Google Had a Video?

UPDATE 4.24.11: Google has announced they will hold off on deleting their videos - for now.

- - - - - -

Google Video will be no more, as of May 13th. Post their announcement, the somewhat snarky commentary online suggests that if an online service that no one used anyway disappears, did it ever make a noise?

The digital echo we'll hear after the collapse of Google Video is unclear. Google Video simply didn't get the traction that YouTube, a very similar service, was able to (and Google went ahead and acquired them in 2006 for $1.2 billion).

One factor may be that Google Video started, in terms of toucan years, a decade or so too soon (a generation in computer years, early 2005 compared to YouTube's April of 2005. Yes, you read that right. A mere 3 months earlier. YouTube, if only due to lack of resources, developed more slowly and therefore organically). The selection hosted on Google was quickly and overpoweringly a motley amalgam of old and obsolete news and advertising clips, educational fillups and full-length documentaries with no other distribution or market value. That's why they were on Google Video. There was nothing compelling I ever found, and admittedly the low rate of return and high signal-to-noise ratio prevented me from ever searching very long or very deep.

In other words, the perception was that it was a bunch of junk. Obviously a last-stop channel. While the content was for the most part unique and unavailable elsewhere, it wasn't useful. Clips that users uploaded themselves were lost in the shuffle.

That made it at best quaint.

YouTube, by contrast, though also quickly filled with content that was not available anywhere else, but was also driven by that aesthetic, also offering simple discovery and tag tools - and the ability to participate without logging in or registering. That made it social. It was a destination. While Google Video was a one-way conversation, a replacement for the top-of-the-dial UHF public-access channels, YouTube was a two-way conversation, a new way to filter the content online, and indeed to contextualize as well as respond in kind.

That also made it political.

Google hasn't been accepting uploads since May of 2009, and seemed to have quickly decided they were more interested in indexing video at other sites and pointing users there. As seems to be their value strategy, it's more useful to discover (and exploit) information about what people are searching for, rather than to actually host it. They admit they're finally ready to put us (and their tech staff) out of our misery.

They warn those who have content up to download it (and perhaps re-up it onto YouTube (they assume you already have).). In spite of amateur archivists rallying ad hoc to try and download the scarcer and "most interesting" of the over 2.8 million videos rumored to live there it's likely most of it will be gone in the digital shadow of the Internet.

How would one go about saving and archiving such a unique collection as that on Google Video? A dynamic collection formed by chance, demographics, and the tyranny of changing technology and audience interaction. Most poorly or mis-cataloged (sometimes on purpose to prevent finding it). And what does this say for the permanence of a corporation's goals, while professing to interconnect all the world's data, when some data is too needy to keep at the party.

Ultimately the longevity of all that data in the cloud is not in our hands. Imagine when YouTube becomes obsolete, or supplanted by some other service or upload/download service? Where will all that stuff go? Most of it may be transferred, and it may be automatic. But a lot will not be, and whether or not it's unique, important, curated or active will not have a lot to do with it.

Curators and archivists are not making the decisions, and the cultural fallout of an unknown, unique and now lost collection becoming extinct bears out two truths:

--Google Video was not the first chapter in what was supposed to be the new story of video on-line, rather it was the last of the older tale. On to new models.

--The take-down of Google Video may be the introduction to another kind of tale (it'll probably be an e-book, actually), one that explores what happens to culture when our audio-visual objects are so ephemeral, fleeting, and out of our control that they can't be depended upon to be around (especially when they're rare and forgotten, especially when they stop existing anywhere else except a furtive digital upload years ago ) when - just in case - they are more important than suspected. To someone somewhere eventually.

A Dog In The Fight

Seems the landscape for what you watch and where you watch it is getting more dangerous by the week. New announcements counteracting and contradicting the previous ones fly as different companies are stepping on each others' toes to get to the customers anyway they can.

Comcast and Times-Warner announced their intent to go wide with TV Everywhere, a computer-based streaming service (press release here). They want to stay in the business of delivering the content no one is going out to theatres to see anymore, before Netflix or Hulu figure out how to completely own the space. (The studios are already nervous about Netflix intruding into the lucrative realm of more current programs rather than just those less attractive that are already available on DVD.) About a moment later the AMC and Regal Theatre chains announced their joint-foray into distribution, acquiring independent and orphan films not only to screen on their small under-utilized theatres but to distribute in other venues including video, cable, and any other method of wireless as well. (reported here ).

They've all come to realize the big sexy blockbusters don't assert their presence for very long in the old ways - they may open on over 4000 screens opening week but by the 2nd the gross has fallen 50% and there's a lot of empty seats. No one makes any money showing a movie to an empty seat. Seats don't buy popcorn (nor are they swayed by ads). Filling those seats with indie product, easily portable and translatable to the smaller screens, won't take up too much room and sometimes it plays for weeks - or months - demonstrating and proving the concept of the "long tail" with a minimum of outlay.

