The Warner Archive
Lloyd Fonvielle
site they're offering on-demand DVDs of films they don't plan to release
to the wider market. These will be professional quality DVDs, with 16x9
enhancement for the widescreen titles, though I assume without any
extras. $19.99 per title.
Several silent features in the first offering, including "Wild Orchids"
and "Love" with Garbo. Among talkies, "Westbound" -- the only
Scott-Boetticher Western still unavailable on DVD.
If this catches on it could be an incredible boon to film buffs,
especially silent film buffs.
More info here:
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/3527754-post14.html
Mar de Cortes Baja
www.mardecortesbaja.com <http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog>
dr.giraud
This is excellent news.
Other silents in the first wave include Garbo's THE KISS and THE
SINGLE STANDARD; and Marian Davies in THE RED MILL.
I also noticed that Coppola's THE RAIN PEOPLE, which had been talked
about as a regular release for this year, is on this list. I wonder if
the economy and the contraction in retail shelf space for DVDs had
anything to do with this.
dr. giraud
Charles Hohenstein
used to take orders?
--
Charles Hohenstein (to reply, remove Gene Robinson)
"The sad huddle of affluent bedwetters, thumbsuckers,
treehuggers, social climbers, homophiles, quavery ladies,
and chronic petition signers that makes up the current
Episcopal Church . . ." -‹Thomas Lipscomb
Harold Aherne
<chohensteGeneRobin...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Does anyone know when this program will begin and what web page will be
> used to take orders?
A few members of the Home Theater Forum have begun placing orders
already, some receiving error message from the website yet receiving e-
mails implying that their order was a success. I would guess the
program begins in earnest this week. They can be ordered at
http://www.wbshop.com/Warner-Archive/ARCHIVE,default,sc.html
There is continuing uncertainty as to whether they'll be DVD-R or
"pressed" DVDs. Warner Home Video will chat with the Home Theater
Forum tomorrow night and many of these questions should be answered.
In addition, WHV is not currently shipping these titles to addresses
outside the U.S., which has caused a torrent of protest at the HTF.
Silents included in the first batch of releases:
Scaramouche (1923)
Souls for Sale (1923)
The Red Lily (1924)
Exit Smiling (1926)
The Temptress (1926)
Love (1927)
The Red Mill (1927)
Spring Fever (1927)
The Smart Set (1928)
The Trail of '98 (1928)
Wild Orchids (1929)
The Single Standard (1929)
The Kiss (1929)
I would assume that the first nine titles use the same prints and
scores that have premiered on TCM in recent years. "The Trail of '98"
has had a score for some time, and I believe the three Garbo films use
the original Movietone tracks.
In addition, talkies up to 1970 are listed in alphabetical and
chronological order at
http://classicflix.blogspot.com/
-HA
The Picture Show Man
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6645560.html?nid=2705
The Picture Show Man
http://www.pictureshowman.com
Dedicated to exploring the history of motion pictures . . .
globular
Not enough, want more than a good choice, want everything available.
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Does anyone know when this program will begin and what web page will be
> used to take orders?
I think the program is due to be announced officially today but the web
page is already up and running (a bit eccentrically) and orders for the
films are being taken:
http://www.wbshop.com/Warner-Archive/MOVIEARCHIVE,default,sc.html?psortb1=name-sort&psortd1=2&sz=148
If this link doesn't work, just go to the Warner Home Video site and
look for a link to The Warner Archive.
--
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Lloyd Fonvielle wrote:
The Warner executive in charge of the project says that's the goal -- to
make everything in the Warner vaults available eventually. That will
require a lot of time and money, and will depend on how well this first
offering works.
We're getting a little glimpse of the future here -- how close that
future is rests entirely in the hands of consumers. So buy something
from The Warner Archive today and speed the plough.
--
silen...@attbi.com
DVDs to order from Warner Bros.
The studio is opening its film vaults to customer requests, including
many film titles previously unavailable on disc.
