I started reading a book on "cult" cinema written by people who worked for TCM Underground and it is just making me sad.
So much is out of print, not on streaming, and barely or not at all available through illicit means.
And these are films that people are writing Books about. What hope does a film that didn't catch the attention of a critic have? (Often, the answer is none!)
Capitalism has decreed that we live in an era where distribution is simpler than it has ever been, where the hurdles for bringing a film to an audience are lower than ever, where everyone has a camera in their pocket that can outshine the Best digital cameras that existed 20 years ago, where a hobbiest with a piece of free software can produce special effects that rival or surpass big budget spectacles of years past, and anyone can just start a television station ( see https://communitymedia.network) and yet ...
Fewer people than ever are actually making movies! It feels like independent cinema is effectively dead. Low and mid budget movies are a rarity. And to top it all off, physical media releases are the exception, rather than the rule.
In a world of digital distribution, manufacturing on demand, and multi gigabit home internet, the fact that it's more likely that a film is impossible to see than it is that I can easily find it is absurd.
It does not cost much money to host a DVD quality copy of a film on a streaming service. Storage is cheap, compression is very good. If no one is watching it, it's basically free at scale, a rounding error. HD and 4k get in to slightly more expensive territory, but logistically there's no good technical reason that every film ever made isn't available for us to stream at any given moment, and even less technical reason that I can't buy it on a DVD-R or whatever.
(Obviously, the barrier here is not technical, it's "legal" and "economic" which means it's bullshit.)
Motion picture distribution and productuon companies have always been a hotbed for scams, financial shenanigans, and outright fraud.
The boom in independent cinema of the 60s and 70s was a tax dodge.
The death of modern film is down to financial shenanigans. It has nothing to do with consumers or demand or art, and it certainly has nothing to do with Markets. It's about consolidation of capital and financial shenanigans.
Part of the problem here is that movies almost always come with super lopsided contracts. The studios tend to retain exclusive distribution rights and IP ownership, and they don't even have to promise to actually release the thing.
Directors and producers tend to get paid based on how well the film does after it is released, and studios get to define what "release" means, and frequently also what "well" means.
(Create space and Lulu let people self publish books which can be purchased by other people. For a fee, books published through Lulu and Createspace enter the Ingram catalog, which is where most bookstores place their orders.
The upshot here is that publishing on YouTube is roughly analogous to sharing fiction via Tumblr. There is no analog for createspace or Lulu. Vimeo comes close, I guess, but even that has more in common with Medium.)
And I don't think Lulu or createspace are benevolent here. Createspace specifically is just Amazon, and Amazon is evil.
But these platforms provide a way for indies to self publish and potentially profit, without signing away the totality of their rights, and to still potentially be carried in stores!
This option is basically nonexistent in video, and video stores are largely dead.
The takeaway here from most folks has been pro piracy. This is not a bad take.
Piracy = preservation becuase preservation = future access. Often only the pirated version of a thing survives. This was the case with myriad silent films, but perhaps most famously nosferatu. It was the case with Doctor Who. It is the case with The Drew Carrey show. It is the case with Daria.
In many instances, piracy is the only path to preservation.
(Hell, GOG and Sony and Nintendo have all released things that were clearly sourced from pirated copies. Even for material they own, often piracy is simpler than the alternative.)
But several of the films I'm looking for are also difficult to find via piracy, and when they are found they are exceptionally low quality. A thing must be released in order for it to be preserved.
I'm sure the problem is just as bad for films made outside the US. I'd love to see a good copy of Baytekin: Fezada Çarpışanlar, for example, or Dracula in Istanbul, but every copy in circulation looks like it was encoded to a VCD in 1996, and they're all sourced from TV rips with lower third graphics and logos etc.
The reason I get so hung up on this stuff is because I've personally watched a ton of early US television just disappear.
I digitize episodes of old TV shows. Usually, I can get to them before they curl up and separate or turn to dust. Sometimes I can't.
For a lot of TV programs pre-1960, they haven't been digitized or preserved at all. I do most of my work on Space Patrol. Space Patrol aired 5-6 days a week from March of 1950 through some time in 1955. Way less than half of the produced episodes survive.
I've digitized a few dozen myself, and preserved some of the associated merchandise. I have one of the original costumes, and several screen used props. There's me and a few other folks trying to track this stuff down, and most of the rest of the people involved aren't sharing.
@ajroach42 Question for you on that, assuming they're still good, my spouse has A LOT of VHS tapes he recorded episodes of tv shows, movies, etc. on. (like several 6' tall/3' wide shelves full). I can't find any good way to get that to digital. Is there one?
So fast or fewest touches mostly means hiring someone to do the transfer, which ain't cheap.
Best quality means building a thing that hooks on to the RF line of your VCR and captures the raw RF off the tape. Maximum quality possible, but slow and fidly and very diy.
Cheapest: public libraries sometimes have archival/digitization stations. Ditto local universities. Worth calling and asking.
Reasonable price/quality balance basically means getting an okay VCR and an okay capture card, and doing the work.
A decent VCR in good working order is going to run $150 shipped, or $10 at your local thrift store (assuming they still accept them as donations.) Sometimes free on FB marketplace or similar.
A good enough capture card can be as simple as an Easy cap USB dongle. They're like $10 on Amazon. Run that in to OBS and save it to disk.
There are a dozen better ways to do it, but I consider preservation efforts to be a real case of perfect as the enemy of good enough. If you find something particularly noteworthy, give it a second pass.
(Others may have strong feelings in other directions. Your mileage may vary, etc etc etc.)
@ajroach42 THANK YOU! I might tell him to start haunting the local thrift stores for a possible VCR - otherwise ebay????
And awesome, I wasn't sure if those dongles they sold on Amazon would be worth it. Sounds like they would be.
He has no problems playing the videos and watching them. :) And I've been using OBS and want to experiment more with using it to create videos beyond streaming this summer.
@KitMuse@ajroach42 Don't overlook garage sales, estate sales, and especially church rummage sales as a source of obsolete but nearly-free VCRs. $5.00 is a very normal price for a VCR even if it was originally a major brand quality unit.
Once you've spent an hour creating the only existant digital copy of a television episode from a piece of rapidly deteriorating 70 year old film, the existence of blu-rays starts to look like a miracle (and their absence like a crime)
Revisiting the head of this thread, of the 50 films mentioned the the TCM Underground book, a little more than 10% are not currently available on physical media of any kind, and about a quarter of the ones with physical releases are DVD only (and many of the physical releases are out of print and only available at heavily inflated prices. )
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