Criterion had a version out which they discontinued so they could replace it with an up-coming edition with more extras and a slightly cleaner print.

He told me (I love insider gossip, don't you....) that the people at Criterion told him that they only sell about 1000 copies of each dvd title. He said they were having a hard time selling their recent release of THE LEOPARD. True it costs $50 but it contains 2 versions of the film and a ton of extras. It's also a great film with a great score and I'd think a lot of people would want it in their collections.

Considering how well done the Criterion titles are done overall and how they're promoted at Amazon.com and elsewhere (not to mention how many of the things my local library picks up), I found all of this, well, impossible to believe.

Can this really be? Are all the people putting out classic films on dvd just doing it for such small numbers? I can't see Turner bothering to issue stuff that only sells 1000 copies. Where's the money in that? Is it the same with classic scores on CD, do they only sell a handful of copies?

And if it is true, what does this mean for the transmission of culture at large?

This news is just another piece in the jigsaw puzzle coming together to form a picture of the current state of things, one confirming my usually pessimistic view of things.

[A friend wanted to confront me on this. He poured water into a glass half way. He asked, "What is this? Half full or half empty?" I answered, "Not only is it half empty, it's not even a very good-looking glass."]

There is a documentary with Wim Wenders about digital technology. It begins with a shot of a scrap metal yard. Wenders comes on in a voice-over and says something like this: "What happens to images when they wear out, when they are no longer relevant, no longer sought after to be watched?"

As I spend this week watching archival prints of German silents I wonder if there's anyone out there besides me and few others that these films and their individual images might appeal to today. I'm sure to someone 18 or 19, they'd all seem like yesterday's news, the spoiled leftovers from a dinner 2 weeks ago, a joke that belongs in an old folk's home or on the scrapheap.

Of course I have a friend who loves silent comedies and silent comedies have aged much better than silent dramas. He shows them to the children of his friends. He comes over to their house and everyone watches Keaton or Harold Lloyd and the kids laugh and love them. But it's a brief window of opportunity. Without early exposure I'm sure the kids would be immune to their magic later on. But what he does effectively transmits the culture to the next generation and keeps it alive.

Unfortunately, when I show films to people every weekend, I'm usually showing to people older than me. Sometimes students come. Never kids, never a starving soul who comes in off the street and finds comfort and sanctuary at my Church of the Cinema. I only preach to regular paritioners, the already converted.

Of course cinema isn't dead if you look at the box-office figures. People go to the movies everyday. But what of the worn-out images, the ones which had a few moments on a screen in a time long past and have been crowded out forever by newer images? 1000 copies for the TV sets of balding, aging fanboys, is that their final destiny, one last viewing before dvd rot sets in?

Nitrate to Nitrate, Dust to Dust. Amen.

During one semester at school I was routinely skipping a couple of my classes, and to fill the time I would go into the library and go through all their film books, copying down quotes (or citing them for later reference) from various directors. It was my intention (and still is) to make a book out of them. I can't find the notebook I recorded them in at the moment, but I remember an interview with Jean Cocteau in which he talked about how one of the things that seperates film from other art forms is that while most works of art start in relative obscurity and eventually gain widespread acclaim and recognition, film is the exact opposite. Most films start out with bang but will survive (if they survive at all) in total obscurity.

But really, just 1000 copies? Like you say, it just doesn't seem possible....is Criterion surviving solely on the sales of their Armageddon and The Rock special editions? There have to be more than 1000 hardcore film buffs out there. I know that if I had sufficient funds I'd be buying ever release they put out...and with the knowledge I have now I'm thinking maybe I'll start buying fewer CDs and start focusing on Criterion releases. I've whined in the past about how expensive they are, but if they're only selling 1000 copies, now I understand.

This is like the poetry section I run at the nearby Waldenbooks. Whereas Danielle Steele's latest 300-page paperback opus might be $5 or $6, most 30-page poetry books run upwards of $15 because they simply don't sell like Danielle Steele. Not that we can stock them anyway. The book store has fallen on rough times and most of what I'd call quality has been stripped away - now half of the poetry section is filled by Blue Mountain Arts and Mattie Stepanek. What does it say about a book store when they don't have Howl or The Waste Land? Hell, I can't even stock Paradise Lost unless it shows up on some high school's summer reading list.

