Categories
Cinema Only on DVD

The Final Frontier of Physical Media

the mandalorian on blu-ray

originally published on Inside the Envelope

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8

Disney shocked the world – okay, maybe not the world, but at least the author of this column – when they announced real, honest to god, physical media Blu-ray and 4K releases of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, WandaVision, and Loki. This marks the first time that any of the platform’s content will be making its way to a retail disc. Coming on the (relative) heels of the 2020 announcement that they would cease to release their live action films on 4K (with exceptions for Star Wars, Marvel, and James Cameron), this is surprising news, but maybe it shouldn’t have been.

As I said in an old Only on DVD column, “DVD is dead. Long live DVD.” We’re currently living in a world that is at once trying to kill physical media and milk it for everything that it’s worth. Some market reports have suggested that physical media sales are up 10% so far in 2023. Without a multi-year trend, that’s little more than an encouraging statistic – but we can’t hang any hats on it because we also just learned this month that the once largest business-to-business home entertainment distributor will cease to ship discs once their inventory has been depleted. The Ingram CEO cites increasing overhead with diminishing returns as the reason for Ingram’s exit from the business. I’m not sure what this really means for the consumer since rental chains had already ceased to exist, big-box stores hardly stock any physical media, and we already purchase most of our DVDs directly from niche distributors and – let’s be honest – Amazon. 

While I’m encouraged that Disney hasn’t totally abandoned the consumer, the announcement of three of their flagship properties (all Star Wars and Marvel) doesn’t exactly fill me with hope for more. What about the 76 movies and TV series that disappeared from Disney+ and Hulu in May? (I wasn’t finished with The World According to Jeff Goldblum, you heartless bastards.) The only thing we can do with any kind of purpose is support physical media with our dollars. That’s the language these companies speak. All we know for sure is that if there’s money to be made these companies are going to find it.

They don’t really care about the consumer. If they did, we’d see a lot more physical media available for people who can’t or won’t subscribe to the streaming channel.

They don’t care about the creatives producing content for their streaming services. If they did, we’d see a lot more physical media available at the request of the creators who fear that their work will be deleted from existence without warning due to those pesky residuals. That said, fallout from the WGA/SAG-AFTRA will ultimately change how the companies do business with their talent – and it might lead to an even more rigorous culling of streaming content. 

Of course, Disney isn’t the only company under siege from a vocal, critical minority. Director Michael Flanagan has taken to the social media airwaves to publicly praise those enterprising individuals that have pirated his unreleased-on-DVD Netflix series as “noble archivists.” Without physical media releases, he notes, his work could disappear without a trace. Flanagan had been a mainstay on Netflix with The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald’s Game, and Midnight Mass. Only The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor have received physical media releases – because they were co-produced by Paramount, which retained home video rights. At one point Netflix promised to follow through on releases for his work, but ultimately failed to do so, explaining that it just wasn’t a “priority.” This conversation with Netflix, in part, caused him and his production partner Trevor Macy to move their new projects to Amazon Studios.

Will Amazon release Flanagans’ series? We are, after all, still waiting on a release of the platform’s most popular series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The grass is always greener.

Michael Flanagan’s not wrong. There is a preservational aspect to home media that most people just aren’t talking about. And they’re not talking about it because, as a collective, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the things we love will always be available at the click of a button. And it’s just not true. I talked to a film preservationist to confirm my suspicions that studios aren’t likely taking the precautions necessary to preserve digital content.

But let’s get back to that “always available” issue because there’s an aspect of this issue that I’ve never really talked about. Consumer burnout. 

My dad called me the other day because he wanted to watch the Sony Pictures Classics movie The Phantom of the Open (2021). He, like many of us, subscribes to a healthy number of streaming services and assumed it had to be available somewhere on one of them. He didn’t want to rent it because he’s already paid a considerable sum for Peacock, Netflix, Paramount, Prime Video, etc. on top of his regular cable bill. I tried to run through the standard explanation about the way streaming services license movies for exhibition, but stopped myself because maybe he had a point. How much are we expected to pay to watch what we want when we want it? At what point does this model collapse because it’s just too difficult or too expensive for the average viewer to manage?

As a result of having researched the streaming business model for this series of columns for DVD Netflix, I’m fully aware of the methodology. I’m also fully aware that my own viewing habits require me to track down movies I know with 100% certainty are not available to stream. I’m an outlier. The average consumer doesn’t just shrug when faced with a $4 rental charge on top of the $50+ they’ve already shelled out for a handful of services. It’s all currently unsustainable. Some of these services will begin to disappear, taking their content along with them. 