By Susan King
March 23, 2009
Over the last 12 years, Warner Home Video has released about 1,200
vintage films from its vast library on DVD. But that still leaves
about 3,800 feature titles that have yet to make their digital debuts.
At the studio's current release rate of 100 per year, they wouldn't
all be available until midcentury.
So in an industry first, the company today is, in a manner of
speaking, inviting the public into the vaults to order what it wants.
And like the neighborhood pizzeria, it won't make it till you order
it.
Among the titles available are several early Clark Gable films,
including "Possessed" and "Men in White"; "Love," Greta Garbo's silent
version of "Anna Karenina"; "This Woman Is Dangerous," with Joan
Crawford; "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," with Raymond Massey; and
"Wisdom," with Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore.
The only catch: Not everything in the vault is on the menu yet.
The consumer who visits www.warnerarchive.com initially will find 150
classic titles from Warner Bros. Pictures, MGM and RKO that each can
be ordered either as a computer download ($14.95) or as a DVD ($19.95)
that arrives in the mailbox approximately five days after purchase.
The studio says it intends to bolster that list at the rate of 20 new
titles a month -- including TV series and TV movies. Many of the
movies and shows were once available on video cassette, but none has
been on DVD, and many others have never been available for purchase at
all.
"My dream has always been to find a way to get everything to everybody
who wants it," says George Feltenstein, senior vice president of
theatrical catalog marketing for Warner Home Video. "No matter how
obscure or arcane, there is something in the library that somebody
wants. But yet you have to hit a certain threshold of sales potential
to justifying making a DVD the old-fashioned way."
That's because it's expensive to release and market a DVD -- even if
the movie has no extras.
"Just the cost of authoring, compression and menus, all of that kind
of thing, can run into a great deal of money," Feltenstein says, "and
with shelf space at retail being diminished -- there is no more Tower
Records, Music Plus. . . ."
But now there is a system that permits manufacturing on demand -- not
only creating the DVD but also placing it into a hard plastic case
featuring custom art, wrapping it and shipping it.
"We can make two DVDs or we can make 2,000 [of a title]," says
Feltenstein. (Sorry, Blu-ray fans: It doesn't work for you.)
What the DVDs don't come with are any extras -- no commentary tracks,
no deleted scenes, no "making-of" features. You get the film and, if
it's available, the original trailer.
As for picture quality, the website allows customers to preview each
title to see how it looks.
"We have digital masters of all of these films that have been created
by the company as part of preservation and restoration [of films],"
Feltenstein says. "Some of them are in better condition than others.
Most of them are pretty good. All of the films will be released in
their original aspect radio."
Warner Home Video will continue to release titles from its library in
the traditional manner -- including some of those being offered now in
the manufacture-on-demand series. This simply speeds up their
availability for fans who don't want to wait any longer.
susan.king(at)latimes(dot)com
--
Bruce Calvert
silen...@attbi.com
March 23, 2009
New Warner Website Swamped With Orders for Vintage Movies
If you're having trouble ordering from Warner Home Video's new on-
demand DVD and download site that I wrote about a couple of posts
back, it's because the demand has far exceeded the studio's wildest
expectations on opening day. I just got off the phone with a jubiliant
WHV honcho George Feltenstein, who reports that within two hours of
the site going live this morning, orders were placed for 140 of the
initial 150 titles. "And they might have gotten orders on those other
ten by now,'' he tells me. "It's more traffic than we can handle.'' He
said the top-secret on-demand project was in the works for two years,
"well before the retail landscape for DVDs started to shrink.'' George
said the hugely ambitious goal is to make Warners' entire 5000-title
catalogue, including hundreds of titles from MGM, RKO and other
studios, available, a project that "may take 10 years to accomplish.''
