Missing Flicks

July 3, 1988

A theater may be the best place to watch a movie, but of the tens of thousands of films released over the past 80 years, only a tiny portion are available to local movie houses.

For that matter, local theaters show only a portion of the movies available in a  current year, and there are two reasons for this.  The first is simply that more movies are made than can be shown and the second is a consequence of the economics of the movie business

Why is it that Woody Allen's "Radio Days," a major and important movie, never made it to Bennington while we are knee-deep in "Superman" and "Friday the Thirteenth" sequels?  The reason is that theater owners and managers cannot select what plays in the own businesses.  These people are at the mercy of the distributors, the owners of the films.  And the distributors call the shots as to scheduling and price.

If a theater wants "Radio Days," the distributor may say, fine, but you have to run it for six weeks.  A theater in a large with its large potential audience may easily handle such a deal.  But the local manager , who through often sad experience, knows his clientele, may realize that though he could make money the first week, the audience for the this movie would peter out after that .  Since he cannot survive by losing money five weeks out of six, he opts for the mass market films wit an assured audience.

The Images theater in Williamstown has more flexibility in scheduling because, not being  a first-run house, it can rent films for a few days long after demand in the first run theaters has slackened.

A second problem is that some movies are only distributed regionally.  For example, many low-budget exploitation and horror flicks are distributed specifically for the southern U.S. drive-in trade, especially in Texas and southern California.  We never see these films, not even in the big cities.

Foreign and "art" movies are never distributed any place except big cities, due to the tiny audience for such films.

And finally, unlike the situation in France, movies in the U.S. are released and then they disappear.  In fact, until the mid 1930's, movies were routinely thrown away after a theatrical release to save money on storage - and I'm talking about master negative and all!  Except for special cases like "Gone With the Wind" and various Disney classics, most movies are never rereleased, and for good reason:  if the theaters were filled with old movies, the market for making new movies would diminish.

So unless one were president or Howard Hughes, a film fan had to settle for the poor quality, terrible sounding 16 millimeter prints in church parishes, or put oneself at the mercy of the local TV station manager, who would think nothing of slicing out essential scenes to fit in yet another commercial.

But the last decade has brought the maturing of two technical and marketing miracles, pay TV, and pre-recorded videocassettes.

And videocassette renting, with an overview of local rental outlets, is the topic of next week's column.

Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.

Does anyone get the idea that my dad was a movie buff?