When DVD Netflix began shipping envelopes in the late 1990s it felt like we had the world at our fingertips. If it was available on disc, we could probably rent it for a relatively low monthly fee. Corner mom and pop video stops were still hanging on, Blockbuster (*spits*), and DVD-by-mail supplied anything we could possibly want. During these halcyon days, I remember thinking that that was the best of all possible worlds. Laserdiscs had improved upon VHS by giving us improved picture and sound with the correct cinematic aspect ratios. DVDs made that hobby affordable and improved the image even further (even though the compression ruined the laserdisc sound mixes). We even had entire runs of classic TV series in a package the size of a Tolstoy novel. Movies we’d never had the chance to see – or see correctly. (Had we really seen Lawrence of Arabia if we’d only seen it on a 4:3 Full Frame VHS tape?)

Still, we wanted more. Over the next two decades, the “more” we wanted resulted in the surrendering of control – the control we’d gained in the VHS wars over the content we owned and watched – returned to the production companies and media conglomerates. They’re once again working to control what you watch, how you watch it, and when you watch it. Ideally supplanting everything with cheap, disposable content that’s really just pretty okay and probably written by AI. 

They would like nothing more than to eliminate the home video distribution of movies and TV series. With that in mind, do you know why Disney released The Mandalorian on 4K and Blu-ray? Obviously, money. They haven’t totally taken that control back – not yet – and not as long as we continue to make the case for physical media. Not as long as the Michael Flanagans of the world – successful streaming filmmakers – stand up to take back control over their art. Disney recognizes that there’s still money in disc-based entertainment. If we continue to support content that can be owned and never adulterated, we can curate our own content libraries. We still hold the control.

This is the last month of DVD Netflix [author’s note: this was published in September of 2023]. I’m sad because I won’t get any more little red envelopes. I’m sad because this is my last column for “Inside the Envelope.” I will continue to write about movies and physical media elsewhere, but this particular gig felt important because you, the reader, cared as much as I do. Most importantly, the DVD Netflix employees cared as much as we all did. It was an absolute pleasure working with them and for you, bolstering your queues and making sure you never ran out of enthusiasm for the envelopes in your mailbox.

This final ‘Only on DVD’ column serves as a so long for now, but not a farewell forever. The spirit of our relationship continues as long as you continue to seek out new-to-you movies and pass along recommendations to your friends and family. Keep forcing companies like Disney and Netflix to acknowledge that there’s money to be found in the hills of DVD distribution. Let them continue to pretend that they’re doing it for the fans (because it makes them feel good). Each disc you buy or rent is a small act of film conservation.

Keep them all circulating.

It might be a little harder without DVD Netflix, but we survived pan-and-scan so we can do anything. Godspeed, weary moviewatcher. 

Categories
Cinema Only on DVD

The Midnight Theft of The French Connection

French Connection -- Popeye Doyle

(originally published on Inside the Envelope)

Only on DVD: Part 8

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7

In 2020, people started to take notice of the little changes made to movies before their appearance on streaming platforms. Oddly, my search into the recent news cycles suggested that larger entertainment outlets didn’t bother to cover the changes with any real zest. Instead, incensed bloggers took up the torch, bloggers like Jamie Logie on medium.com who pondered if this was merely the tip of a really big iceberg. He noted that Disney had obscured part of Daryl Hannah’s tasteful posterior in Splash (1984) – before eventually putting it back in – and that Netflix had removed the reveal of Biff’s Ooh La La magazine in Back to the Future 2 (1989). In the edit, Marty only says “Ooh la la” while an awkward cut skips over the book’s identity. We saw some more of the iceberg after Disney chopped up The French Connection.

Sidenote: Apparently, the suggestiveness of a 1950’s nudie magazine was too much for the fragile constitutions of our 21st century offspring. The button-up 1950s were a conservative reaction against the flapper 1920s, and the 1980s were a devil-may-care commentary/nostalgia-gasm about the button-up 1950s, which means that the 2020’s, via its erasure of the 1980’s playful commentary on the button-up 1950s, are now disavowing a modest transgression from the most conservative era of the 20th century. Got it.

I won’t make the claim that the 1980’s were a societal pinnacle, but we, the children thriving in the Reagan-era, were allowed to witness rampant and largely innocent sexuality in PG-rated cinema and I’m pretty sure we were better off because of it. I’ll wait for the Kinsey Institute study to prove me otherwise. Admittedly, there was the Porky’s-type lechery that seeped into the popular culture and I’m no fan of that leering brand of misogyny. But that is not this. Staring through peepholes into the girls’ locker room is a far cry from a small gag about Biff’s off-color reading material. That detail provides character definition and a clever joke about the latent impurities beneath the surface of 1950’s decorum – that the kids of the 50s and the kids of the 80s were still, ultimately, just kids. 