There's an idea. Maybe it's time film study was taken more seriously, broadened in the educational system? Granted, I don't remember film study going too well when I took it in high school - most of the class slept through FRANKENSTEIN and no one really "got" CITIZEN KANE, but at least there was one other person in the class besides me who raised their hand for KANE as the best film we had watched. That counts for something, doesn't it? There are lots of kids who get through all four years of high school literature with Cliff Notes, but there's always at least one person who's moved by The Grapes of Wrath, or excited enough by Catcher in the Rye to seek out Franny and Zooey. Can't we do that with film? Sure, there'll be lots of kids who snore through Casablanca, but won't there be at least one person who wonders whether this Humphrey Bogart guy ever did any other movies?

Sadly, I think that's still a long way off. Another thing I remember from my high school film study class is my teacher telling me the school board comes inches away from shutting the class down every year, and that there were many teachers in the English department who considered it an embarrassment that students could take the course for English credit.

It would really be great if the movie-going public were more accepting of watching older movies at the cinema. Not only would this preserve the art, but if it was widespread enough it would also cut back on all the movies Hollywood churns out that are exactly like 10 other movies that came out the previous year. It would please the studios as well; all those number-crunchers who only look at the bottom line would realize that it's much cheaper to put out a movie that's already been made than it is to put Brittany Murphy in another $50 million romantic comedy that'll open at #7 and promptly drop off the face of the planet forever.

Incidentally, Lou, have you seen Bill Morrison's DECASIA? It's sort of a long montage made up of damaged, decaying film, put together as "a meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality." I haven't seen it, but I have seen Morrison's short film LIGHT IS CALLING, which is actually a horribly decayed clip from THE BELLS (1926), slowed down so that you can better appreciate the decay. It's actually extraordinarily beautiful, though it's depressing both in what it implies about the fleeting nature of love and in what it shows you of just how much film from that era has been destroyed. There are good prints of THE BELLS around, but how many other films have been totally lost forever due to this kind of neglect?

Movies are genuinely loved by many many people. It couldn't continue as an industry if people didn't love to go or rent and love to watch. TCM couldn't continue on the air if there weren't more than 1000 people watching it every night (though who knows look at AMC--started out like TCM now runs schlock over and over and is filled with commercials).

Culture is something that people either get and love or ignore. All the Profs in town for this German seminar were talking about who were the few of us locals who kept coming to see all "their" films, they couldn't believe we were out there for all these screenings of obscure silent German movies. Likewise, we couldn't understand why they picked Ann Arbor to run the seminar since they were from the East Coast, Sweden, Germany, and all points south. We basically had to answer them that we were a bunch of fanboy fanatics instead of average people.

One thing a Prof told me was that students these days are already over-extended and so they have no time to follow through with all their interests.

And I can see this. A film/video & language major was coming regularly to the films I show and then he told me he'd have to stop coming, that his grades were suffering and he had to hit the books and not see films.

The average college student wants to get a good job, gets more classwork than any of us could stand to do, then wants to get drunk, laid, watch football, go regularly to church, get in extra-curricular projects that look good on a resume, and then watch Troy or Spiderman 2 on dvd late at night over pizza. Casablanca is two hours that students already know they can miss without guilt so imagine what I get for trying to show The Chess Player, 3 Women, Scenes From A Marriage, Moonfleet, or The Phenix City Story......

DECASIA was released on DVD and is available online from Amazon and all the usual suspects. It also shows up on eBay pretty frequently.

You're right about the college student being over-extended. I don't worry about getting drunk, laid, watching football or going to church (though I enjoyed the order in which you listed those activities), but I do work two jobs, listen to hours upon hours of music, and still like to read from time to time so I don't slip into illiteracy. Finding time for movies, which are supposed to be my life's passion, is often difficult. Hell, I have DVDs I bought long ago that I still haven't watched. I strive to be eclectic in my interests but sometimes it's just not practical. It's very frustrating that I live about 45 minutes away from Chicago, where we have a wonderful art museum, a slew of great arthouse movie theatres, and one of the greatest orchestras in the world (despite Daniel Barenboim's sleepy direction) and I so rarely have the time or the money to seize any of those opportunities.

