Noel: At this point, I think DVD itself is here to stay for a while. At the very least, it's going to take a few hundred years to dispose of all those discs filling up the five-dollar bins at Wal-Mart. As you allude to, sometimes we in the media are quick to jump on the emerging technologies and talk about them as though they've penetrated further into the culture than they actually have. The majority of Americans have finally made the jump from VHS to DVD—more than two-thirds of households, at last count—but not so many are jumping on the Blu-Ray bandwagon yet, and the move toward legal downloads has yet to become a groundswell. And while we bang out breathless stories about Netflix's adoption of the "set-top box," do you know who's quietly become the fifth largest video rental company in the U.S.? Redbox, who operates those little kiosks that have popped up outside McDonald's and grocery stores across the country.
And what's inside those Redboxes, by and large? Well, you and I both worked in video stores during our misspent youth, so we know what movie renters have always wanted to find at their outlet of choice: The Hollywood hits of two or three months ago, preferably for a dollar a night.
Still, there are a couple of interesting trends at work—I don't know if they're encouraging necessarily, but interesting. One is the boom in straight-to-DVD product. Straight-to-video made a lot of sense in the days when there was a video store on every corner but the hot new releases weren't always in stock. Now kiosks and on-line renters are flush with hot new releases, so it's hard to imagine many people deciding to risk their buck on some off-brand western or horror film. And yet, while The Weinstein Company has yet to make much of a splash in the theatrical market, they're flooding your mailbox and mine with DVDs under the auspices of "Genius Products"—and some of those strange little movies they keep sending our way aren't so bad. I can't tell whether the "Genius Products" line is a tax write-off for the Weinsteins or if they're genuinely profitable, but if it's the latter, that could be a bright sign for the future of DVD—not as a medium to preserve our cinema past, but a medium to deliver our cinema future.
The other interesting trend is towards double-disc editions in which the second disc contains a digital copy of the film for the purchaser to load onto their portable device of choice. Apparently, the home video companies behind these sets are acknowledging the imminent shift of movie-delivery away from hard copies and toward virtual ones.
I don't know how imminent that shift actually is—like I said, we in the media often oversell these kinds of changes—but it's a future I'd like to see come sooner rather than later. And here's why: Those obscurities and cult movies that are languishing in the studio vaults may never get their due on DVD, but it wouldn't take that many downloads to make it profitable for studios to dust off old prints and make them iPod-ready. The golden age of DVD may be over, but if the world of digital delivery takes hold as it should, we could be on the cusp of a new golden age of cinephilia. Remember how the film school brats gave way to the video store brats in Hollywood? Well, in 10 years or so, we could have a whole generation of filmmakers who had legal access to the entire history of world cinema with just a few mouseclicks. Imagine the possibilities.
Scott: When I was a child, I used to dream of having a box with a gigantic dial on top of my television. By turning this magical dial, you could call up any movie ever made—including the ones I tried to watch through the fluttering V-hold on the Playboy Channel—and voila, there it would appear on the screen. I don't imagine a dial will come into play, since it would take endless scrolling to get to whatever you wanted and there would need to be searching and browsing functions, but certainly the digital age promises to make that dream a reality eventually. (Either that or movies will be something you ingest in pill form and have projected inside your skull.)
In any case, I'm heartened by your optimism about what's coming next: If it does indeed become cheaper to distribute the cool obscurities and hidden gems that are never going to be available on (Region 1) DVD—and digital delivery does seem to promise that—then color me excited. I've always considered cinephilia like the loose thread on a sweater: Pull on it, and the whole thing starts to unravel. If you could access world cinema with the immediate, mouseclick ease of following trails of hypertext on the Internet Movie Database, then it's possible to explore all sorts of little-explored corners and unheralded filmmakers. DVD opened things up enormously in many respects—particularly television, which has been more enriching than I ever would have expected—but we've hit the wall now. But we're hitting a wall now: Most of the worthwhile TV shows have found their way to disc (sorry, According To Jim fans), and production has slowed markedly on the release of older movies that have never been on DVD. (A handful of smaller companies excepted, of course.) With sales falling, unreleased titles growing more obscure, and new technologies on the march, there's just no incentive to assault the market with DVDs like there was before.
And yet, as you say, DVD isn't going anywhere soon. Those Redbox kiosks are just a diabolical blight on the culture: All new releases, all Hollywood movies, and absolutely no indication that movies even exist past a two or three month window. If you use Redbox exclusively, you have no sense of the past and no sense that films exist as anything other than disposable nuggets that are consumed and forgotten. At least in the video store—where, yes, the majority of customers are trolling for yesterday's multiplex fare—there was the possibility of stumbling into something unknown and intriguing on the new release wall. You could pick up a DVD box, look at the description on the back, and maybe find something that won't be parodied in the next Date/Epic/Disaster/Superhero Movie. With Redbox, simplicity and convenience comes at the expense of everything; it's the opposite of the magical dialbox technology of my dreams, which is endlessly vast and far more democratic. Seeking out only the new breeds narrowness and stupidity, and I hope that whatever's next will expand, not contract, the world of cinema.
In the meantime, there are still DVDs to cover, no? Just yesterday, the Criterion version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's scandalous Salò arrived on my desk, which will surely make it a Blockbuster Night for somebody (but not at Blockbuster, which I can only imagine won't be stocking it), and there are still surprises and delights to be had every month, even if they're coming at a much slower rate than before. Just a quick scan in my immediate area reveals a pile of intriguing Criterions (including Guy Maddin's Brand Upon The Brain! with your choice of narrator), some Dragon Dynasty discs, the latest (Larisa Shepitko) from the very cool Eclipse series, the most recent seasons of Dexter and House, and a Derek Jarman set. Not bad for a dead format.
R.I.P. DVD. Viva DVD!
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