Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The reasonable person would consider it fair use to gather reference material for their job. The MPAA was arguing in court that any violation of their DRM was illegal, reprehensible, irredeemable. And Scorsese was likely a member!
He was buddies with Jack Valenti!! Via wikipedia:
In 2007, Scorsese was honored by the National Italian American Foundation (N.I.A.F.) at the nonprofit's thirty-second Anniversary Gala. During the ceremony, Scorsese helped launch N.I.A.F.'s Jack Valenti Institute in memory of former foundation board member and past president of the Motion Picture Association of America (M.P.A.A.) Jack Valenti.My guess is as best as yours. Lawyers enjoy flinging three letter acronyms around.
or rules for thee but not for me.
The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Monkhouse#Film_and_televis...
"going back to when Monkhouse first bought a home video recorder in 1966"
Wow... if he started that early, the costs must have been astronomical in the beginning.
Made me understand how seriously he takes film.
[1]: An interview with letter box on Killers of the Flower Moon on YouTube
The numbers of films produced per year has dropped significantly over time.
He can't watch all of them. But I am sure he does watch some recent movies.
5 bags
Videodrome's a classic.
Long live the New Flesh!
These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically like these artists do.
I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells incredible.
So, not secret at all.
It's the ultimate in VHS preservation.
I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make this happen!
But I have actually toyed with the idea of setting up complete workstations modified player, and a slightly better software UX. Don't know how to reach the market willing to pay for such things, though.
For tinkering at home, the specific PCIe capture device is actually quite easy to find, it seems it's still produced for some reason.
It bypasses all analog processing of the signal by the VHS player and captures the video signal directly from the tape head.
All further processing is then done in software. If any improvements in software processing is made, the "raw" capture can then be reprocessed with better results.
For a long time a great S-VHS deck, professional Time-Base-Corrector and so on from a TV studio, was the better option over vhs-decode software, especially on bad tapes. But now, I'd go with vhs-decode any day.
An example - S-VHS tapes can not be played back in regular VHS players. They can't handle the format.
But with vhs-decode, it doesn't matter. A regular cheap VHS player can "rip" an S-VHS tape.
And decode the HiFi FM-stereo signal, too.
Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
For Scorsese, by paying for this system he can make sure that he can do the watching and the research he wants, no matter what. The "no matter what" is the important part; no matter matter who makes a show/movie, no matter what his relationship with it's creator/owner, no matter if the studio wipes the tapes hours after airing it just the one time, Scorsese will have his own copy as sure as the sun will rise. For many a rich folk, they will blow 7 figure sums on things they themselves feel are less important than such an ironclad guarantee without a moment's hesitation.
It's not too far fetched.
"4,400 distinct titles, including features, documentaries, shorts, history programs and award shows"
I suspect that's a far more miserable, time-consuming and failure prone approach than simply taping them off the TV. The studios aren't set up to show films, they're to hand them off to distributors. The whole system is set up to deal with films in bulk, not to individual users. And they won't have them in convenient VHS format, so even if Scorsese had a guy he could just ring and ask for Film X, what he'd get would be .. several reels of 35mm. Sure, he's probably got a little cinema for that as well, but it's not as convenient as a TV.
And of course asking the studio runs a high risk of "no".
He could have the best VHS records out there and the best tapes, but the source material being recorded would be painfully limited, as would the recordings.
I would have expected Scorsese to have requested, threatened, manipulated, bribed, and so on to obtain film reels.
This would not be possible for a lot of the content but surely for quite a few.
He could do the same for original VHS cassettes with the movies (like you would find in a rental store. Just unwatched ones.
Also that he would have people to buy DVD version when (if) they came out. Still if a DVD version was released that would indicate that the source film was available and Scorsese could have a copy of that instead.
Scorsese grew up with this TV resolution and I'm sure he would have preferred high quality for things we cared about, but for day-to-day use, having VHS was fine. (If he really cared, he could have gotten a betamax recorder or a super-VHS recorder to record off the TV)
I'm pretty sure that he'll stream better copies - but for those not available, having a noisy VHS is great. And with streaming/digital "sales" you never know which films you're going to lose next...
On the other hand, I am outraged that I am forbidden to watch old movies, as they are not publicly available, and enshittification of streaming services is progressing. Less classic content, more money, divided by studios/companies/corporations. Am I supposed to pay 200$/month for 6(7?) subscriptions to have 30% of the content I want to watch
Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then… deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos could be publicly archived, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982
Now to figure out what's missing. At first glance, it's missing the world-best TV series about investment banking and stock trading by humans, Traders (1996), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traders_(TV_series).
If the content was licensed elsewhere, at least they could have told viewers where to pay to view it.
With the help of many industry partners, the [Canada Media Fund] CMF team unearthed Canadian gems buried in analog catalogues. Once discovered, we worked to secure permissions and required rights and collaborate with third parties to digitize the works, including an invaluable partnership with Deluxe Canada that covered 40 per cent of the digitization costs. The new, high-quality digital masters were made available to the rights holders and released to the public on the Encore+ YouTube channel in English and French.Someone else claimed the woman in charge of the project suddenly quit and there was no other recourse than shutting it down. I find this hard to believe...
> In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
> For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese’s tapes are more than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work.
In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah. Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of this burden.
In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if universities provided detailed, honest financial statements - which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history" technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny new student amenities are higher priorities.
For example, presidents have large offices because they would say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money: fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments that open entire research units, dealing with internal governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can handle all of these responsibilities.
Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a need to support certain student populations to increase retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more good press about alums), so you now have people that create programming to engage first-generation college students, Black students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and no one person can do all of that as well.
The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental health care, people that help students navigate this internal system, for example), because American society and government doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
Seems like he employs an archivist, not that he's an archivist. A better title might be Scoreses's secret VHS archive, I don't know. Archivist is a specific job with specific, non-trivial training. It's a nitpick, but it reminds me of when people acted like Elon Musk designed the rockets for SpaceX or his Tesla cars, or when they talk about Steve Jobs creating the iPhone. The person with the money and the vision is critical to success, but it's just not accurate to say that they did these things themselves.
Seems like he said what he wanted recorded, then paid an archivist to archive them.
Counterpoint: so Howard Schultz is a barista?