Now just last week DirecTV is fighting the old/new model with their own "premium VOD" (here). It's shaping up to be a dogfight and who wins will depend on whose dog is the biggest.

AMC and Regal have both declared they won't play ball with any studios that share their content on DirecTV's VOD model (intended to make films available for as much as $30 as little as 4 weeks after opening in theatres). AMC and Regal insist on keeping the theatrical model intact, in spite of their own dog in the race, their small yapping foray into on-the-fringe distribution of under-the-radar titles, a low-profile attempt to nibble at the crumbs the studios leave behind that can't be ignored.

AMC and Regal, the #1 and #2 largest theatre exhibition companies, have most at risk in the short term. Comcast and DirecTV are looking at the long term. No one knows what will capture the public's fancy with increasing amount of content being consumed on tablets and phones. Staking out their claim with talky independent films (which are shorter and scale "down" visually) may translate well from the empty screens at the multiplex to home, where AMC can still take 60% of the revenue.

Predicting what people will pay for is a fool's game. The LA Times article quoted above reminds us that this is similar to the fight over Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" last year, when Disney wanted to shorten the time from theatrical opening to DVD to 3 months. Marketing was no doubt trying to mitigate the likely dramatic fall-off of business for a title they predicted (and not without precedent) would have no legs.

They'd seen the movie. It wasn't very good.

Disney backed off when the theatre chains threatened to boycott the film, and subsequently and surprisingly, "Alice" continued to play to curious and hood-winked audiences, partially due to the confluence of 3-D still being new and unburnished by "Clash of the Titans" and "Piranha 3-D," the very fecundity of the idea of making Alice a sexually stirring post-adolescent in the remake, and the promising if half-baked potential of Depp as the Mad Hatter, a conceit ultimately not exploited in the film but no matter. "Alice" grossed $330 million in the US and $690 million more overseas, making it even more popular than those Pirate movies.

An early release of "Alice" to home video (in any format) would have quenched curiosity, shortened the run (over 4 months domestically) and suppressed the upper reach of its gigantic receipts.

Everyone is in a rush to bite the hand that feeds them, while the old saw that content is king still proves itself out, in potent and unexpected ways. The fertile potential of good films is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room that still drives people to what they want to see, wherever they have to go see it.

Estimates in the Mid '80s

Scanning the shelves in a video store (in the old days, meaning about 16 months ago), or browsing through Netflix's seemingly bottomless catalog both emphasize a sense that there is an inconquerable amount of movies to watch. No one could get to it all in a lifetime. Movies you never even heard of starring people you'd never recognize, produced by studios long since bulldozed.

Hundreds of television series are lost to the sands of time, except someone had the master tapes and they've been re-mastered and released to DVD. For those nostalgic fans who still remember, wherever they may be now, when they first saw the show during its short run. And to generate new fans and maybe drum up interest in the Hollywood remake next summer.

Those film masters were stored somewhere and its likely at one point someone wanted to throw them away. They took up valuable space in a vault that was already too full of negatives, dupes, episodes of programs that someone actually were requesting. and as institutions move, are sold or consolidate, the heavy and dusty remnants of its past, embodied in papers, legal files, boxes, media and master tapes, are all expensive afterthoughts. There are stories of Hollywood studios dumping their old negatives into landfills and into Santa Monica Bay rather than pay to store them any longer.

Things sit around in corners and get rediscovered years later, only because they were forgotten and didn't have a chance to meet with misfortune.

Films go through a messy and rather reverse-exponential process of birth. Multiple camera negatives, dupe negatives and interpositives, work prints, optical and magnetic soundtracks, including stereo and foreign-language separations, M&E tracks and other manners of layers are created, duplicated and laid upon one another in the process of ending up with the "master final." All those building blocks are kept in case the producers or creative talent want to go back and redo some iteration.

This process doesn't just occur for union Hollywood productions - every independent short, television program, pilot, news program and industrial creates in its wake the detritus of at best 5 or 10 times the amount of content actually needed for final distribution. By the time they're not useful anymore the people involved have separated and are working on 10 other projects and proper and measured disposal is put off until the final custodian whose garage it ended up in because his name was on the cardboard boxes passed away and the grandkids want it cleared out so they can resell the house in a falling real estate market.

These elements may end up in an archive somewhere, and barring the unlikely event that someone has to reconstruct a film or program from its constituent elements they remain untouched until they deteriorate, asserting their physical uselessness beyond the until then merely philosophical.

Archives are challenged daily when a donation comes in from a family that has prints or elements that haven't been run through a projector in 30 years (and are likely in better shape than the ones in the archive). Inevitably these donations come with boxes of outtakes and unfinished copies no one (including the producing studio) wants, but in order to get the good they accept the whole motley pallet.

