I was born in the early 1960?s. It was different then and younger people might have a hard time imagining a time when there wasn?t push button entertainment at one?s disposal at all times. In those days, you took what you could get. That often meant the ?Movie of the Week?, usually at 9:00 at night. If you were lucky, you might catch an afternoon matinee. Or, you could stay up and catch the late show. Most cities had horror movie hosts to introduce and give more or less funny comments about the film.
About the time I got into high school, premium cable channels were getting big. This was HOT STUFF. Now, for the first time (for most people), one could see women in various stages of undress and also scenes of violence and gore that never would have made it past the TV networks Standards and Practices board. It was an exciting time for me and a lot of other people.
Rolling along a few more years, I started hearing about movies on tape. If you had big bucks, you could get a machine that played movies on your own television. Of course, everyone now knows where that was going to go. An old friend of mine was a longtime employee of Erols and told me this story: Erols was the first pioneer of home video distribution. At first Erols sold tapes to people. Then, a friend of the company president asked to borrow a tape and when he returned it, he gave him a few bucks as gratitude for the loan. An idea was born?loan or more accurately, rent out tapes of movies and charge the viewer for it. From that simple beginning, the way we watched movies was forever changed. Even the way movies were made was affected by the phenomenon. It began to seem like a movie?s theatrical run was more of a promotion for the more lucrative home video market than anything else.
And brother did the business boom.
I remember when I bought my first VCR. What a happy day that was. This was in 1985, I think. I even remember the first movies I got with my brand new Erols video card: Herschell Gordon Lewis?s Two Thousand Maniacs and George Romero?s The Crazies. I was hooked, Jack. From that night on, I rented about two movies a night. What a time it was and the dreams of every true blue movie fan had come true. And better yet, you could make illegal copies of the tapes you borrowed to watch them over and over again. Many people obsessively taped just about every movie we rented. God, I must have spent enough to feed a small third world country?s population with what I spent on rentals and blank VHS tapes in those days.
Of course, people being the way they are, an ugly dark side came of the home video revolution. While some innocently taped movies to enjoy them again, others did so for profit. Bootlegging. It?s easy to assume that movie studios have more money than God and can afford the meager losses they took from the VHS pirates, but every thief from a homeless pickpocket to CEOs of huge corporations justify and rationalize their actions in the same manner. Bootlegging movies undermines the right and proper way that filmmakers get their product out to the movie lovers. I know that there are gray matters in the equation, but I believe that the system works by feeding the machine that gives us the movies.
I wonder how many hours I spent in video stores. I?d browse the aisles and look at just about every tape in the store. It was a great place to meet like-minded movie lovers. I became well known to the managers of various stores that I frequented and they would often let me take tapes home for free, sometimes before they were legally available for rent. I?d critique them and help out the staff in a lot of ways.
Remember when just about any store you?d go to had movie rentals? Mom and Pop grocery shops, convenience stores, music stores, just about everywhere. It was cool seeing movies like that all over the place. And product started piling up in them. All kinds of movies. If it had a catchy title or attractive packaging, people probably would take a chance on it. Oh man, I wince when I think of some of the turkeys that I brought home. Deadtime Tales. Redneck Zombies. Flesh Eating Mothers. Psychos in Love. Creepozoids. Some of them were incredibly inept, yet conveyed such charm that they became beloved favorites. I?m talking about stuff like Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama and dozens more. The getting was good and would-be filmmakers were doing crackerjack business cranking out the cheese.
Of course, as will happen, dark clouds began to form. Blockbuster Video began attempting to monopolize the entire home video industry. Erols, once the biggest of them all, saw the portents and sold out to BB. The Mom and Pop places started cutting out their rental programs. They could not compete. Rumors of Blockbuster making demands of studios started brewing and the whole place started leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I tore up my Blockbuster card and patronized the few remaining small companies.
There was another format that home viewers used all this time. Laserdiscs. About the size of an old record album, laserdiscs promised better sound and visual quality and even provided extra features in addition to the movies. Alas, I never owned a played and only watched movies on them a few times in my life.