This conversation about revisionism floated to the surface when the news broke wide that Disney had tampered with William Friedkin’s classic The French Connection (1974) and distributed this new cut into the wild. A 52-second section of that film was edited because Gene Hackman’s cop character, Popeye Doyle, utters racial slurs. Those are the facts. We’ll return to this in a moment, but first I wanted to look at Disney’s recent history of censorship as a “family-friendly” company in the 21st century. 

Due to Disney’s policies regarding streaming content on its Disney+ service, content rated higher than PG-13 or TV-14 generally hasn’t been made available. Recently, parental controls have been instituted and R-rated content such as Deadpool (2016) has popped up on the app. The company’s directives have long been a source of contention among cinema purists who’ve made a study of the Mouse’s tendency to meddle in the moral quality of its artistic productions. The need to obscure and shuffle potentially offensive material under the rug has been part of the Disney brand – even if it often refuses to specifically acknowledge the ways it manipulates its own properties.

The list of movies that Disney has censored or adjusted for its streaming platform includes more than just the likes of adult content like Deadpool. A Goofy Movie, Darkwing Duck, DuckTales, The Emperor’s New Groove, Goof Troop, The Muppet Christmas Carol, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit have all been edited for streaming exhibition. The questionable content included cleavage (yes, really), cigarettes, violence, and racial insensitivity.

With regards to The French Connection edits, however, I think we can all agree that the Disney company has gone outside its jurisdiction. The edited cut aired not on its own streaming channel – but The Criterion Channel and TCM, was loaned out via DCP (aka a Digital Cinema Package, the digital-age substitution for a stack of film cans) for theatrical exhibition, and replaced the original cut for anyone that had purchased a digital copy through Vudu, Amazon, Apple, etc. It did so without notice of modification. Blurring cleavage in Wizards of Waverly Place is one thing – butchering the editing of an Oscar-winning film is another matter entirely. It should be noted, specifically, that Gerald B. Greenberg won an Academy Award for his editing of The French Connection.

I want to call out this fact one more time for anyone that thinks that buying a digital copy of a movie is the same thing as owning a copy of the disc.

Disney replaced all previously purchased digital copies of The French Connection with the version containing this edit.

To make this point very clear, these included copies of the 20th Century Fox film purchased through sites that had no affiliation with the Disney company and potentially even prior to Disney’s acquisition of the Fox library. Today, the only way to purchase the unedited The French Connection is on the old 20th Century Fox Blu-ray, which Disney has since chosen to stop distributing. It is currently and suddenly out of print. It should be noted that international Blu-ray releases are still available.

Now, let’s return to the facts. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle uses a racial slur. The movie does not celebrate his usage. In fact, Ernest Tidyman’s script uses the scene to establish that our protagonist is far from an excellent human. He’s a complicated moral figure that single-mindedly attacks the streets to achieve an outcome using any method necessary. The film asks the audience to determine for themselves if the end justifies the means. Neutering a scene that uses vulgarity to color in those shades of gray muddies the filmmakers’ creative intent with arbitrary moral judgment brought down 50 years after its 1971 release.

So, what’s this all about? Why now?

Some years ago, everyone collectively stopped giving the audience the benefit of the doubt. I’d argue that the audience stopped earning it as well. The Internet culture that democratized film criticism has also given megaphones to people without the slightest interest in film education, preservation, or context. Everything, it seems, has been filed under the disposable label “content,” which celebrates banal, comfortable, safe mediocrity. This does not describe the cinematic landscape of the 1970s.

William Friedkin is trying to establish that the character of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection is a racist, belligerent cop. Gene Hackman (who also won for his performance in the film) said that he also had reservations about playing the character. Popeye’s a bad guy and that might make him a good cop… or a bad cop. The viewer gets to decide – not the media conglomerate lording over its massive empire on high or the reactionary bloggers feigning offense without caring to understand that the movie itself holds Popeye Doyle up as a racist. Friedkin never played coy with the issue. This was not a “good people on both sides” brand of hedging.

Where does this end? Does it end? The arbitrary nature of taking the knife to The French Connection suggests that no movie is safe from massacre. Am I overreacting? I don’t think so. We’re collectively not overreacting enough. We’re not teaching enough. We’re not talking enough. And most problematically, as a culture we can’t be bothered to care enough. This will happen again and again. The precedents are being set. The cleansing of our classic media means fewer irrationally angry potential customers. It’s not sanitization, reader, it’s global anesthesia by way of mass commercialism.

The French Connection doesn’t represent an anomaly. People talked liked this. Cops in cop movies talked like this. For all their artifice, movies have always presented a version of our reality – no matter what alarms sound in our 2023 brains. Don’t say that. Don’t do that. 2023 isn’t wrong, but we should maintain the ability to witness our past – our progress and our transgressions – so that we can recognize them for what they are.