The other challenge is that no one can predict what will be valuable or useful in the future. As filmmakers, genres, actors, and modes of representation fall into and out of fashion, those titles that no one seemed interested in in 1990 suddenly gain a new cultural currency in 2010. The public and researchers see something on YouTube in degraded video quality and go searching for the high-quality masters in a curated archive to reclaim it for the greater good.

So libraries and archival institutions whether official or de facto tend to err in the direction of taking in more than they think they want or need, in the interest of expediency and in the interest of being complete. It delays the decision-making process ("What do we actually want in our collection?") from input to some later era ("What are we gonna do with all this stuff?"). You can't predict what will be used in the future anyway, what will turn out to be unique and therefore more valuable, and besides, funding may increase and you can build that new wing.

Very little is ultimately used. In any archive or library, less than 5% of the items generate 90% of the use, and it's estimated that 80% of the items never get requested or viewed at all.

So it sits forgotten, in a curated and protective environment instead of a garage or the bottom of the bay.

Someone's gotta keep it.

Watch Instantly

Netflix isn't just about getting the new hot hits on DVD. The Psychotronic Netflix page on Facebook, post by post, and the increasingly indispensable Rupert Pupkin Speaks blog, in more complete list form, researches and reveals the various obscurities, off-the-radar gems and lost or forgotten films becoming available through Netflix's burgeoning streaming service.

Many of these films have not been available before in any format since VHS, and some never made it to DVD. "The Keep" (Michael Mann), "Citizen's Band" (Johnathan Demme), "92 in the Shade" (Thomas McGuane), "Cul-de-sac" (Roman Polanski), "How I Won The War" (Richard Lester), "Harry In Your Pocket" (Bruce Geller), "Inserts" (John Byrum), "Hickey & Boggs" (Robert Culp), and "Grindhouse" (Rodriguez/Tarantino (the original theatrical hash) are all examples of films I saw in theatres, in some cases travelling many miles past my neighborhood venue, titles not currently available on regular DVD ("Grindhouse" recently escaped on Blu-ray) and can now only be seen by looking at my computer screen by myself, alone.

DVD rights to such titles are murky, undervalued and considered (or actually) not worth pursuing. But these films seem to be part of some out-of-date late '70s-early '80s cable bundles that didn't make it to the DVD publishers during the go-go era of Blockbuster and Erol's, packages that Netflix has purchased to beef up their offerings, from Starz (for a steal, it turns out) or elsewhere.

Netflix doesn't want to be in the mail-order business. The more that people stream films over their t.v.s, phones and handhelds, the less they have to manage, ship and replace thousands upon thousands of discs in the mail which are prone like all objects born of atoms to wear, get lost and suffer other misfortunes of human clumsiness. DVDs break and have to be replaced. When films can be streamed over air, the economics of digital delivery manifest themselves.

This is a long-term strategy - the financial benefit won't bear fruit for a while. Netflix may intend to eventually save the estimated $600m a year on snail-mail postage, but the cost of acquiring this content is suddenly astronomical - over $1.2 billion in the next year alone by some estimates.

The math has changed. I've talked about how Hollywood will insist on regaining control of their content online before. Netflix isn't buying savings because Hollywood has decided they want to be paid to let people look.

Netflix is only leasing the films, for increasingly short periods of time. 3 films in my "instant" queue disappeared last month, as deals matured and were not renewed at the old rates. Netflix has some work ahead as it decides whether (and how) to have the best, the widest, the newest or the deepest selections.

For now they have all the eyeballs. Reportedly over 80% of films watched online stream through Netflix, and they're responsible for over 20% of all internet traffic. This is an enviable position they welcome. Netflix has always had a long term strategy - they aren't called "MailDVDs" after all. Reed Hastings always knew the future of movies was online.

New consumer plans going into effect this week prove they would rather give you unlimited movies on the web than helping you arrange that list of DVDs to mail. People have been using their queues as memory aides - you aren't really going to get to all 500 of those films in this lifetime. As of this fall they report that more of their content is delivered online than by mail, in terms of hours watched. It used to be they mailed DVDs, but also streamed some movies too. Now they stream movies but mail them too if you really want.

They hope that adding that extra dollar to each account nudges you in the right direction. It will also help pay the bills.

In the meantime, while only about 20% of their current content is available for streaming some of it is only available that way. It sits there behind a low-res window of laptop watch-instantly tempting us. I could spend months watching these low-rent forgotten '70s and '80s late-night channel 44 fillers, but the majority of viewers won't want to watch "Fast Food" with Michael J. Pollard and Traci Lords. *

If Netflix wants to offer all the new films and latest shows, it will pay dear for the privilege.
_ _ _ _ _ _

*Although I heartily recommend it.

