Laid to rest

2 comments March 23rd, 2009

Via the Huffington Post, here’s a quietly powerful photo of Liam Neeson and Vanessa Redgrave from Natasha Richardson’s funeral Sunday in Milbrook, New York.

A bit more about those Warner Bros. vault movies

Add comment March 23rd, 2009

This is from Glenn Erickson’s invaluable DVD Savant column. As a true classic movie aficianado, Glenn is all over the news about these films, and he got some important info straight from Warner Bros.

George Feltenstein just wrote me with this: “The goal is to eventually make EVERYTHING available, but obviously that will take a lot of time, and a lot of money. I set out some ground rules. Everything HAS to be Original Aspect Ratio, and 16×9 if widescreen. No 4×3 Letterbox. No Pan ‘n’ Scan. I also wanted consumers to be able to preview the master before the buy, so they’d understand what they were buying.”

It’s great to hear that even in these bare bones releases, the movies will be seen as they were meant to be seen.

Good — make that great — news for old movie fans

Add comment March 23rd, 2009

BEAST OF THE CITY, a great Pre-Code crime movie that Warner Bros. is releasing as part of its new program.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of movies sitting in the vaults of the studios, all with a few fans, but few with enough fans to merit a full-scale DVD release. Well, Warner Bros., the studio that owns the rights to many of these movies, is opening those vaults and selling the films on a made-to-order basis.

Starting today, 150 movies from the silent era to the 1980s go on sale, everything from I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI to Emilio Estevez’ WISDOM. Digital downloads are $14.95, and actual DVDs are $19.95. Here’s a link to the site.

From the AP report:

Many of the titles Warner is releasing in the new venture have made the rounds on another Time Warner subsidiary, the Turner Classic Movies cable channel, and on VHS. But the studio will keep mining a 6,800-feature film library, amassed when Ted Turner bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s archive in 1986, which in turn was bought by Time Warner a decade later.

Twenty more films or TV shows will be added to the program of re-releases each month, with 300 expected by year’s end. To put it in perspective, the studio has released only about 1,100 movies on DVD since the technology was spawned 12 years ago.

“There are still thousands of movies that we own that consumers haven’t been able to get,” said George Feltenstein, senior vice president of theatrical catalog marketing for Warner Home Video. “I expect that we’ll be selling thousands of copies of every title over a period of time, and making a lot of people really happy.”

Heck, I’m happy. Very happy!