You have a choice of two movies. One was made in the 1930s or '40s or '50s; the other was made sometime between, say, 1980 and last week. Forget about who's in them or who made them. In fact, let's stipulate that in both cases it was nobody special and neither film is anything but ordinary. Your chances of being satisfyingly diverted, engaged, entertained are measurably better if you select the older movie. Even if both films are run-of-the-mill. Because once upon a time they had lots better mills.
This is a thesis you can check out any hour of the day by comparing what's showing on Turner Classic Movies or American Movie Classics against the miscellany on HBO or Starz. The grainiest 68-minute program picture out of Warners in 1933 is almost certain to have more moxie, more bite, more coherent storytelling and narrative drive, and probably more to say to a present-day viewer with an operative brain, than the latest direct-to-video sleazefest or multi-megabuck, hi-tech stunt derby from Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay.
Or maybe that's just me.
Then again, maybe it's not. "A year ago," says Craig Wilson, owner of Video Isle, "80 percent of our business focused on these two racks"; he indicates the new releases section of the video-rental emporium just a few doors down from "coffee corner" (Queen Anne Avenue North and Boston Street). "But now - without our having done a thing, really - it's a little less than 60 percent.
"People are really beginning to get into the older films."
Wilson's no video geek. A boating enthusiast, tall, tanned, silver-haired, with a sense of humor that sneaks up on you, he didn't get into the videostore business because of any avowed devotion to cinema. "I set up a store, thought it would be" - he shrugs - "maybe a three-year stand. It's been 19."
From a business standpoint, Wilson began to figure it would make sense to draw attention to "the catalog": the older films - the no-longer-new releases, but even more, the classics - that constitute by far the larger share of his store's holdings. But he also couldn't help catching the movie-buff bug: "You want people to know," he says, "just how good these older movies are. I mean, they just keep getting better and better."
Enter, about this point, an antic spirit.
Wilson has sponsored a (frequently championship) Queen Anne Little League baseball team for some years, and recently he became friends with Little League dad Arne Zaslove. In addition to directing the Bathhouse Theatre for two decades and the Floating Theatre before that, and co-founding the Professional Actors Training Program at the University of Washington, Zaslove - whom Seattle Weekly once hailed as "the closest thing Seattle boasts to a living Cultural Resource" - is a film freak of long standing.
As a Fulbright scholar in the 1960s, he went to Paris to study masks and physical theater at Ecole Jacques Lecoq, but kept sneaking off to the Cinémathèque Française. He recollects his delight when, upon settling in Seattle c. 1967, he discovered a far-flung suburban movie theater - the Edgemont in Edmonds - that devoted itself full-time to programming the European and classic films that fascinated him. Many's the night, Zaslove says, he and fellow cinemaddicts piled into actor John Aylward's car and made the pilgrimage north to catch the latest (or not-so-latest) Godard, Bergman or Buñuel.
So Zaslove and Wilson started comparing notes. Before long, they hit upon the notion of instituting something to be called "Reel Classics: Two on the Isle," variously characterized as a "festival," a "club" or a subscription series aimed at helping ordinary, non-film-freak folks discover the vintage movies they don't quite know they're looking for.
Not that Wilson and Zaslove always know what they're looking for. While I'm talking with them at Video Isle one drizzly morning last week, Zaslove suddenly lunges at the classic comedy shelf and comes up with a DVD of films by the legendary yet little-known French comic Max Linder. "Where did you find this?!" Zaslove asks in something between a hush and a whoop.
Wilson shakes his head, trying to recall: "It just ..."
"This is the man who inspired Chaplin!" Zaslove goes on. "Chaplin based his whole persona on Linder - not the Tramp, that came later, but the Dandy, the first figure Chaplin developed." He presses the DVD cover as though it were the Rosetta stone.
Then, in the act of restoring it to its niche, he snatches up another: Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill Jr.," the 1928 feature with the amazing, town-destroying, CGI-free cyclone and Keaton's death-defying tumbles through it. "This - this - is Greek tragedy! This is a perfect motion picture!" (I will not lie to you: it is.)