Remembering and Forgetting in Hollywood

Having peeked inside various archives in Los Angeles for the last couple of years and doing time there instead of merely looking over the fences I've become aware of a trend overtaking the curation of films. In the minutia of deadline day-to-day decisions the philosophical dicotomy between digital and analog, invisible to the audience, is inexorably influencing the industry by stealth and infultrating practice; amid short-sighted budgetary edicts the tipping point's been reached where either something is committed to digital or it remains in analog format.

In effect, this assigns assets either to corporate balkanization or to cultural extinction. It has much to do with what is old and with what is new. It will be an irreversable decision as time goes foreward.

The vast majority of content is not only being produced on digital formats now but also being post-manipulated and delivered by digital means. TV shows and "films" - no longer films really; let's call them AV events - are captured and fed directly into computers to be put together virtually, configured for however and whereever the end product might need to be received. The more flexible the basic building blocks of any material are, from aspect ratios and frame-rate formats to language tracks and bit-rates, the easier it is for studios to shake and bake the right-sized product to however the buyer will want it - a digital satellite feed, a cable TV master, a phone-app or uncompressed HD digital cinema package (DCP).

Final analog 35mm prints occupy only one corner of the buffet table. They're increasingly less relevant to the larger mediasphere and no original negative elements are stored to be later referenced, free to be forgotten and one day re-discovered. The suggestion belabors the insult that the rights holders 1) intend to forget their content, and 2) shouldn't have, and have pre-planned for a future in which their own disregard is remade whole, their lack of foresight to (with with foresight can) be ridiculed.

It's either gonna be saved or it's not. The new digital versions arrive clean. They don't involve messy use-once-throw-away chemicals or manifest accidental scratches or unintentional grain, something more and more audience members express they have no tolerance for. Once digital masters are at the point in their lifecycle to be duplicated and delivered to theatre spaces (some of which are indeed still theatres), they're much cheaper to duplicate and deliver, living on proprietary hard drives that are wiped and reused rather than on 160 lb. celluloid prints that become boat anchors or landfill, once a title leaves its initial run.

Digital archival "prints" don't remain in the world to temp pirates. Proprietary drives work only in the intended venue and self-destruct once the run is over or even if it's plugged into the wrong keyed server. These copies aren't vaulted - they have no half-life.

Titles are rebuilt, on demand, at the studio level by digital means. There will be no going back to the negative or having to find masters after many years, which may not be close at hand.

The sense of objects lost and then found will disappear. There will be nothing to be discovered. If it's not there, it's not anywhere.

A whole new world of archiving is being created before our eyes in which IT experts, server management, copyright maintenance and metadata are more important than the old skills of rolling through reels, shot-by-shot comparision, chemistry and detective work. Searching through vaults, often in the side of a mountain somewhere, or digging through 100-year-old show business magazines for release info, deteriorating or off-limits or hidden in a library not sufficiently staffed to allow access, is labor intensive.

The search will become increasingly pointless. Numerous older titles released on VHS in the 1980s, when that format seemed to to revive entire back catalogs in the go-go days, have not made the transition to DVD. They never will now. Most of the classics and cult items that have been mined now comprise the new "cult" canon. There's no financial reason to re-release "The Devils" or "Sonny Boy" or "American Hot Wax" or "Kafka." The Warner Archives program, along with Sony's recent entry to reanimate some of Columbia's forgotten back catalog, are last ditch efforts to skim what remaining cream is left, at inflated prices although on DVD-rs (shelf life: less than 10 years). These feed on the last good will of jaded collectors who will still pay for films as the studios abandon the DVD business.

The 1000s of titles that did made it to DVD won't make the transition to streaming. The real problem is invisible without your long glasses on. So much new content is being readied to be served up online or on your iPad. Those digital masters are being shepharded and under the legal custodianship of the studios. The studios keep everything safe for as long as its apparent financial lifespan. And no longer. These new and future digital masters are digested and reabsorbed into the studios' virtual clouds of content out of sight, out of mind and out of the culture.

The older realm of films already on prints, almost everything made prior to 1999, will remain in the thousands of archives worldwide, unavailable except to those museum and theatre spaces that still show film from film.

They're kept in cool conditions, and with a minimum of fuss they will last another century. They will sit. These two schools, digital vs. analog, move farther apart as theatres, museums, film festivals, free tv, and all the other modes in which film continued to live are slowly replaced.

The "print" people, who work with objects and artifacts and do research in dusty basements, are already irrelevant to the "digital" people who sit in front of computers and scan and code metadata.

Our historical memories will become divided between the sexy shiny 3-D stuff that we look as it goes online (and no longer when it goes offline), and the plastic objects that still exist because they were able to be left behind.