But, as you say, all is not hopeless. I actually contend that there are more film score fans than we realize - I've discovered them in very unexpected places. I have friends who are passionate about music, like listening to recordings of Allen Ginsberg, dig through libraries looking for Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad. And yes, independent films are gaining a somewhat stronger foothold. It's an interesting time in the film industry - the indies are being more and more widely screened and accepted by the public, while at the same time it feels like Hollywood productions (with some exceptions) are getting louder, faster, dumber, and far more derivative to compensate. It would be nice if there was more of a communion there rather than a schism, but I guess the fact that at least there's enough variety to make that distinction is encouraging.

What we really need to be concerned about are the kids who are buying into every glitzy singer/slut package that the major record labels throw at them. As I was leaving work at the mall tonight there was a local band called "In Red" playing. It was some special event sponsored by Pepsi. They were surrounded by 14-year-olds screaming their heads off in adoration. These are kids who claim to love music but don't realize (or don't care) that the bassist and guitarist are playing the exact same notes a couple octaves apart, the drummer can't keep a beat for more than a measure, and they've used the exact same chord progression five songs in a row. Now, In Red is not a record label package deal, but what else could they have been influenced by? Just look at the popular bands and "artists" like Good Charlotte, A Simple Plan, and (god help us) Avril Lavigne, who the record companies are now touting as "punk" - how many of their listeners would even know who Sid Vicious was, if you asked them? The major labels have gotten to the point where they'll assimilate anything in which they see a market value, and they'll do it quickly before it has a chance to gain any strength on its own. "Indie Rock" - literally independent rock - has now become an aesthetic category rather than a description of a band that actually tries to survive independently.

That's what we really have to worry about, the kids who just sit there and take whatever garbage a corporation shoves into their eyes and ears. We already know our music is esoteric - but when even the Sex Pistols have become too esoteric for today's kids, that's when you know you're really in trouble.

I'm just kidding. But a friend of mine put it in a similar way, he said, when people stop recognizing who Charlie Chaplin is, that's the end of civilization as we now know it.

You can't blame kids for going with the flow of corporate/mainstream rock if that's all the radio stations and MTV promote and they don't get to hear anything else. Also, the kids don't seem to mind and don't seem to search out anything else. I mean think of all the people who can actually listen to the Dave Matthews Band. They adore him! And DM is actually an intelligent guy but that's besides the point.

And it's funny we should be talking Rock because it too has a Golden Age, the 50s and 60s, that I think is much better than anything that came along after it except for a few New Wave bands. But it's the same uphill climb as we've been talking in regards to scores, films, and literature. Try to get people born after 1980 to listen to Fats Domino or Chuck Berry. I mean it's not impossible but again unlikely.

Culture is about shared and common knowledge. That's what this site is about. People who are plugged into film music come here to share that involvement with like-minded people because we speak the same language.

There comes with this inclusive and exclusive territoriality. Inclusive, like an evangelist, in that we want to get outsiders to come into the fold and speak that language with us. Exclusive, like the xenophobe or frat member, who is proud that he speaks the language but is weary of or wants to feel superior to those who don't.

From Cocteau on the Film......

"The tragedy of the cinematograph lies in its having to be successful immediately. It takes such a vast sum of money to make a film that it is necessary to get that money back as soon as possible by massive takings. That is a terrible, almost insurmountable handicap.....

"A film worthy of the name encounters the same obstacles as does a canvas by Vermeer, Van Gogh or Cezanne. But whilst these paintings land in the public museum only after a long time, a film must begin in it....In short, a painting that isn't worth a penny to begin with will be worth millions later on, whereas a film that was worth millions at the start will survive, if at all, in dire poverty."

And this one has less to do with our discussion, but I like it a lot so I'm putting it up as well:

"We are all made of mud, and gravity compels us to fall back into it very quickly. There are moments when we see ourselves clearly, and there are moments when we should like other people to see us clearly. It is this contrast that creates the interplay between presence and solitude, between our plunges into the human sea where we catch cold, and the fireside chair in the country."