anyone?

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

TJFF and TCMCFF

Thursday April 22 marked the midpoint between the Toronto Jewish Film Festival and the Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.

TCM’s festival (Thursday April 22 – Sunday April 25) marks another evolutionary stage for the specialty TV channel that boasted (and still does offer) classic movies, uncut, commercial-free, and in widescreen. From books to merchandise and tie-ins with Warner Home Video as well as the Warner Archives Collection, it seemed natural that the channel (which has domestic variants in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain, France, Latin America, Asia, and Germany) would take a stab at a film festival.

There remain countless neglected films, unrestored classics and rarely seen gems to discover, and certainly one advantage is to see them on the big screen in classic Hollywood movie palaces. Including film prints.

For TCM, it shows them to be a patron of the commercial arts, and that’s not a bad stance, since TCM’s offerings are essentially classic Hollywood fare, and their film festival is the perfect launching pad for recent restorations to make their international or North American premieres, which in turn help publicize the DVDs and Blu-ray releases coming soon.

TCMCFF isn’t a blatant commercial event, as it does bring attention to film preservation and the results of hard work and results from much-needed financial support. Theatrical runs also help sell physical home video product, and as digital downloads continue to erode the sale of hardcopies (and perhaps eclipse them), theatrical runs will be the deluxe presentation of a film.

Kind of like the old road show engagements of event films in theatres at premium prices, as was popular during the sixties, except with far shorter theatrical windows. Roughly $20 gets you the IMAX or 3D version, before it slides to home video.

In Toronto, there’s a problem with those deluxe theatrical venues; we don’t have enough centrally located IMAX screens (er, we have ONE), for example, and the bulk of the multi-screen houses have been relocated to the Dundas line, leaving areas like Bloor and Yonge weaker.

(That intersection, as well as a long stretch of Bloor, once housed several big screen theatres before they were razed and replaced by condos. Maybe the boost in density might prompt a rethink, but if the inhabitants are strictly property investors and seasonal inhabitants, a deluxe theatre centre ain’t gonna happen.)

In any event, in the case of TCM, they have the venues and audience base for classic films, whereas Toronto has been oddly ignored by the U.S. when it comes to premieres and touring classics. The norm of Los Angeles-New York-Toronto for premiere North American engagements is kind of gone, and the test will be whether we’ll get some of the goodies premiering at TCMCFF, or will have to wait for the home video edition instead of that one-time theatrical run.

Top-lining the first day of TCMCFF’s line-up is the restored version of A Star Is Born (1954), which was first reconstructed as close as possible to its original nearly 3-hour length in 1983, but given an overhaul using contemporary technologies. That film is joined by Monkey Business (1952), Casablanca (1948), the rarely seen Frank Capra adventure-drama Dirigible (1931), and the Janet Gaynor comedy-musical Sunnyside and Up (1929).

With the exception of the last two, everything else is available on DVD, in case you want to program your own selective TCMCFF. (Casablanca is also available on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video, who will release A Star Is Born on DVD and BR June 22nd.)

Also worth hunting down is Ronald Haver’s 2002 book, A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration for a detailed background of what was, at the time, one of the biggest archival hunts in film history – the missing footage of this once-maligned classic.

Over the weekend, I’ll have reviews of some of the titles still unavailable in North America, but released on DVD in Europe. For details of the goodies being offered, check out TCMCFF’s website.

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The TJFF began last Saturday April 17, but the big event was the Canadian premiere of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a 1948 documentary of the postwar trials that was designed as a de-Nazification tool for the allies. There exists Russian and German versions, but the English version was never completed, as it was thought the contents – which includes some concentration camp footage – was unsuitable for schools, and an American populace the government felt was better served focusing on rebuilding the economy than dour WWII horrors.

Reconstructed in 2009 from various sources with a new narration track, Nuremberg premiered to a sold out house, but the TJFF have slated a second screening this Sunday (the festival’s last day) at the Cineplex Odeon Sheppard Cinemas at Yonge & Sheppard. (Check TJFF’s website for further details.)

No word on whether the guest roster from the premiere - restoration project director Sandra Schulberg, restoration picture/sound editor Josh Waletzky, and CBC Journalist Evan Solomon - will be present, but those unable to get tickets the first time around will be able to catch the film on the big screen, and absorb its intensity before it inevitably makes its way to DVD. (More info on the film can also be found at the film's official website.)

This year’s offerings are quite diverse, and perhaps the two main strands that dominate the content are the consequences of the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic doctrines, and Jewish artistry and culture in comic books and humour.

Some of the films have repeat screenings, and the venues include the Al Green Theatre, the Bloor Cinema, Cineplex Odeon Sheppard Centre Cinemas, and the SilverCity Richmond Hill Cinemas.

I’m thematically grouping some of the reviews of films I’ve seen at the festival, and will have the first set up Saturday: The Brothers Warner (recently released on DVD by WHV), Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood (recently aired on PBS), and Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, a Canadian premiere.

Lastly, I’ll also have a round-up of this week’s recent soundtrack releases, followed by several CD reviews.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com