His New Job

The release of the almost complete (33 of the 34) Chaplin Keystone films (all 1914) from Flicker Alley, remastered from the best surviving elements over the course of decades and international boundaries, is cause for celebration, if only to allow a truer tracking of his character and development of film-making techniques. It also allows us to discover what intangible qualities insinuated his nascent tramp character into the cultural consciousness so quickly and so completely early into the century.

Chaplin occupies a unique place in film history, a young but polished stage performer who knew the tricks of pantomime and embodied an everyman underdog persona to early film's limited techniques to full advantage while other blustery, broad and 2-dimensional performers as Ford Sterling and Harry Langdon would end up being mere footnotes in Kevin Brownlow books. Popular film-going had been around for almost 20 years when Chaplin hit the scene. Filmmakers like Mack Sennett had already codified the limits of the common get-rich-quick business model that was ripe for expansion, either by advanced story-telling (soon to be exploited by Griffith), marketing (Zukor's "Famous Players" and Vitagraph's "Broadway Star" series), or more nuanced character work. Here Chaplin stumbled upon, in a self-knowing as likewise likely accidental manner, the assumed and effective traits that even as he built his popularity upon them, often in cahoots with his audience willing to be seduced, he would set an eye to abandon by the coming of sound a decade later.

The Keystone films have been hard to find in clear watchable versions, and their charms are obscured by scratches, random jumpcuts and generations of dupiness. This release allows us to put the beginnings of his career into perspective. Starting quite early in his career he was already starring in short comedies that took place in movie studios, pointedly early in each new contract with a new studio ("A Film Johnnie" at Keystone, 1914; "His New Job" at Essanay, 1915; and "Behind the Screen" at Mutual, 1916). Clearly such a setting was already familiar enough to audiences by 1914, a familiarity with the backstage mechanics of film-making common enough to set Charlie loose with antics to thereby ensue.

The comparisons between them are instructive, each only a year apart with the missing Keystone pieces as ... well, the keystones. Less than a month after he started with Mack Sennett, "A Film Johnnie", taking place at the Sennett studio with cameos by Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Ford Sterling, demonstrates our hero at odds with an establishment that doesn't welcome or appreciate him, oddly enough populated by the very film workers who are making the film we're watching. (Sennett does not make an appearance.)

The film is, for lack of a better term, primitive. Filled with smoking, shoving and smirking, it shows the speed of prevailing slapstick traffic at the time with the fleeting pleasures of showing the Sennett studio in an occasional background shot, between business with rugs, fake backgrounds, a bombastic director and a pretty girl. Chaplin already knows how to play to the camera rather than to his co-actors, his first and best secret from the legit stage, but the wonders of film-making are still situated within the mise-en-scene, particularly in a sequence in which the backdrop is built and changes behind him as he pines over the girl unaware, a surprisingly modernist moment for 1914 and an impulse Chaplin generally avoided.

By comparison, the following year's "His New Job" (which not-too-subtly announces Essanay's success stealing him from Keystone, for an increased salary presumably going from about $150 to $1250 a week) depicts Charlie's persona as social irritant so comfortably developed and acceptable that the plot mostly hinges on bits about extras being pushed through doors and funny costume gags rather than exploring any potential a film studio or Charlie, as an increasingly sympathetic character, lost within it might reveal. It does feature the questionable benefits of Ben Turpin as another job seeker that Charlie steps over (and on), and also includes a couple of moving shots in which the camera rather insistently dollies in when the film-within-a-film is being shot.

This foregrounding of the apparatus of image-making is self-aware and unexpected in an otherwise typical entry. The studio setting is ultimately a throwaway, even as character accents proliferate, such as Charlie's distracted and immodest glances at a half-draped statue, allowing him to show a conflicted chivalry that must have struck a nerve with him or his audience. The turn reappears in "Work" and in "A Night In The Show" and elsewhere, almost making it a leitmotif of characterization through his early period. As an affectation it's slightly vulgar, but it shows Charlie's heart is in the right place.

The Essanay films are simultaneously more competent and less desperate. By the time of "Behind the Screen" (1916) for Mutual, 2 years after beginning in cinema and 50 short films later, Chaplin as a character has been developed enough and his takes, ticks, and turns familiar enough to risk having him kiss Edna Purviance while dressed as a boy on the mouth (claimed by some to be the first American mainstream "gay" joke). That detail and others, including the porcupine he makes of himself with a dozen chairs on his back and the prevalence of outsize but hollow columns, flour sacks and rubber swords, embrace a truly surreal understanding of making films, finally addressed head-on by Chaplin.

The naked statue he can't keep his roving eyes off of also shows up. A creature of habit (personally as well as professionally), Chaplin knew intimately how to create and milk little moments that had power and meaning beyond their apparent triviality on screen. Much of his training on stage taught him how to size and time little moments that most other screen actors of the era had no idea how to finesse.

