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My Video Collection

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When I bought my first video cassette recorder (VCR) in the 1980s, I thought I had it made. I had a great cable television setup near a neighborhood where many film industry moguls lived, and I could record films that were being broadcast on the many channels to which I had access. Eventually, I had a library of several hundred films that any film fanatic would be proud to own.

But then, little by little, they started to go bad. The VCR units had a hard time rewinding. And, of course, you couldn’t view a film until you rewound the reel. The tapes got stretched and started to go blooey. And rewinding became more and more of a chore.

When the DVD players first came out, I thought that was the way to go. I mean the laser didn’t even make contact with the surface of the DVD the way a VCR did with a videotape cassette.

One of my friends even suggested I convert all my videocassettes to DVD. I quickly pointed out that it would take years to accomplish this feat, during which my cassettes would continue to deteriorate.

Then I found out about a thing called “laser rot.” Even DVDs were not immune. After all, there was this metallic coating on a thin plastic disk. And plastic, as we know, won’t last forever.

In the age of streaming, people don’t keep the films they see: They just play them while downloading them. After viewing the film, it is gonzo!

Heyday Is Over

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The Unmarvelous Marvel Universe

When I first came to Los Angeles at the tail end of 1966, it was the beginning of a Golden Era for people like me who loved the cinema and saw it as an art form that would prevail well into the next century.

Only, it didn’t. The great Hollywood directors sputtered out with films that were pale copies of their best work. There was John Ford’s 7 Women (1966) and Howard Hawks’s Rio Lobo (1970). On the plus side, there were the French cinéastes of the Nouvelle Vague, including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Agnes Varda. And, across the Pacific, the Japanese were making great films which I have never tired of watching.

It was in 1968 that Andrew Sarris published The American Cinema:Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. It was a revision and expansion of an issue of Film Culture that came out several years earlier which I had photocopied while I was at Dartmouth College and which I always kept at my side.

But other things were happening. Hollywood was sputtering out like a volcano in its final throes. The film distribution companies were run by yahoos who insisted that people of my frame of mind were out-of-touch elitists and what the filmgoing public really wanted was Thoroughly Modern Millie and the Marvel Universe.

In the course of several decades, there was a dribble of good films from Hollywood and abroad, but mostly an avalanche of mediocrity. At the same time, it was getting harder to see the films I loved. I recorded hundreds of films on VHS videotape—but then videotape died. I switched to DVD, but now I am beginning to encounter “laser rot.”

I have in my library a number of volumes that are over a hundred years old. Unless they are destroyed, they will be readable for at least another hundred years. Such is not the case with films. The media on which they are stored has to be changed every few years because of the rate of change in the digital world.

So I have concluded that it will be difficult to be a film lover. Yet I almost never see current Hollywood film products in theaters. Sometimes on HBO or Showtime, but never at a cinema.

Fortunately, my books are still quite readable; and I am diving into them voraciously.