He said the initial offering, which will be supplemented by at least
20 features each and every month -- around 450 are scheduled for the
end of 2010 -- was chosen from among titles most requested by fans, as
well as titles for which the studios has the good masters. "There's
are at least a couple of thousand people who want each of these titles
out there,'' he says,."And we wanted to put out titles that look as
good as our regular commercial releases.'' He said he was particularly
happy to recently discover a good widescreen transfer of Budd
Boetticher's much-requested "Westbound,'' his only Randolph Scott
western not available on DVD. George said that two of my most wanted
titles, Michael Curtiz' "Mission to Moscow'' and Wilhelm Dieterle's
"The Last Flight,'' will "probably'' be available next year. Hooray!
("Portnoy's Complaint'' is coming too). The titles in the Warner
Archive program are burned rathan than pressed like WHV's regular
discs, but George says tests show these discs, burned with a
oropietary technology, "are as durable and playable as pressed discs.
They're not like discs you burn on your home computer.'' George
emphasized that these releases were intended to supplement WHV's
regular retail releases, which will continue to feature supplemental
features not available in the new bare-bones discs. He's going to
announce some upcoming titles tonight on Home Theater Forum. "If
initial sales are any indication, we're in for a long ride,'' he tells
me.
--
Bruce Calvert
Lloyd Fonvielle
earns him a place alongside Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, and Marc Randolph and
Reed Hastings, of Netflix -- visionaries whose willingness to listen to
consumers, rather than dictate to them, created new markets and made
their companies fabulously wealthy.
silen...@attbi.com wrote:
Donald4564
> In addition, WHV is not currently shipping these titles to addresses
> outside the U.S., which has caused a torrent of protest at the HTF.
>
Let us hope that that this problem can be cleared up soon as there are
at least a dozen pictures I would order straight away?
Is it a problem with rights or copyright?
I would have thought that all the silent pictures would be 'passed it'
by now?
Regards
Donald Binks
globular
it is not readily easy to work out what is on what anyway. It seems
like some kind of business thing to care about the film company.
Jim R.
considerably. It'll also help cut deeply into the bootleg market -
something I'm sure Warner didn't overlook when they decided to do
this. Paramount, Universal, Columbia, 20th Century-Fox, etc., are you
listening? - Jim Roebuck
Lloyd Fonvielle
Public film archives of the world -- are you listening?
silen...@attbi.com
> > In addition, WHV is not currently shipping these titles to addresses
> > outside the U.S., which has caused a torrent of protest at the HTF.
>
> Let us hope that that this problem can be cleared up soon as there are
> at least a dozen pictures I would order straight away?
>
> Is it a problem with rights or copyright?
According to the chat on the HTF last night, most of these titles will
soon be available to non-USA buyers.
Also, Warner Brothers is working with Kevin Brownlow on standard DVD
releases of silent classics like THE BIG PARADE and GREED.
--
Bruce Calvert
silen...@attbi.com
Warner Bros. brings film vault into digital age
Warner Bros. mines library for DVD release spanning silent film era to
the Brat Pack
By RYAN NAKASHIMA AP Business Writer | AP
Mar 23, 2009
(LOS ANGELES) Warner Bros. is reaching into its film vaults so it can
sell old movies on made-to-order DVDs, in a move it hopes will goose
sales of a vital product in a downturn.
Starting Monday, the studio will sell copies of 150 films from the
silent era to the 1980s Brat Pack that have never been released on
DVD. Internet downloads of the movies will cost $14.95, while DVDs
sent in the mail are $19.95. Both can be ordered at http://www.warnerarchive.com.
The initiative, which Warner claims is the first of its kind for a
major studio, is an effort by the Time Warner Inc. subsidiary to
combat what could be a fundamental decline in demand for DVD purchases
— a falloff that can be blamed on market saturation as much as the
recession.
Walt Disney Co.CEO Bob Iger warned of this shift last month when he
noted that most U.S. households own 80 DVDs already, leading people to
become "more selective" about what discs they buy.
U.S. DVD spending fell 7 percent last year, to $21.6 billion,
according to The Digital Entertainment Group, an industry consortium.
While high-definition Blu-ray disc spending nearly tripled, it
represented a small slice of the market, at $750 million.