The whitewashing of our media is no different than the conservative push to ban books that consider the history of race in America… or scrub clean from offense Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels or Roald Dahl’s children’s books. Bad press means people on Twitter fuming away as they click themselves into a fury, having never read or taken the time to understand the source of the intent. Corporate culture has found need to adulterate our celebrated art in the name of sensitivity, but we all recognize the motivation.

Money.

And that two-faced turn makes the significance of this midnight theft stink even more. 

Categories
Cinema Only on DVD

DVD Netflix is dead. Long live DVD.

(originally published on Inside the Envelope)

Only on DVD: Part 7

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6

We’ve all heard by now that DVD Netflix will stop sending little red envelopes this fall. When I announced it on the Cinema Shame podcast, I mentioned – that with very few exceptions – this means that most of us (99.9% of us?) no longer have rental access to physical media. As someone who grew up during the video store era, this realization leaves me grappling with an cinexistential crisis. This current generation of budding cinephiles will never browse a rental shelf. Spare me the argument that this is progress. Not all progress benefits us. 

My local video stores provided a huge portion of my film education. They directed my path of discovery based on the catalog titles they’d chosen to stock on their shelves. We VHS kids had some magazines and film books to direct our attention, but when we wanted to rent a movie we often just walked into the video store blindly, reaching our hands out into the darkness just to see what we could find. 

Even without DVD Netflix, that experience didn’t exist anymore. Although we have more movies available to us at the click of a mouse, that blessing is also a curse. How does anyone stumble into a new favorite movie? If you’re watching something new in 2023, it’s because you probably went searching for a specific title or cast/crew member. Some exceptions remain – like browsing the cobwebbed corners of Prime Video or Tubi, but you’re still at the mercy of the app’s search returns, unpredictable video quality, and “you might also like” algorithms. That’s going in blind, but with someone you don’t know handing you random titles that you’re definitely absolutely going love because you watched Pitch Perfect 2 that one time in 2017.  

It’s not the same. There’s a negligible sense of discovery and zero adventure. Spare me the eyerolls and nostalgia gasps. A Friday trip to the video store was the pinnacle of my average week as a pre-teen stuck in rural Michigan. What’s the modern day equivalent? There isn’t one. I don’t meant to suggest that we’ve become a passionless society, but maybe we’ve become a passionless society. In the absence of obstacle, what need does passion even serve?

Faux outrage and virtue signaling is not passion.

You could argue, of course, that video store shelves were less efficient, that they didn’t bother to narrow down their offerings to focus your search. That, however, was the beauty of the experience. Each store had its own personality, its own clerks stocking employee recommendations. I grew up in a tiny farm community. We had two bars, two convenience stores, and two video stores serving roughly 2,000 people. In my head, the rental stores were called “the one with CEDs” and “the one without CEDs.” (Yes, indeed, one of my stores stocked Capacitance Electronic Discs, aka RCA Videodiscs and I’ll let you guess which one went out of business first. That said, it had more to do with their commitment to extraordinarily high late fees.)

The point is that, unintentionally or not, each store had a share in developing my cinematic perspective. Through one I had access to the future of home video technology (a format that is now a super geeky go-to punchline), surely fueling my entry into the next big thing – Laserdiscs – and for a minimum-wage teenager with limited liquid assets, I got pretty hot and heavy with the magic of those vinyl-sized flippers. Just say it with me VHS generation… and say it extra sexy…

…original… aspect… ratio.

Through the other location, I found classic movies. I remember plucking It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) from the shelf because of the size of the two-VHS box with the shiny gold MGM banner across the top. At the time I didn’t know Sid Caesar from Sid Vicious. There wasn’t an algorithm in this universe that would have put that epic, madcap comedy in front of my face based on my habit of watching Batman (1989) over and over and over again. 

I’m waxing nostalgic not to dwell on what we’ve lost as a moviewatching culture because we do enough of that already, but to consider how we move forward with what we’ve got left. Our movie rental stores have all become banks and pharmacies (cue Joni Mitchell), but that doesn’t mean we’re left without opportunity for the arbitrary fate of offline, algorithm-less discovery.

Take a trip to your favorite second-hand bookstore or thrift shop just to see what’s in stock. There’s bound to be some title that takes you by surprise. Survey the VHS tapes, the DVDs – and take one home with you. Two if you’re feeling daring. There’s no reason we can’t “keep circulating the tapes” (to borrow an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 phrase) on our own. Give the movie a watch. Maybe you’ll want to add them to your collection. Maybe you won’t, but that doesn’t matter! It’s about the act, the adventure. If it’s not a keeper, you’ll have the opportunity to put it back into circulation via a redistribution service like SwapADVD.com or eBay.

So, while there’s still time, dive into the abyss that is the nether regions of the DVD Netflix catalog and then watch through that queue. (Show us your conquests on the socials with #GetThroughMyQueue.) After that? Well, there are video stores all around us, if we just take the time to blindly wander into the semi-dark.