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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.

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Cinema Only on DVD

What We Learned from the “Mind-Boggling” Case of the Glass Onion

Only on DVD: Part 5

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

On my last ‘Only on DVD’ column, I dissected Paramount’s release of Confess, Fletch (2022). Looking at the reported production and distribution facts leading up to its super-secret release week, I’m tempted to call Paramount’s handling of the property “inept.” Comparing Paramount and Confess, Fletch (2002) with Netflix and Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), however, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Big Red’s distribution methodology is something else entirely. 

I wanted to learn more about why Netflix chose, according to the headline of a November 27th article in the Hollywood Reporter, to leave “tens of millions on the table” by shunning a traditional theatrical release. I’m looking into Netflix specifically because of Glass Onion, but many of these same criticisms could be lobbied against HBO Max and Amazon Prime and anyone else with a production business and a streaming service. They just have fewer notable examples – and none as big as Glass Onion.

Sidenote: Let me be abundantly clear – because some readers have been confused by this in the past – I write for DVD Netflix, an entity that was cordoned off from the streaming giant known as Netflix. DVD Netflix goes out of its way to cater to its subscriber base by absorbing steadily increasing postal costs and providing a wide variety of titles despite dwindling resources. In many ways, The Little Red Envelope is the antithesis of the Big Red Streamer – even though they share distant familial DNA.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) gave Netflix its first massive critical success.

Big Red first courted industry respectability by releasing Awards-worthy releases such as Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). Since then, seven more Netflix-distributed and/or produced movies have been nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, including 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front. To date, none have won the top prize. Traditional distribution for Oscar fodder doesn’t stray too far from Netflix’s practice of limiting the exhibition of their original feature productions. Open theatrically in a few major metropolitan areas and increase the number of screens in lockstep with critical buzz, Academy Award nominations, and ticket sales.

It should be noted that the Academy once again requires a qualifying theatrical release for awards consideration (the restriction relaxed during COVID but was reinstated in 2022), and if not for this stipulation it’s likely these films wouldn’t appear in theaters at all. The Netflix limited theatrical release model never stood out as something entirely dissimilar, especially since five of their eight nominees were released since the beginning of the pandemic, when “normal” became anything but.

And then they got into the Knives Out business.

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) received widespread critical acclaim and made $311.9 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. Lionsgate greenlit a sequel in 2020 without much hesitation. Lionsgate, however, didn’t own the rights to the property. Rian Johnson had retained sequel rights and auctioned them off to the highest bidder. Enter Big Red, who outbid both Apple and Amazon, with an offer of $469 million for distribution rights of the two planned Knives Out sequels – more than double what Lionsgate had been prepared to offer.  Variety quoted one anonymous losing bidder: “The math doesn’t work. There’s no way to explain it. The world has gone mad. It’s a mind-boggling deal.” We’re left to wonder how Netflix views the value of the Knives Out franchise. Where do they plan to recoup their investment?

Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer considered this and saw an opportunity to stay in the Knives Out business. He thought he could parlay the distribution rights for the original Knives Out to maintain some involvement with the sequels. He imagined a world in which Netflix could stream the original alongside the sequels and release the trilogy together on physical media. Lionsgate supplied a more traditional theatrical distribution model, whereas Netflix had only thumbed its nose at exhibitioners. (Netflix attempted a simultaneous theatrical and streaming release of The Beasts of No Nation in 2015, causing the large chains to boycott the film.) Big Red would surely welcome a wider theatrical release for such a high-profile sequel. Feltheimer made the offer. Netflix declined.

In producing Glass Onion, Netflix crossed over into the mainstream; courting a big, burgeoning Hollywood franchise to compete with the headlining IP on streaming rivals Disney and HBO; and, for the first time, brokered an agreement with AMC and Regal Cinemas. (At the time, AMC’s chief executive Adam Aron proclaimed proudly and presumptuously that “both theatrical exhibitors and streamers can coexist successfully.”) And indeed, everyone expected Netflix to burst into theaters, box offices blazing, a parade of fanfare for their $469 million investment. A November 25th New York Times article suggested that sources inside the company expected Glass Onion to play on 2,000 screens nationwide. As a point of comparison, the current number one movie as I’m writing this, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, played in 2,176 theaters on Valentine’s Day 2023.

But Glass Onion only opened on 638 screens.

This decision went against the wishes of Netflix’s Film Chief Scott Stuber and Rian Johnson, both of whom lobbied for a wide release and a traditional theatrical schedule dictated by ticket sales. Those previously enthusiastic major exhibitors threatened to pull out of their agreement but stayed under the assumption that a big opening weekend would change Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos’ way of thinking. Despite internal disagreement, Sarandos doubled down on his demands of a one-week theatrical run, followed by a 30-day window before arriving on Netflix’s streaming service.