A most telling premonition of Chaplin's long career capturing the attention of the world is manifest as early as his 2nd film, "Kid Auto Races in Venice" (1914), shot for Sennett one afternoon during a soap-box derby on the streets of Los Angeles. Here Chaplin acquires a tramp outfit for the first time, by accident and presciently similar to the one he would adopt months later, and the bulk of the show (a scant 6 minutes) is his curious and intrusive tramp walking in front of the newsreel cameras trying to film the race. Chaplin mugs, poses, gets pushed out of the way, and keeps vying for our attention, the audience, while the hapless filmmakers turn the camera away, push him aside, and generally pretend he isn't there.

He is magnetized by the camera lens, and he won't get out of the picture. The force of Chaplin's character and his insistence on being seen and recognized as something interesting, as photogenic - as newsworthy - ignites a fuse of recognition, not only of one man's vanity, though he may be clearly down on his luck (a tramp even!) but in the power of cinema to promise something larger than life out of normal everyday events and accidents.

Even in early 1914, Chaplin was injecting his own wry, winking personality into throw-off shorts already aware of a meta-narrative of films about films. Something that illustrated their potential power, even then.



Charlie kisses a "stagehand."

Soylent Green Is Made Of People

More houses used to have libraries. Books used to be objects on every shelf - and heir to decay, tearing, browning at the edges, silver fish and mold.

One collected books in order to become "learned." They manifested a physical amalgam of your own knowledge, souvenirs of previous interests and areas of study, arcane statistics and insights - a kind of memory adjunct. They're there because you need them to look something up every so often - you can't memorize everything and there's comfort in knowing at least what can be found in them, pleasure in knowing where to find something.

Of course you must be familiar with them to be able to get your hands on what you're looking for. Someone famous said, "Who wants a library full of books you've already read?" Well, that is a different kind of library. That's a want list acquired, weighing down and intruding on your future free time.

Now books are moving en masse to digital form, and are acquired by download spontaneously and often at a whim. Formatted files sit on Kindles and Nooks owned by increasing layers of demographic, and are not burdened by the physicality of real books or the potency of having been read and displayed. No, instead they have become lighter than air and are infinitely more portable, especially in numbers.

An electronic device is still useful for reference - it's not very cool to pull out an OED in the bar when a trivia question about past-pluperfect inflections arises (again). If that's your idea of a good time in a bar maybe you're not as cool as you thought - or you're in the wrong bar - or maybe you do want to pull out an OED. Digital books can be taken anyplace. They can be downloaded and searched everywhere and yet are no where. They are files, in the cloud. We rent the ability to view them, through the phosphor screen, rather than getting the thing delivered for us to put on the shelf - to tease us over how much future free time it means.

We certainly can't copy or move them from device to device. And every so often we are reminded that someone else controls the content as when Amazon deaccessioned all the digital copies of 1984 from afar, an unfortunate irony and strangely prescient considering the title. Google Books only allows you to look at one page at a time based on your search term, rather than let you view an entire copyrighted work. They don't give it all to you for free online - and they shouldn't. They're protecting content by denying you the ability to refer to it meaningfully - but there you go.

And your digital files won't move to any other device, and will eventually become technologically obsolete.

We are awash in cultural artifacts but we simply don't see anyone's books anymore. We can't keep them or hold them. We can't check the dude out by what books he's got - or by what LPs are on the turntable. Books are no longer valued as objects with impact, as objects worth seeing. Owning. Having. Newspapers are already gone, and magazines are next, and that iPad subscription to Sports Illustrated won't keep you warm at night in 5 years. Even on BART, if someone's reading Gibbon's Decline of the Roman Empire on their iTouch, you'd assume they were FourSquaring (must everything become its own verb?). Proponents insist that there's no room for the 10,000 books available and now in your back pocket on a Kindle. You can pull them out anywhere. There's no room on any shelf for that many. No room in a house, or 2 houses. Break the tyranny of the dusty page.

I say we make room. Make room to display the value books assert in their very existence - heavy and aging at the expense of something else. That is what gives them value. To make room is to admit their worth and that a decision was made. That they are here instead of some other object. These books are here because I read them and I know what's in them and they represent who I am.

If they're in the air and they're infinite and they are all around us, and invisible, they're like a watered down soup. Just filler and not worth the space they take up.

The Kiss of A Spider Woman

Perhaps you heard the New York Times have reported that the owners of all the original materials of the film "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985, directed by Hector Babenco) are up for auction - not as a film or even as an archival collection manifesting some larger meaning or artistic importance by its breadth and depth of materials and provenance. The lot includes scripts, 35mm outtakes, camera negatives, papers, and the rights themselves.

