Movies. My passion.

This NYTimes.com article by Dave Kehr about the future of Blu-ray DVDs offered a lot of information about different topics that I found incredibly interesting.

It notices that regular DVDs didn’t start getting adopted by the public until their price (and that of their players) fell considerably, a trend that seems to be repeating with Blu-ray discs, whose prices are still quite steep compared to regular DVDs.

Furthermore, while DVDs only had to compete with VHS, which offered a clearly inferior experience, Blu-ray has to face-off against new technologies like “digital downloads, streaming video, and video-on-demand services,” apart from regular DVDs, which are a good enough product for many consumers.

Kehr also points out that while Blu-ray is a far superior technology compared to regular DVDs, it doesn’t mean it works for everything.  While new releases, especially blockbusters, translate wonderfully to it, older movies require so many touch ups (apparently needed to make them look acceptable on such an unforgiving, perfectly sharp medium) that sometimes the feel of the original film gets lost.

Then, Kehr states something that left me totally baffled:

Restoration on that scale costs a lot, so much so that only the most famous titles seem to justify the expense, as exemplified by Warner Brothers’ recent high-definition transfers of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” to Blu-ray. It’s safe to say that only a tiny fraction of the movies produced by Hollywood studios, much less those from international sources, will make the cut.

This isn’t the first time this winnowing has occurred. When VHS arrived, the format was forgiving enough to allow the studios to transfer many of their titles to tape directly from the video masters they had already made for television distribution. Many of those titles disappeared in the transition to DVD because studios felt that more obscure films wouldn’t be profitable enough to justify striking new prints and preparing new digital transfers.

As a result huge swaths of our film heritage have vanished. After 10 years of DVD the studios seem to have concluded that all the films that will make money in home video have already been released; that number is a very small percentage of their output. Turner Classic Movies online says that of the 162,984 films listed in its database (based on the authoritative AFI Catalog), only 5,980 (3.67 percent) are available on home video.

Read that again.  Less than 4% of all the movies ever made are available on DVD, which is really the only medium one would refer to nowadays.

What about the other 96+%???  Are they all lost forever?  Never to be seen by human eyes ever again?  We’re talking about thousands and thousands of movies, many, one would think, of considerable quality.

Once the initial shock passed, another quick calculation dashed my youthful dream of watching the highest number of movies I could possibly muster in my lifetime.  I calculated that even if I had all of the almost 163,000 movies available to me, and watched 2 each night, at an average runtime of 2 hours each, it would take 223 years to watch them all.

It would not be doable even if a person didn’t have to work and could dedicate 8 hours each day to watching movies.  In that case, it would still take 112 years to watch them all.  And that doesn’t take into account the thousands more movies that would be produced in that century.

A human impossibility that doesn’t justify losing that movie library forever or not having it available, which amounts to it being lost anyway.