Now retailers are cutting back shelf space for DVDs. And digital
downloads have come nowhere near to making up the difference, said Tom
Adams, president of Adams Media Research, who doesn't predict overall
growth in home video until 2010.
Home video revenues are a key profit driver for the studios — in some
cases, accounting for 60 percent more money than what a studio
collects at the box office. So the recent decline has forced studios
to do everything from lay off staff to pare back movie making.
Warner's decision to open up its vault "sounds like it's a risk-free
way for them to generate a little money on some very old content,"
Adams said. By making the DVDs only when the movies are ordered by a
customer, Warner doesn't have to worry about filling up a warehouse
with inventory that struggles to sell.
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."
Titles include "The Mating Game" (1959), starring Debbie Reynolds, and
a string of Cary Grant flicks from "Mr. Lucky" (1943) to "Once Upon a
Honeymoon" (1942). There's also "Wisdom," a modern-day Robin Hood tale
from 1986 starring Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore.
Reynolds noted that in the past, the only way to watch some old films
was to have a projector at home and obtain a bootleg copy. She said
fans have been asking her to get some of her films on DVD, like "The
Daughter of Rosie O'Grady" (1950), which is expected in a later batch
of releases.
"I was a girl that was raised with radio and I had to go to the
theater to see movies," said Reynolds, 76, during an interview in a
screening room on the Warner lot. "Now you get to see everything at
home on a DVD. It just seems like a miracle that it can be done this
way."
Robert Crawford, a 53-year-old auto worker in Saginaw, Mich., expects
to use the new Warner program to add to his 5,000-disc collection, a
mix of Blu-ray discs and DVDs.
He bubbled at hearing of upcoming releases such as "Beast of the
City" (1932) starring Walter Huston and Jean Harlow, or "Rasputin and
the Empress" (1932), which features three Barrymore siblings,
including modern "Charlie's Angels" actress Drew Barrymore's
grandfather, John.
"Some of these films I've been waiting on for years," said Crawford.
"Let's face it, Best Buy doesn't carry every title, neither does Wal-
Mart. They don't have the shelf room."
© 2009
--
Bruce Calvert
Retrojunkie
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/190608
>
> Warner Bros. brings film vault into digital age
> 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.
I'm drooling. :)
...
> Reynolds noted that in the past, the only way to watch some old films
> was to have a projector at home and obtain a bootleg copy. She said
> fans have been asking her to get some of her films on DVD, like "The
> Daughter of Rosie O'Grady" (1950), which is expected in a later batch
> of releases.
>
> "I was a girl that was raised with radio and I had to go to the
> theater to see movies," said Reynolds, 76, during an interview in a
> screening room on the Warner lot. "Now you get to see everything at
> home on a DVD. It just seems like a miracle that it can be done this
> way."
I understand they're going to offer the films for download as well,
aren't they?
-----
Living in the past? Visit www.retrojunkie.com
Lloyd Fonvielle
> I understand they're going to offer the films for download as well,
> aren't they?
Yes.
globular
?proper aspect ratio,16X9?
What?
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Lloyd Fonvielle wrote:
>> Exciting news from Warner Home Video just breaking. At their online
>> site they're offering on-demand DVDs of films they don't plan to
>> release to the wider market. These will be professional quality DVDs,
>> with 16x9 enhancement for the widescreen titles, though I assume
>> without any extras. $19.99 per title.
>>
>> Several silent features in the first offering, including "Wild
>> Orchids" and "Love" with Garbo. Among talkies, "Westbound" -- the
>> only Scott-Boetticher Western still unavailable on DVD.
>>
>> If this catches on it could be an incredible boon to film buffs,
>> especially silent film buffs.
>>
>> More info here:
>>
>> http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/3527754-post14.html
>
> ?proper aspect ratio,16X9?
>
> What?
Yes -- the widescreen films will have proper aspect ratio, optimized for
16x9 TV sets.
--