Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:05 am
Mary, folks, the truth of the matter is that all organizations are funds-seeking; give them any amount of money, they'll find ways to spend it. Given it's the Library of Congress, we like a lot of what they do, some Nitratevillains work there, they run events we approve of -- Mostly Lost springs to mind, as well as their accommodation of the restoration-by-kickstarter-and-dvd efforts that we so enjoy supporting -- well, we sometimes forget there are other constituencies, like the Aerospace stuff and bed historians * that must be catered to. It all takes money, and private donors are important. If you think not, look at the David Packard Campus next time you're there to watch the Silent Comedy Mafia identify something no one's seen in more than a century.
Of course, we would like to see them spend that money restoring and making available the Tom Tyler FBO silents (in a pinch; I think we need more Hoot Gibson and there's a universe of silent shorts from the 1920s that's barely recognized), but other people have different agendas, and the people who are more likely to contribute millions are the people with a financial stake in more recent films. How many Martin Scorseses do you think there are in Hollywood? Don't you know that the movie people lost the top spots in the industry in the 1980s, when it became clear that movie franchises could be worth billions? Oh, they needed movie people to run the business, but the reason the industry has been in decline for so many years has been the triumph of the business people. Neither Disney nor Pixar will be releasing an original animated feature for at least two years. It's all sequels, because those have a clearly recognizable ROI (Return on Investment) that anyone can plug into an Excel Spreadsheet (except me -- I looked at the spreadsheets 30 years ago, saw they didn't work in any way that my double-entry mind didn't recognize and never bothered) and sell to someone who doesn't know anything about the movies. Or anything except how much will this investment earn me and what starlet do I get to f**k? **
Just be glad for the underground efforts -- as Ben points out, 35 of the winners have been posted to the LoC's Youtube site in high-quality prints (drawn, in some cases, from the paper prints -- Gad, Hart looks good) with freshly composed scores. That takes money stolen from the big boys. Let them preen.
Bob
* There's some discussion of this unlikely-sounding discipline in the Murphy Bed thread in the Talking About Silents Section
**And if you think that world has ended, then you think that Arab Spring ended all tyranny in that part of the world and we've all been singing "Kumbaya" in this country since Johnson got his voting rights bill through Congress.
Last edited by
boblipton on Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:37 am, edited 2 times in total.
New and vigorous impulses seem to me to be at work in it,[the cinema] and doubtless before long it will drop all slavish copying of the stage and strike out along fresh paths. -- Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree