Maelstrom of Movies

An anniversary passed quietly last month: 10 years ago, Warners Brothers released the first wave of DVDs in general retail stores. Some industry commentaries may pin the advent of home theater entertainment a bit earlier, but to the public at large, August 1997 was the month this new fangled technology first became available and the digital video disc (or digital versatile disc, depending on who you ask) entered the everyday conscience.

DVDs captured my interest the instant I saw them in Circuit City. Perhaps it’s hard to understand in the Information Age, but I never had heard of DVDs before, and that center display with the slim cardboard cases was their introduction.

Movie studios recently had begun releasing specific films in widescreen VHS, something I wished they did for all their tapes. Whether a movie boasts the epic screen or the old square Academy ratio, a director frames each shot like a photographer frames her stills. There’s a subtle language to film, one in which emotions and story are imparted not only with actors or script but with editing, camera movement, and shot selection. I never was cognizant of that art until Braveheart, which I saw three times in the theater. Mel Gibson used very inch of his frame in every shot, and when I saw the movie again on cable, I couldn’t believe how much the television screen butchered the picture. I finally realized why some movies seemed better in the theater than they were on cable.

While widescreen presentations still were rare for videos, every DVD Warners released in that first wave contained one, along with the film’s trailer and a “full-frame” version. I think I drooled.

Warners was the only major studio that fully believed in the new home video format—the others attempted to push something that was called DIVX, a disposable DVD that would be cheap but stop playing after a certain time. It lasted only a year. Obviously, people wanted their movies to last forever.

I’ve touched on it before—Hollywood’s initial disinterest turned into the film fringe’s gain. With the same vision as the Warners bosses, independent licensors soon gambled on the new technology and struck deals with the studios for their unwanted movies: the Army of Darknesses, the Portrait of Jennies, the Black Holes. They also acquired disused film libraries like the post-Corman New World, while negotiating agreements with European and Asian film companies to strengthening their new catalogues. Silents, serials, b-grade programmers, big turkeys, kung-fu adventures, Hammer horror, giallo… they all found a home on DVD, long before special editions became standard expectation.

By the time I bought my first and only player three years after that Circuit City find, the studios had taken note of the increasing sales and the success of the likes of Anchor Bay, Elite, Image, and Kino. They had quickly abandoned their DIVX obsession and slowly started playing catch-up. DVD was beginning to grow up, which only meant more movies for me.

Because of its initial concentration in indies and oddities, DVDs only fed my one obsession. I was the one in the video store seeking the goofy-looking box with the most dust; now, I had a hundred to choose from. For the first couple of years, I played my own game of catch-up, buying an average of 3 or 4 DVDs a month. Upon seeing my still-blooming collection for the first time, my friend Karen called me “a video store.” My sister was a bit more precise: “You have a lot of really strange movies.”

Yeah, I do. Ten years ago, thanks to circumstantial timing, the little cult films, the failures, the foreigners, the small ancients, the little-known but the loved—for a brief time, they took center stage, stealing the monologue and singing the lead. I was in the audience, and I’m still there, with the world’s guiltiest grin embracing my face.