Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

> Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.

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?

When you're that rich and that interested in your niche, in a world where there aren't any other ways to catalog then you do what you gotta do even if it's pay ~$1 million / year.

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.

I doubt Martin Scorsese was all that wealthy in the 80's when he started this. He was well-respected, sure, but he made art films, not summer blockbusters like Spielberg and Lucas or big-time comedies, and the external revenue streams (HBO, video rental) were fewer and smaller. He was known, but he wasn't MARTIN SCORSESE like we know him today (that would probably have been Coppola). And I'm guessing most of what he was taping was news and talk shows (to get accents, styles, vernacular, etc), which would often not be kept permanently by the broadcasters, and lots of more obscure things that would be difficult to track down.

No news, no shows, sorry. Just films.

The article mentions he also taped things like his mother's appearance on Regis and Kathy, but primarily films.

"a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s"

"4,400 distinct titles, including features, documentaries, shorts, history programs and award shows"

> simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?

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".

If you have (much) more money than time, it seems like a TiVo with concierge user interface.

I'm thinking the system helped him avoid Hollywood politics. If a studio lost the bidding to distribute his next film, they might try cutting him off from high-quality originals out of spite.

Probably a lot easier and cheaper to build his own collection. Not sure paying others to do the work makes him the archivist though.

Scorcese's production company office was based in the Directors Guild of America building on 57th St for many years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com