They're not selling this to some cultural institution, like the MOMA (who's not interested and doesn't know how to do such things anyway) or the UCLA Film Archives (who as a public entity only takes donations, thank you very much). They're selling this instead as a "work of art."

The collection of film isn't being sold as a cultural entity so much as a physical pile of objects. A beautiful one. The idea is that the whole amalgamation is its own artistic statement.

The move is audacious and smacks of performance art. The film, no slouch itself and a major art-house hit for the time, snuck up on me on cable years later when I wasn't sure what I was in for. It had its own pedigree, co-written by Paul Schrader's brother Leonard ("Blue Collar") and novelist Manuel Puig and starring William Hurt in a game of chicken with his career poised after the avant-garde hipness of "The Big Chill" (1983) and before the cold and depressive "Accidental Tourist" years (1988-present). Raul Julia, who did his best to fight against type-casting his whole career yet ended up cast (perfectly) as Gomez Addams and in "Street Fighter" movies right before his death, is his cellmate who becomes obsessed with the spectre of the Spider Woman in the films of Hurt's dreams.

Get this straight. They are auctioning off a collection of raw and production elements, wishing to declare, position, and profit from the larger idea of detritus as cultural value, an evidence of unique process important and illuminating. Hollywood doesn't appreciate its own products, David Weisman, one of the original producers, suggests, and thinks the art world may appreciate the "object" more properly. This stretches the concept of what is actually art (here we go again), which ultimately will be in the eye of the holder.

Will the new purchaser re-release the film with new sequences never before seen, envisioned, or even scripted? Will the outtakes be digitized and turned into a 360-degree museum installation without beginning or end? How much value does the "asset" still have? The film made about $17 million and went on to generate more interest after a Broadway version. It's not like the collection can be displayed in a Manhattan summer house above the divan, not easily, and it will have storage issues to sort out as well. But so do original canvases by Picasso and Modigliani.

And yet, neither can any actual film, artifacts manifesting the most successful artform of the 20th century, be displayed easily for casual and immediate appreciation and critique. Analog though they be, they must be projected on an arcane projection device, with a lens, bright light, seats and a blank white wall. They don't reveal their secrets to the naked eye and visual inspection. You must "present" them.

Cinema is the only artform in which you turn your back on the object and look at a shadow of the original, shone and reflected against the opposite wall. Which is the source of its power, a caress we stare at of movement and images, light and sound, carefully worked and seducing us to get closer to something we can never seize, never possess. Film only reveals its secrets by proxy, entraping us without us knowing what hit us or exactly how it did it - this collection of frames and shots.

How do these objects possess us and make us obsess over how they were built up; manufactured? Cast their unique spell when we give over to their charms? The quoditian objects created around the production of "Kiss" have been re-conceived as an objet d'art, but may serve better as archival summary to be mined by some future historian. Perhaps by keeping the panoply whole and identifying it as a "work of art" with value all its own, some one some day may get to the bottom of it.

Who's Cow Is It Anyway?

While arguably, the digital cat is out of the analog bag, Hulu which streams the most amount of television shows online (legally) announced they were going to start charging for much of their premium content. You could still get some of the old stuff for free, but in order to sate your appetite for "Gossip Girl" or "30 Rock" you'd have to $10 a month to get it on your iPad. And that's still with the forced salad dressing commercials. (All of "Rockford Files" and "Banacek" are still available. I guess a new generation doesn't consider them "iPad"y.) 

In the shift to online-only editions, Time Magazine is also moving to a paywall strategy - the newest issue's articles are shortened and only older (and less relevant) news is available for free. This is an effort to protect its content from freeloaders on the web, who don't pay their way and cost relatively little to deliver to, but are troublesome in that they demand more and more content in real time, something print-based magazines are still having a hard time figuring out how to do. Paywalls are confusing and controversial. But it seems the last way to save the dying print industry, in a race with music to the bottom and without deep-pocket patrons to soften the fall. 

20th Century Fox has snuck a pay-subscription model by us for mobile phones (called Bitbop) without fanfare to test the pay-for-tv model in your pocket. They will offer the same t.v. shows as Hulu and soon full-length motion pictures. You kids can go make your lol videos, we're going to stream stuff you want to pay for. Because it's actually scarce. 

Turns out it costs to create content, in time and in money. Ipads and iPhones have changed how we get this stuff; now people would rather watch once than own and store what they have to hide when polite company comes over. Why the hell do you have a copy of "Beverly Hills Cop 3"? Apple, famously open in the beginning and increasingly more closed, is turning into the best friend of content providers. If the pipeline is singular and controlled (and works through an already-in-place payment system, like, say, the one for iTunes) paying for content just might work. 