By the mid-to-late 1990?s, I had a wall of videotapes. Factory tapes, mind you. I had several shelves of my own recordings, which I watched with less frequency. Many of them never even got labeled and I never seemed to have the time or energy to go through them and identify them.
Of course, the industry was rumbling with something new about that time. People were weary of their creaky, cumbersome tape collections. Rewinding was a drag and excessive tracking could cause problems for the tapes. There was a new format for movies being talked about. Digital technology, but this time they were the size of compact discs. It quickly looked like DVD was going to be THE wave of the future. A marriage of compact discs and CD-ROMs in one comfortable package.
I bought my first DVD player in 1998. Few people had them in those days and my Sony player was a marvel. I still remember the first DVD that I bought. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Once more however, , an industry giant attempted to compromise the format. Remember Circuit City and their DIVX debacle? I never liked the concept of DIVX and I would talk people out of buying a DIVX player if I knew that they were considering it. It was a War for the future of home video and this time, the good guys won. The people said NO and DIVX was defeated. NOTE: This is not the same DIVX that is currently used in Internet video applications.
Unlike VHS, the DVD market was, for the most part, aimed directly at fans. VHS tapes were often priced ?for rental? and would cost sixty, seventy, eighty or even a hundred dollars and very few individuals would buy them. This was done to keep the movie rental market booming. Now, what real fan wanted to return a movie after a night or two when there were documentaries, commentaries, hidden features and every other imaginable extra content in the package? Especially when DVDs were so reasonably priced. Savvy fans knew to get a desired disc in the first week of release to get an even better bargain. Then there was the attraction of owning a lifetime copy of a movie when you bought it. Care for a disc and it will theoretically last long after our deaths.
If VHS made people crazy, DVD made them certifiable. In a couple of years, all or nearly all movie lovers had DVD players and they also had rapidly growing collections of movies. I had been replacing my tapes with DVDs. Eventually; I gave away all but a few of my tapes to the local library. DVD was here to stay.
Another great thing about DVD is the relative ease that a filmmaker has in getting his or her movie out and distributed. True independents are out there putting their movies out and doing their
own distribution over the internet. DIY creation at its finest.
One complaint that a lot of people currently have is about movies they?ve already bought on DVD and come a year or so later, a bigger, better Special Edition or Director?s Cut is released. I?m kind of on the fence about it. Some obviously seem to be done for reasons of cynical greed, yet there are legitimate reasons for others. More people are getting surround sound systems and most of the older DVDs aren?t in that format.
So, by all appearances, it is nirvana for movie fans. Right? Right. But have we lost something along the way? Maybe.
In the old days, before all this push button convenience, I?d sit through just about any movie that happened to come on. Many of them I hated, but there were some that just seemed okay, but the story mounted and by the end I was really glad that I stuck with it. How often do you pop in a movie and get bored and turn it off? I do it a lot, I?m afraid to say. It seems that fewer people have patience to sit though something challenging. Then there are the extras. Back about 15 years ago, if there was a special on TV about the making of a movie, most particularly a horror movie, I?d tape it and watch it over and over again. Fascinated about an inside look at the creation of a movie. Now, I grow bored with seeing behind the scenes documentaries. Jaded. The magic of the movies is demystified about the sheer amount of information that has become available about them.
And the very worst thing of all about the home video explosion? I think it was a major factor in the demise of the drive in as we knew it. The thrill of the drive in was seeing sleazy movies that you couldn?t see elsewhere. Plus, you could drink and party all you wanted at them, as long as you and your friends kept fairly cool. When home video became the number one source of movie viewings, one of the first casualties was the Great American Drive In Theater. Sure, some are still around, but they are more of a curiosity; a nostalgia. A place to take the kids for a taste of what it used to be like.
As for me, I?m still as obsessed as ever with movies. Nothing has changed in that regard. My friends scratch their heads in befuddlement at my movie collection and I still spend much more than any sane individual ought to on movies. I haunt the bargain bin of DVDs at Wal Mart and I?m constantly searching the internet for deals on used movies. Every week I check Amazon.com to see what DVDs are coming out. If a new format for movies comes out, as I?ve heard rumors about, I suppose that I?ll be as addicted to it as I am with DVD and I was with VHS.
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