The Way We Were

When I finally saw “Cookie’s Fortune” several years after its 1999 release, I loved it, and it has since settled as my favorite Robert Altman movie and one of my favorite movies in general. And given that it was set on and around Easter, I wanted to make it an annual viewing the same weekend as the celebration of What’s-His-Name’s What-Have-Ya. Trouble was, the “Cookie’s Fortune” DVD was not readily available for purchase in any of the typical haunts for such things back in the mid-aughts. Blockbuster, though, had just instituted a rent-to-buy policy wherein by renting a DVD and keeping it past the grace period, the rental would automatically change to a purchase. So, that Easter, I went to the old Blockbuster Video store at Lincoln & School, rented “Cookie’s Fortune” and never returned it, converting it into my very own copy. A few years ago, I noticed “Cookie’s Fortune” was screening on Netflix, but almost as soon as it was, it wasn’t anymore and currently isn’t streaming anywhere. When I watched Altman’s low-key comedy this past Easter, it was on my old Blockbuster DVD, praise What’s-His-Name. I kick myself every day that I never rented “Ruby in Paradise” to buy it.

My first experience with collecting physical media was, in fact, my dad collecting it by recording old movies to our brand-new Betamax VCR in the mid-80s. “Casablanca,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Star Trek II: the Wrath of Kahn,” “Captain Blood,” Adventures of Robin Hood,” on and on, I watched all of them for the first time on those Betamax tapes. So, physical media collections have in some sense always meant discovery to me, no different than perusing a used bookstore. Eventually, though, when I got older and acquired spending money and discovered Suncoast at Valley West Mall, I begin collecting VHS tapes, which metamorphosed into DVDs, and then into Blu-rays. It wasn’t a big collection, as these things sometimes go, just a few small shelves, a gathering of taste, though my taste has changed over the years, and as it has, I have wound up with some DVDs on the shelf that I wish weren’t there, paralyzed to buying more, a shelf stuck in stasis, half what I want to show the world, half not. Recently, though, I’ve been wondering if I should ditch what I no longer want, reorganize and rebuild.

This thought occurred to me while reading Marc Tracy’s July New York Times piece about the resurgence of collecting physical media. This is not collecting physical media for collecting’s sake, necessarily, but as a bulwark against the fickle nature of the various streaming platforms and their inventory. What is and is not available changes month to month, and if it’s more profitable not to make chunks of your catalogue accessible to watch, God knows, profit always wins. The perturbable Richard Brody of The New Yorker was already writing about this subject two years ago, arguing that in our current climate of contempt for the old, collecting movies on physical media becomes an act of defiance, effectively turning us into individual preservationists, no different, really, than, say, David Bradley, who famously maintained a bunker in Hollywood of old film prints, a one-man archive.

On his Good Eye: Movies and Baseball Substack in 2024, Noah Gittell also tied this physical media resurgence to the notion of ephemerality. He wasn’t so sure, however, that such preservation was right, noting “that before the 1980s, films that ran their course in theaters were rarely seen again.” If you went to see “Star Wars” five times, as the young Eddie Adams from Torrance did in “Boogie Nights,” it’s because there was no way to see it once its theatrical run concluded. Unlike books, or music, movies were “wild,” as David Thomson put it for Harper’s in 2015, and “went away.” Yet, even if the Library of Congress did not begin preserving films until 1988, as Gittell notes, it’s also true, as Thomson points out, that the Copyright Act of 1909 and its subsequent amendments were in part intended to help put such preservation into practice. That was not pursued for quite a while, however, meaning that an untold number of movies from the artform’s early days were lost forever, no small thing. Motion pictures are part of our shared history, as preservationist champion Grandmaster Marty Scorsese has been arguing for years, “a record of ourselves in time, documented and interpreted.” 

The moviegoing experience might be ephemeral, “light(ing) up walls, flicker(ing), and go(ing) out,” as Susan Sontage wrote in On Photography, but the camera itself goes to show that movies themselves are not, preserving images by recording them, originally on film stock, something to hold “between (your) fingers,” as Thomson wrote, “something alive, the material of a story.” When I saw my favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans” at the Music Box Theatre in 2021, it was on a 35mm print rescued by the Chicago 35mm Society. To see and hear the crackle of film of my favorite movie, I didn’t feel like I was just watching it but that I was in the room with it, that the movie itself was alive and present in a way a digital copy can never quite manage. Film prints, though, are fragile, which is what makes film preservation so crucial, and from the long line resulting from a scratch on the celluloid that ran down the screen for the length of one reel, I thought about how fortunate we all were that this print had inflicted no further damage, at least not yet.

Ephemerality is at the core of “A Week’s Vacation,” the 1980 French movie that I watched the Saturday of Easter weekend when I went looking for a new movie on The Criterion Channel. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, schoolteacher Laurence is prescribed a week’s holiday to rest, and recharge, and sort herself out emotionally and mentally. But rather than yield some big picture payoff, her problems not only prove not entirely solvable but in the grand scheme of things, insignificant, as she herself is, as if life itself is just a week’s vacation from wherever we started and wherever we’re going. If it was weirdly comforting, it was unsettling too. And when I was explaining “A Week’s Vacation” to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife not long after, she expressed interest in watching it, though I when I tried pulling it up on The Criterion Channel, it was gone. I admired the irony, even if I yearned for a Blockbuster to go and rent it and never return it.