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| Norma Shearer - Back to the Vaults | |||
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| Norma Shearer - Back to the Vaults | |||
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© 2003 Sandy McLendon
“We’ve figured out what DVD stands for – Dangerous, Very Dangerous.” It’s official – DVD is the top video format. Sales of players have outstripped those of VHS videocassette player/recorders, and some retailers are in the process of cutting VHS selections back sharply or phasing them out entirely. DVD is convenient, the picture is far better than VHS, and the storage capacity of a DVD makes it possible to have highly desirable extras on the disc. A good DVD will have not just the movie- it may contain the film in more than one aspect ratio, there can be several alternate-language soundtracks, and the director and stars can provide commentary on their own work, turning any living room into a film school. It ought to be Paradise. It’s not. As any classic-film buff can tell you, availability of pre-1950 films on DVD is a far, far cry from what it has been on VHS. One example is the films of Norma Shearer – Norma is currently represented by 12 movies on VHS, and there are additional titles that have lapsed from print, but are still available used. If you’re looking for Norma on DVD, it’s a short search. There is one – count ‘em, one – title available, 1939’s camp classic, The Women. The DVD is a honey, with a crisp, sparkling print, and a digital restoration of the fashion-show sequence that finally gives today’s viewers something that hasn’t been seen in decades – the Technicolor ® view of the stage matted into the black-and-white fashion salon. Old VHS versions of The Women settled for just showing the colour element against a white background; seeing the sequence in its 1939 high-tech glory is an example of what digital restoration and DVD can, at their best, do for viewers. Unfortunately, as good as The Women is on DVD, it looks as if it’s all of Norma we’ll be seeing in that format for the foreseeable future. Warner Home Video ™ has no current plans to introduce any more Shearer titles on DVD. The reasons for this, and their implications for the future, are troubling. Like other home-video companies, Warner is obviously basing its selections of titles to be introduced in DVD format on what sold like hotcakes in VHS. The Women, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind – all the trite-and-true titles that everyone loves are available. But titles that sold only moderately on VHS are now considered a marginal business, due to the costs of producing DVD’s of the quality level expected by Warner customers. It’s something of a Catch-22; Warner has the highest quality standards in the industry, bar none, for its DVD efforts. Warner combs its vaults carefully for the finest elements, does impeccable restoration both physically and digitally, and packages the result with fantastic extras. The catch is that neither Warner, nor any studio, can afford to do all this for any title that is not expected to sell briskly. It looks like a million bucks. It costs a million bucks. The availability of classic movies on home video – never as great as buffs would have liked – is now poised to become much, much worse. The "marginal" titles like Shearer’s A Free Soul, Crawford’s Sadie McKee, Harlow’s Bombshell, and many others, will likely lapse completely from print. In a return to the days before VCR’s, we’ll see them only on television and in film classes. Since popularity is an issue even in these venues, some titles will become completely unavailable again – back to the vaults, ladies. Shearer is again a case in point: Turner Classic Movies shows her work far less often than it did only a few years ago. Doris Day is what viewers want, and to hell with you, Norma. What’s sad about all this is that the situation is remediable. Unfortunately, only one studio, Universal, has begun to implement the solution: Licensure. No studio can be expected to make every title in its library available on DVD with all the restoration and extras mass-market buyers expect. It’s time for a two-tiered system, where studios begin working with companies geared to special-interest markets. Titles that cannot be expected to sell in huge quantity should be available for licensure to companies like Anchor Bay, Kino, Image Entertainment, and others who cater to buffs. These companies, and others, could produce licensed titles that would return revenue to studios, at little risk to those studios. It would not, of course, be possible for special-interest video companies to give licensed titles the same level of presentation that studios can. But extras and super-quality prints aren’t necessarily the point – availability is. Given a choice, most buffs will accept a video taken from a print with some damage and artifacts rather than have the title locked away in studio vaults. Studios could impose some quality standards as part of a licensure programme, such as ensuring that titles were presented at a certain standard of resolution. And there would be additional revenue possibilities for studios: any licensee who was willing to pay for additional materials, like trailers and screen tests, could, for a fee, include them on a DVD release. Billing special-interest video companies for licensing, retrieval, printing, and basic conservation of special-interest titles could become an important revenue source for studios, offsetting the costs of maintaining their libraries. All of us out here who love movies would like to challenge the studios to become more creative in their approach to home video on DVD. While most pre-1950 titles are not huge sellers individually, the aggregate market for these titles is large, and growing. While it’s completely understandable that not every title in studio libraries is suitable for release by studios, it’s less understandable that studios are turning up their noses at a way to make everyone happy, and studios richer. Hollywood is never so much at a loss as it is when the distribution channel changes. Years of revenue were ignored when television was introduced, because Hollywood did not understand that TV was just another way of showing the product. When videocassettes were invented, studios spent years trying to ignore demand, because they focused only on the legal ramifications of selling that which had traditionally only been available in exhibition. It’s to be hoped that in the near future, the industry will begin a new, more mature approach to distribution, one that recognises that there’s a customer for everything, and seeks ways to match up films with their fans, no matter how obscure the title, genre, or star. Think about it, Hollywood. You have an important revenue stream available, for very little more than the cost of letting go of an outdated paradigm. Free the films. Free the stars. And free the money.
The author
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