Now it's a contest to get as much out there as possible. Simply start limiting access moving forward and let the old stuff remain open, languishing in its diminished "free" ghetto. Things are changing, folks. The internet is omnivorous. They're praying the long tail model wags the new stuff into a tsunami of micropayments. There may be less value in the back catalog, unless of course producers try to charge for that as well. After all, it's first run till you've seen it. Disney for one knows you don't want to buy DVDs anymore, and intends to start supplying their content in the future through internet access that we pay for, without ever delivering actual discs, files or copies to us. Their old stuff will be handled this way as well - you'll be paying for "Dumbo" and "Hannah Montana" for the rest of your life. Their plan is called "Keychest," and they will supply access to their shows and their movies for a fee and hold the keys, as well as information of our renting and buying habits to sell to other providers. 

That's one way to have your cake and get hit in the face with it as well. Why do I have the feeling I'm on the wrong end of the baked goods?

Friction

One of the most film-geeky sequence in Truffaut's "Day For Night" in the one in which the young Jean-Pierre Leaud steals a still of "Citizen Kane," his fetishistic totem to a mode of American studio movie productions, and a purloined souvenir from the unobtainable mysteries of film appreciation in an age (1973) when you had to watch everything at a local repertory house or late at night on t.v. when the local station happened to program it.

Series of books were released in the late '60s and '70s that discussed film and produced goldfish-scale black-and-white stills, miserly and like manna, such as the breadcrust-size A. S. Barnes series that revealed Bunuel, French cinema, Dreyer, or the Marx Brothers. The "Focus On" series, also defunct, edited by Donald McCaffrey focused on Chaplin, Welles, science fiction, D.W. Griffith, Bonnie and Clyde, the western or Blow-Up.

Where did such enthusiasm for publishing go? Did we really have a cultural hunger and imperative to read about such seemingly generic or specific topics? Playboy published "Sex In The Cinema" issues every November, using the excuse of grabbing stills of cinematic transgressions with naked people to suggest the mysteries popular films really held. "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea" (1976) was about much more than Sarah Miles with no clothes on.

Films had a limited availability, not easily viewable after they disappeared from theatres. An entire subculture centered around stalking and tracking down elusive showings, late at night or at conventions, or unannounced on the bottom of double bills. The stills and second-hand reviews that were published had the power of discovered evidence, skeletal relics outlining the details of the bodies of the texts, the nuances of the photography and players, the sensual pleasures held within the time spent with the actual film, unspooling in real time, one time only, a late night rendezvous.

They were poured over like a Maxwell Demon gatefold, being undecoded as best they could until we could unlock the mysteries the films ourselves, in person, face to face. Until then, we had to take Baxter's or Clarens' or Hoberman's word for it. I read every word Kael wrote in the '60s and '70s, in part to ensure myself that I could trust her.

The days of discovering films through all these secondary ephemeral stills and critiques is over. It used to be hard. Movies are so easily accessible through the Internet through streaming or bit-torrenting under the radar, or from video-on-demand from the studios themselves, often before theatrical release, which is suicide, that they have lost their aura as events.

Films have lost their aura as important. Any title is available almost anyway you want, almost as soon as you want it. Television distributors have already given up trying to get us to make appointments to drive us to their product. They'd much rather throw it at us any way and place we might pay attention, an act of desperation and promiscuity. We have Hulu and Netflix and NBC.com and YouTube, and soon Sezmi and Zillion.tv.

Seeing films used to be work - you had to pay attention, pour over the listings and be aware of the rep houses who might have a quirk in their scheduling that would schedule "Transatlantic Tunnel" (1935) or "The Wild Party" (1975) because the bookers read the same articles in Cinefantastique you did. ("Tunnel" showed with "Phase IV" in a mad programming strategy.) Now they show up without announcement or explanation. Who rented "Anti-Christ" (2009) from Time-Warner Cable thinking it was an "Exorcist" rip-off from Italy? Films will be delivered digitally to all 3 of your screens and they will be in bite-size pieces and ubiquitous.

No longer sacred or special objects that we must travel to in order to enjoy. We don't have to leave our couch, and so they are no longer objects to be revered. To have access at your fingertips is to not feel the need to steal those stills from behind the grate, to decide what is worth the risk of getting slapped.

It used to be hard to publish opinions about films as well. Even writing zines required patience, a certain design sense - or specific lack of one - explicitly applied, and pages and staples to be lined up. Photos to be chosen from the delicious few available for your lustful duplication.

Now there's no more friction. Now all is instant, ubiquitous and promiscuous. We've lost the need and the value of having to wait to see what the secrets are to be revealed by films, carefully and in their own time. Even if they are worth working for. It devalues not only the work in making them but in the work in viewing and enjoying them as well.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The author acknowledges the contributions to this discussion of Bruce Fletcher, of Dead Channels and of SF Film Club, which we don't talk about.