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Notes from the (video) revolution
01/10/2006 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Excuse me, says Mark, if he gets a little nostalgic for the coming of this piece of technology and how it really changed the world of the technically-inclined cinema fan. Or one like him. VCRs did not come into common use until the mid-1980s and, in fact, he did not really rush to get one. I remember there were Sony ads on television with a taxi driver saying at the end of a nightshift as the sun was rising that he was going home to watch "The Tonight Show". The idea caught on.
When a film like CASABLANCA came out, most people had one chance to see it. It played at a theater and then it just went away, seemingly forever. And it remained that way with films for many years. If you wanted to see the film again you could buy another ticket, but only for a limited time. You had to do it while the film was still playing. Or perhaps the film might get a second run. Things got a little better with the advent of cheap theaters where films might play on a second run and of drive-in movie theaters. But within a month or so the film was gone like smoke in the wind.' That made films very transitory.
Castle Films were my first experience with owning a bit of my own cinema. I was a little bit of a hobbyist when I was young. Castle Film sold for the princely sum of $5 little five-minute silent abridgements of popular films on 8-millimeter (like home movie) film. That was five 1960 dollars. And of course they were silent. You can buy some entire films for less than that these days. I bought three, insisting on getting films I had never seen, just to be able to see a bit of them. The three were IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, VARAN THEUNBELIEVABLE, and THE DEADLY MANTIS. Those short excerpts I watched over and over.
When television started showing movies, there was a little hope that maybe some time you could see your favourite movies again. Some films I had wanted to see I saw for the first time that way. But more frequently they were films I had less interest in. But I do remember when "Saturday Night at the Movies" ran THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. I remember maybe around 1963, watching the "ABC Sunday Night Movie". The movie they were showing was a favourite of mine. It was JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH with James Mason and Pat Boone. I think that at that point we had a black and white television.
The network had abridged the film so they could fit in a lot of commercials. The film was frequently interrupted. And I felt a bit saddened. It was not that the film was being so mishandled. I felt bad because this was ABC's second showing of the film. That meant they probably would not show it again on the "ABC Sunday Night Movie". That meant it would be years before I got another opportunity to see the film.
Those were different days in many ways, but certainly as far as appreciation of films was concerned. Seeing a movie was a fleeting experience. You could tell a friend about a film, but you could not share it. With a book it was different. If you read a scene in a book that was enthralling you could go back and immediately reread it. You could analyse the scene and see why it affected you the way it did. But movies were a different matter. If you wanted re-view scene from a film, you were generally out of luck. Perhaps if you were seeing it in a continuous performance theater you could wait until the film was on again and watch the scene again. That might be possible, but it was a high price to pay. If you were seeing the film on television you were out of luck altogether. There was no control at all. You had one chance to see a scene and that was it until the next time the film was shown someplace. VCRs changed all that.
Around 1972 I had access to a tape recorder and discovered I could record the sound of a film off of television and play it on a tape recorder whenever I wanted. I recorded two films on audiotape and listened to them dozens of times each. The films were A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH. I would find cheap audiotape and eventually collect the soundtrack (the whole sound track, not just the music as the term "soundtrack" has come to mean) of hundreds of films. The cheap audiotape fell apart in a few years and was unplayable.
In 1974 I met someone who actually collected films--picture and sound. For a hundred dollars or so you could buy a copy of some films. Then, I was told, any time you wanted you could set up the projector and see the film. This changed the entire cinema experience. Some films got better on multiple viewings. Some were not as good. But this was a hobby for the very rich or the very dedicated. Not many people could own a dozen films of their own. I looked at the guy who collected ten or twelve films like some people look at Porsche owners. The film my friend was so proud of having was BOBBIKINS, which was hardly a classic. It is a B-picture comedy about a talking baby. But who am I to judge? If he really liked the films that was good for him. It was just as well that he got the film. It seems never to have come out on video.
I think it was at MidAmericon in 1976 (but at any rate at some science fiction convention) where someone had brought a videotape machine. In those days they used special inch-wide tapes. I don't know how he got it, but he had a videotape of the original KING KONG. An opportunity to see KING KONG was always a special occasion for me. This was no BOBBIKINS. This guy could see the film KING KONG whenever he wanted! It was the first time I saw someone without really expensive equipment owning his own film. It might be worth it to get one of these videotape machines if I could own my own copy of KING KONG.
VCRs were for me the real beginning of my personal video revolution. Then the revolution began to pick up steam. Within about six or seven years I was able to record films that showed up occasionally on television and watch those, cut as they were and frequently with poor reception. But I could see them pretty much the way they were when television broadcast them. I had a copy of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH that I had gotten off of some ABC afternoon movie. It was badly cut and had a lot of commercials that I had imperfectly edited out. And in the picture the reds ran like Seabiscuit. It was a pain to watch it, but at least I had it. Few films were available for purchase.
Films started coming out on videotape not log after that. There were some priced down where I could afford them in the $20 range, but many were a lot more expensive and were priced so that only video stores would buy them. Eventually they came down in price, particularly when the new medium of DVD came along.
More effective was waiting for cable stations to run films and record them off the air. This was particularly good with the American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies, two cable stations that ran classic movies twenty-four hours a day. Finally you could take a wide range of classic movies and watch them over and over, stopping and repeating whenever the viewer wanted.
DVDs were an even more flexible medium even if they were read- only, and they also offered a much clearer picture. These days for a usually reasonable price you can own copies of many of your favourite films and watch them in high-quality reproductions. Just like with audiotape soundtracks and videotapes I have hundreds of DVDs. Access to films has gotten better, even if the content may not have. I now can see JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH whenever I have the whim. That may mean that I am seeing it less often than when it showed up by chance on TV. Then I always watched it, because who knew when it would be on again.
Mark R. Leeper
(c) Mark R. Leeper 2006
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