This is not written with great deal of new research, but through my own observations.
It seems that, since their beginnings, movies were thought to have a shelf life. The shelf life was long in our grandparent’s era when movies opened in big cities and the actual prints were circulated throughout the country. But once you saw the movie, the producers thought that was it. Some movies took longer to play out, but we can see that there was no system in place to preserve and protect these movies. And many have faded away.
Of course there were always revival theatres and events, which brought back popular movies, but they were the exception.
TV, it has been said, is where movies go when they die. New TV stations, of the early 1950s and 1960s dug up hundreds of old movies and showed them all day. Until the early 1970s TV stations signed off soon after midnight, but when broadcasting went 24 hours, so many black and white old movies were shown.
Many old movies have just gone away. If you pull out microfilm of big city newspapers from the 1940s and 1950s you will see ads and reviews in the movie section, some with major stars, that you have never even heard of. Film company failures, legal reason and lack of preservation (and perhaps lack of interest) I suspect are the leading causes. If there is a dollar to be made Hollywood would mine those pics.
Our parents and grandparents thought that TV, or anything broadcasted, should be free. So they did not mind the bad prints, the cut up stories (sometimes beyond comprehension) and the commercial interruptions. It was free, it was on TV, and these depression babies watched it. As TV became bigger in the 1960s NBC had Saturday Night at the Movies where they showed a recent movie, all cut up and censored. Soon “recent” movies in Prime Time became very popular and older movies thrived on local stations at all times.
When cable was introduced, in the 1960s, it was first done to bring broadcast TV, the network stations, to localities that simply could not get these station over the air. It was against the FCC rules to charge for “free” TV so cable started movie channels. You paid for the movies but got the broadcast stations for free. That is how HBO started on Cablevision (its original owners) on Long Island. As HBO and similar stations got more popular, broadcast TV pressured The FCC to allow Cable movie stations to show ONLY movies younger than three years and older than ten. So HBO showed mostly the newer ones (it was just one station then) and AMC showed the older. (There was no TCM then.)
Our parent’s generation was never wild about cable; they were going to have to pay for something they thought should be free, although they never got the complete uninterrupted, uncensored movies before. But they were used to the full screen, black and white movies that had no nudity, few social issues or “bad words.” That’s what they saw when they were young in the theatres, that is what they wanted to see at home. Several movies, including Superman II and Black Sunday, had to film alternate ending to get past FCC censorship.
The next big step was the VCR. The VCR time shifted movies and helped eliminate commercials. It also created a huge market where movies, old and new, could be rented or bought. The industry was very much against the rentals and fought it, but a few things developed:
1. It showed that a new generation of “viewers” the generation born after 1950 was willing to pay for TV viewing, one way or another. Now everything on TV has a price. Not just TV but now we have subscription radio. We also pay for receiving phone calls, when we only used to pay for making them.
2. There were HUGE amounts of articles stating that VCR sales would fail because people only want to see a movie once. Music can be repetitive but, all these experts predicted, no one wanted to see a movie more than once. Obviously, none of them had children who wanted to see “the Wizard of Oz” ten times in a row.
3. It really showed that rentals would dominate, not direct sales. This is perhaps because the price of video tapes, perhaps nearly $100 in today’s market was too high. Perhaps people just wanted to see most movies every once in a while. And those depression babies DID NOT run out and buy VCRs either.
4. Along with cable, the VHS explosion lead to the closing of many movie there’s, especially the ones that got the movies months after their big release. Originally a movie would come out on tape a year after it hit the theatres. This was done for many reasons but mostly so that the release of the tape did not interfere with the worldwide airings, and local theater airings of the movies. Even today, the theatre owners want a longer lag time.
The laser disc era, beginning in 1981 or so, showed that there was a market for better looking movies, widescreen, with good sound that, frankly, cost more. But this was going to be a very small part of the market. Yet, the achievements made for laser would be the foundation of the DVD (deleted scenes, separate commentary, interviews).
Certainly the VCR changed everything. With the rise of cable, movies on network TV began to disappear. Modern movies also had difficulty getting past the 1940s censorship TV had.
In the mid 1980s movie studios began to recognize that their biggest asset was not NEW movies but their library of movies. Ted Turner bought MGM for its library, started Turner Movie Classics and quickly sold its movie making assets. Of course Time-Warner later bought Turner’s movie library and cable stations. Network TV execs said that they were not threatened by cable, but by the local broadcast stations that were popping up over the country, showing reruns and movies.
The DVD hit the stores in 1998 and really changed so much. First, DVD’s killed laser instantly and those stores and departments stores closed quickly. DVD cost roughly 20-25% that of the laser and 50% of the VHS tape. But DVDs were on sale everywhere: Drug stores, appliance stores, grocery stores, and of course, at the biggest category killer of all time: Amazon. Wow, did that lead to a huge domino effect of the video stores closing. It took time but DVD’s also began to put out inexpensive “sets” of movie series, TV series, and related movies and movies not so related.
DVD changed the movie theatre business. More movie theatres closed, now movies open big, all over the country, even the world, at the same time. And, instead of waiting a year, movies get released on DVD three or four months later, where they make at least 40% of their profits.
By the way, the people who claimed VHS would fail because people didn’t want to watch the same movie twice also disappeared. Of the theatres that failed, it seems that the porn market took the biggest hit. Of course, video tape and their rentals (every video store in New York had a “back room”) had also hurt that part of the industry, but the ability to buy these discs anonymously, cheaply over the internet, seemed to kill it. (I just googled Adult DVD!!! Boy is it a big market!!!!).
During the height of the VHS phase, I bought a book on the Superman films. It said that the Superman serials of the 1940s might never be seen again. Well, DVDs made serials practical to produce and I have seen a dozen of them.
Of course, a decade later Blu-Ray appeared. While DVD was made for the old fashioned 480i square TV, Blu Ray was made for the modern TV set and home theatre. Again, this most hurt the movie theatre because HOME THEATRE can be more fun than the terrible movie theatres, with their commercials and coming attractions and coming attractions and coming attractions.
There is a sad note here, of how movies get lost. In the beginning I mentioned how many movies from the 1940s are lost to us, never appearing on TV. Many that appeared on TV never made it to VHS and many films on VHS and Laser never made it to DVD. And now we are losing movies not on Blu ray.
I loved small movies including Avalon, Nobody’s Fool, The Summer of 42 and so many others. They are not out on Blu Ray and may never be. It took until this week for the Black Stallion to be out.
The Complete Betty Boop and the Godfather Trilogy (all three movies, edited chronologically) were out on Laser but not on DVD or Blu Ray. MGM released sets of their “shorts” on Laser but no other medium.
Even some of the commentaries made for Laser never made it to DVD or Blu Ray.
So when you pop in that Blu ray, remember this line from the “Summer of 42”, which you can only see on DVD,
“Life is made up of small comings and goings, and for everything we take with us there is something we leave behind.”
We may be leaving behind a lot of great movies.
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