Reel Classics, which is set to launch this weekend, arrives at something of a critical moment for film and its video accessibility. Not everything is available on video, of course; never has been, probably never will be. Studios and their archival divisions have often failed to realize the beauty and importance of their holdings. It took years before MGM got around to transferring any of their Greta Garbo pictures to video. The historic early-sound comedies Ernst Lubitsch directed for Paramount were never released at all on VHS cassette - only as a boxed set on laserdisc, a wonderful but never widely embraced format that was discontinued a year or so later. Now DVD has taken off like gangbusters, and VHS, like laser, is going the way of the dodo. High-profile franchises such as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are selling off their cassette inventories, and on a visit to Costco last week I found that the only videocassette recorders or players still available for purchase were part and parcel of primarily DVD units.
Video Isle won't be going that route. Thousands of movies that have yet to come out on DVD exist on VHS. "We're not going to abandon our VHS titles," Wilson says emphatically. "We're 'librarying' them."
He leads me into the back rooms at the Isle, beyond the neatly shelved, brown-sleeved rental DVDs. "They won't all be out there on the racks, but we'll have them. I've got a cellar full of them in my house - and I rent a 12-by-15 storage locker to hold others! When people come looking for an older movie they've heard or read about, there's a good chance we'll have it."
More and more, people are looking for those movies, though not always out of pure cinephilia. "I just think people like shopping," Wilson conjectures. "Netflix [online and direct-mail rental service] is a great idea, and I've tried it; it's convenient, of course. I got a little worried...." Perhaps under the physical-theater influence of Zaslove, he mimes a shudder. "But their offerings are limited, especially when it comes to the classics. And it's not going to replace stores where people can go and look around and make discoveries for themselves.
"People in Seattle are very fortunate," Wilson adds. "There are any number of really fine, independently owned videostores in this city." He and Zaslove attribute this in part to the strong sense of community in Seattle neighborhoods, something nowhere more strongly felt than in their own Queen Anne.
So what exactly is Reel Classics? Call it a work-in-progress, a dream-in-progress, with even the dreamers not quite sure how many directions it may grow in.
First the idea was to build a database of "the great classics of 20th-century cinema" - except that, as far as Zaslove is concerned, nothing released after 1960 is eligible, at least for starters. Friends and colleagues have pitched in with suggestions, especially fellow Queen Anne Little League parent Tonya De Vorchik, who's built the database, and staffers at Video Isle. Initially, titles have been sorted into six categories: Screwball Comedies, Silent Cinema, Westerns, Family Fare, Musicals and Film Noir. Some are "major classics" a lot of people will know by name; some are "little-known gems" whose titles ring a bell only for film buffs, though in most cases there's nothing arcane about the films themselves. Some are already at Video Isle; others will be added to the catalog.
Reel Classics will steer potential viewers toward the right movies via synopses (for every film), "shelf talkers" (sorta miniature file cards on the racks) for key films and the comprehensive, computerized index accessible inhouse and online. The goal, according to an early handout, is to "place [the film] in context, point out performances to watch for and trace the films that shaped it ... and the films it influenced." If that's starting to sound seriously ambitious, well, Zaslove doesn't rule out the notion of giving informal talks, hosting discussions and maybe even arranging group showings.
Yet another of the hats topping Zaslove's artistically flyaway hair is that of memorabilia collector. Over the decades he's amassed rooms' worth of posters, lobby cards, film toys, pop-ups and other artifacts and ephemera, along with a voluminous library of film books. A lot of these will be on rotating display at Video Isle's Queen Anne store and the Fremont branch, too, to help put folks in the mood. (Since Zaslove just signed to direct the fall season at Teatro ZinZanni, De Vorchik will be taking over the window displays.)
As for the "Two on the Isle" part, Video Isle will be selling passes good for eight Reel Classics rentals (anything except new releases): pay for six and get two free.
Zaslove is the best kind of film buff: one who possesses discerning intelligence along with the capacity for delight, and knows that the past is as new as the experience one is having with it. He's equally tickled with a new book of interviews with Federico Fellini and a great Randolph Scott Western (yes, there is such a thing) he's never seen before.
"Forty-five years I've been doing what I do," he muses, a happy gnome. "Directing, clowning, teaching.... Everything I've been doing all my life feeds into this project."
Which is as it should be. Send in the clowns.
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