By Shelly Brisbin
March 8, 2023 11:23 AM PT
It’s not a classic era for classic movies
It happens to most of us: You search your streaming services or an aggregator site for a movie you remember fondly, or somehow never saw when it was new, only to come up empty. The withering of back catalogs has hit all of the big services, as they cut costs and execute mergers in the face of stiff competition. But for classic film fans, movies often go missing in bulk, taking forgotten-but-important titles along.
Really old movies—which I define as being released between the dawn of the sound era and roughly the end of the decade I was born—are what make me happy. They’re my comfort food, my geeky hobby, my excuse to host a podcast. I’ve loved this stuff since high school. And while media mega mergers mean libraries of old films get valued as assets when the deals are made, that doesn’t mean they’ll pop up on a streamer anytime soon. That’s not just a problem for me and fellow followers of the #TCMParty hashtag. It’s a loss for culture and film history—a memory hole for the 21st century.
Sure, you can find classic films on Amazon, HBO Max, or for rent or purchase on iTunes. But you can’t always watch the specific one you want to, much less take a deep dive into the catalog of a director or actor whose studio’s library is locked up by the current owners, or by a tangle of cascading legal rights. Truthfully, it’s been that way for years. It’s just the names on the buildings that change, as the number of ways you might be able to see a classic you love continues to shrink.
Right cross
The first thing to know about why a film is or isn’t available to stream is that it’s complicated. Last year, Amazon closed a deal to buy MGM, including a 4,000 film library that includes Rocky and James Bond properties. These aren’t MGM films from my classic era, but the deal is a good example of why owning a thing doesn’t mean it’s immediately available for your customers to stream. Rights to stream, remake, or make discs containing many of these titles are tied up for years to come, not to mention the costs associated with remastering and marketing a back catalog. So for viewing purposes, mergers and acquisitions of vast movie libraries just create delays, while the new owners wait out rights deals, or negotiate new ones.
Even within large film libraries, individual titles are caught up in rights disputes all the time, with the estates of directors or producers owning veto powers, or the chain of custody becoming murky over 80 or 90 years. Clearing rights is a legal specialty for a reason.
Locked in the vault
The pre-1986 MGM film library belongs to Warner Brothers, as do its own classics, and RKO’s, too. That’s a legacy of Ted Turner’s purchase of these assets from Kirk Kerkorian back in the 80s. Turner wanted to show the movies, and did so on his various cable channels, eventually including Turner Classic Movies. When Warner bought Turner out, it began selling physical media, creating the Warner Archive. They spent a lot of money to restore and remaster films, too, which was a great investment while people (like me) were buying physical copies of the movies they loved to be sure they would have a one.
Other classic film libraries haven’t been as available. Many of Paramount’s pre-1949 films were locked in Universal vaults for years before the company began various projects, including a YouTube channel, to release selected films. And the 20th Century Fox library is now owned by Disney, which is typically stingy with its own content, and has so far not brought those piles of old Fox films to Disney+.
The trouble with holding up Warner Archive as a model for other classic library owners is that its early success didn’t last. The business was built on physical media, and when Warner and TCM tried a classics-focused streaming service, FilmStruck, it failed.
Today, the closest we have to a streaming service with classic content is TCM, a commercial-free cable channel. Its availability on many over-the-top services means the majority of the MGM/Warner/RKO library content, plus other films the channels gets rights to show, have been relatively available to view. But the seas looked rougher for TCM fans following the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery. In January, Discovery president David Zaslav stated very publicly (while flanked by TCM on-air hosts) that the channel will continue. Plenty of us who love the channel could be heard muttering a skeptical “for now” when we read the news.
And as great as TCM is—with an on-demand component you can use to stream films shown in the past few weeks—the entire library is not (and has not been) available all at once, whether on a dedicated service or on a service like HBO Max.
Defensive Collecting
Long before streaming took complete hold of the media landscape, I was a physical media collector. I bought Warner Archive VOD releases, crummy transfers of public domain film noirs from a bin at Fry’s Electronics, and fancy box sets devoted to John Ford or to forgotten film noir.
I’m glad I did, because those discs form the backbone of my home Plex server, a library that can grow as big as the hard drives I have available to store them, assuming the movie made its way into some digital format, and I was there to grab it. I still collect discs. So Kino Lorber, Criterion and Warner Archive get the money streaming services do not. Choosing between access to the very old instead of the very new is not ideal, but it’s what I’m doing for now. And for the future of my access to classic film.
[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]