There’s some industry thinking to back up Sarandos’ methodology. David Zaslav, chief executive at Warner Media Discovery, said “a movie that opens in the theater performs five times as well as a movie that you put directly to streaming.” The same held true throughout the history of direct-to-video releases, which must be seen as the most direct comparison for the more than 817,000 offerings cluttering app space. Movies that play in theaters receive a quality control pass from potential viewers, but here’s the problem – and I admit there’s a gap in available information, but let’s do the best we can. It wasn’t whether Netflix left money on the table, but how much money they left on the table. In the Hollywood Reporter, Wall Street analyst Eric Handler commented, “They had a big chance and they whiffed.” Netflix pulled a box office hit from theaters, during a period of industry uncertainty. Any other studio would have killed to have that kind of opening. Netflix denied exhibitors the chance to benefit from the increased patronage Glass Onion had generated, choosing market manipulation over concrete money in their pockets.

In Glass Onion’s first weekend in theaters, it made $13.2 million – good for third place behind Disney’s Wakanda Forever and Strange World. Both of those films played in more than 4,000 movie houses. Glass Onion made $4,000 more per screen than Wakanda Forever and $14,000 more per screen than Strange World. $14,563 to be precise. Sarandos, meanwhile, carried on undeterred and downplayed the theatrical significance. “…we make our movies for our members,” he said, following it up by saying, “Most people watch movies at home.” 

This statement might not seem like much, but it tells us everything we need to know. 

Sarandos only wants to exhibit Netflix movies on the Netflix streaming service. In a perfect scenario, he’d eschew theatrical exhibition altogether. As a company devoted to its streaming content, that makes sense, but it still needs theaters for credibility, awards eligibility, and the viewership bump (the number of eyes on home television screens). He does not care about the potential viewer experience. He’s in the content business, not the movie business. Anyone that’s not a Netflix subscriber should become a Netflix subscriber. This doesn’t benefit the public, many of whom want to see the film but don’t or can’t subscribe to Netflix. After all, there is this very real thing called The Digital Divide. The “most people watch movies at home” statement has been true for decades – since the proliferation of home video – but more and more people watch movies at home because they’re increasingly forced to watch movies at home. Paramount secreted Confess, Fletch into theaters. Netflix provided such a narrow window for Glass Onion that many just couldn’t make it. Roll back the calendar a few years and even the worst and least profitable mainstream movies had two weeks to prove themselves. 

Furthermore, no matter what they say, streaming services don’t want theaters to survive. The sooner the traditional exhibition branch goes extinct, the sooner Sarandos can operate Netflix in a vacuum. That kind of world would absolutely revive the pre-U.S. vs. Paramount (1948) distribution business model. He’s not alone, of course. Every studio with its own streaming service would prefer to use that as an exclusive subscription-based venue for exhibition of its product. I keep saying this because it bears repeating: a studio that produces a movie and exhibits it only on its own streaming service is engaging in the exact practice that caused the Paramount decision in 1948. The times and venues have changed, but without the protection that that Supreme Court decision afforded, the fundamental makeup of those monopolistic practices remains a very real potentiality.

The only barrier between a system whereby Netflix produces a film and exhibits that film only on its streaming service is the viewing habits of the moviegoing public. No physical media. No theatrical releases. If streamers successfully lock everyone to their couch, in perpetuity, endlessly scrolling a deluge of disposable content, the industry will be forced to change with the times, kneeling before its streaming overlords. The requirements for Oscar contention would be dismissed. The perceived differences between a theatrically released movie and a direct-to-streaming release decrease every day.

We are not powerless. We are not slaves to entropy, but we do need to engage in a little more consumer activism. We not only need to return to theaters, but we need to continue to purchase physical media and rent physical media from DVD Netflix and our library systems. Maybe you’re still one of the lucky few with a brick-and-mortar DVD rental store in your neighborhood. It’s a little more effort, but if we become slaves to convenience, we’ll lose one of the things that made us movie watchers, cinephiles, and film geeks in the first place. Choice. 

How we watch movies matters. Streaming services can be wonderful tools; they’ve given us the ability to find movies that had been completely unavailable for decades. If we abandon all else, however, we’ll be subscribing to a system that dictates how we watch and when we watch it. It’s not a new system, of course. We once liberated ourselves from a similar construct with the invention of the VHS tape, but this time around we won’t have the luxury of escapism provided by our connection with big movies on the big screen. The movies might never even play on the big screen. 

Roku produced and distributed Weird: The Al Yankovic Story without an accompanying theatrical release or the wide viewership guaranteed by Netflix or Amazon.

Maybe there isn’t some sort of diabolical schematic for how to take over the world via streaming video. Maybe it’s nothing more than this oft-repeated rumor that physical media is dead, that home video consumers have been wooed by the streaming dawn. Netflix certainly isn’t the only service that fails to offer alternative viewing methods for their product.Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) saw an initial Blu-ray and 4K release in Australia months before one was even announced in North America.

I would be shocked if the Roku-produced film had even found a fraction of its audience on the little-known streaming service. Most people I asked about the film didn’t even know how to watch the film online. Much like the belated release for Confess, Fletch, Weird may have missed any sort of window to capitalize on its good reviews. At least its devotees could eventually slot this film on the shelf next to UHF (1989), which is far more than I can say for the prospects of ever seeing a case spine that reads Glass Onion.