My heroes! Stepping into the breach, the Onion A/V Club makes with the film geek content and how this week by interviewing not one, not two, but three archivists who restore classic films for dvd release. Some excerpts:
The problem is that most of the people at the studios who are making these decisions know nothing about film. There are exceptions, but a lot of them may as well be selling shoe polish or potatoes or toothpaste. They're strictly thinking of it as a packaged-goods business, and not looking at it as selling entertainment. But the other side of that is that most people who are cinephiles and film enthusiasts don't have any sense of business. They'd run you right into the red ink, driven by their passion, not looking after the purse strings. You have to have a balance.
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On some level, we think of it as stewardship. We've got these great movies that deserve to be put out on this archival format. In some ways, we're curators. And if there's not a lot of available materials to help this mini-exhibit, then it just stands on the strength of itself.
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We're not the canon. Criterion's the canon. We're the people that get left out of the canon.
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For 10 years, I always filled my tapes up to two hours, because the movies are only 70 minutes, and I have all these great trailers and shorts and weird stuff. I put stuff on there like they were Cracker Jack prizes. Now suddenly they're calling them "extras." I never was involved with laserdiscs, because I didn't like 'em, but once I got involved with DVD, I suddenly understood. They finally made something that I can embrace, because it's a cube, not a flat piece of paper. It's like a time capsule: Fill it up and throw in the kitchen sink. If you put the trailer to the movie and a commentary by the director and you find outtakes and you put together a gallery of stills and advertising and promotional material, then all of that is married to the movie and will never be lost again. People like it now, but 25 or 100 years from now, all of this will be kind of important, not just culty, fun, "wheeee!" It'll be like, "Wow, there's this whole world of movies, and all of it was archived and presented correctly and married together."
Just go read the whole thing already, why dontcha?
