I’ve been collecting movies in one format or another since the late 1970s. Some of my acquisitions are treasured artifacts—the Betamax copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail was my first ever factory-released video purchase (in 1983!); the 16mm print of Harry Langdon’s Plain Clothes was struck especially for me and is one of only 4 copies in the world I know of; the box set of Kinji Fukusaku’s Virus is a much –prized out-of-print gem that contains two different cuts of the film, an entire book, and the most depressing movie poster I’ve ever seen.
But some of my acquisitions defy explanation. I just don’t know what to say for myself.
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Wages of Fear: In 1997, I got a laserdisc player, and this was my first laserdisc purchase—and the only LD I ever paid full price for. It was the Criterion edition, and I got it at Tower Records near my office at the time (my co-workers wondered why I took such a long lunch hour that day). Oh, how I treasured that thing…
But, I never actually watched it. At nearly 3 hours, it was just way too long to fit into my life at the time. My daughter was born a few months later and as a stay-at-home father I never had three consecutive hours to myself to watch it. Eventually the kids got older, and it became easier to steal away some time for myself, but by then I’d moved the laserdisc player to a place where it was harder to use, which was just enough of an inconvenience to keep me from ever prioritizing sitting down with Clouzot’s thriller.
Eventually I sold the laserdisc—it was still in its shrinkwrap!—and upgraded to the new Criterion Blu-Ray. I haven’t watched that yet either.
(Let me just mention as an aside that I have seen Wages of Fear, theatrically. I’ve just never watched my own copy of it)
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Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah: The earliest copies of this that surfaced in the US were from Hong Kong, which had burned-in English and Chinese subtitles. And for some reason, the HK version was also edited. Not censored, just cut—and poorly, randomly, as if someone just lost a reel by accident and never got around to returning it.
I kept trying to upgrade that edition, but every attempt had its own issues—a worse English subtitle translation here, a pan-and-scan dub job here, a widescreen version that wasn’t anamorphic… laserdiscs, DVDs, VCDs, VHS—from Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Hong Kong, the US, England… none of them ever had the right combination of attributes to satisfy me.
I never got the copy I wanted, but along the way I ended up collecting a totally absurd number of copies and seeing the film as many times as I probably care to. And then they came out with a Blu-Ray version–it’s remastered! (Hangs head in shame)
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Buster Keaton’s Silent Films: I’ve been in love with Buster Keaton even longer than I’ve been in love with Godzilla. I first got the VHS editions of The Art of Buster Keaton when I was living in New York in 1995. At the time my “job” consisted of printing edge codes on 16mm workprints for NY’s documentary filmmaker community. This did not pay well. But I found that if I walked to work (only 40 blocks!) and let my boss treat me to lunch (she liked wheatgrass!) I could save my lunch money and subway fare to spend on Buster Keaton movies.
Years later I upgraded these to the laserdisc editions of the same set, purchased at a Boston-area laserdisc emporium’s going-out-of-business sale for the same price point as a single VHS tape. And then I upgraded that to Kino’s DVD edition. And I bought a Spanish box set just to see how much the prints differed. And then the Netwerk editions from England, and the competing UK versions from Cinema Club, and then my friends at Eureka’s Masters of Cinema sent me their box set, and then I worked on Kino’s Blu-Rays. Oh, and I got 16mm prints of several of the films along the way. Not to mention the Super 8mm and old Betamax versions I already had from the early 1980s.
For every one of Buster Keaton’s silent films I own at least 4 versions, in some cases as many as 8. And most of these are actually identical in every respect except media format.
I think that’s maybe a sign of mental illness.
Can I justify my bizarre collection of slapstick comedies from Denmark? By that I mean my collection of ragged, incomplete editions of lesser known comedies by such lesser known comedians as Monty Hall or Syd Chaplin, all of which have their intertitles in Danish? Can I justify my Big Box of Unidentified 9.5mm Clips (which is exactly what the name says it is)? What do I have to say about having multiple copies of the 1960s Gamera films without actually owning any of the versions any sane person would willingly sit through? Or my massive archive of unlabeled movies recorded off-air from German TV? And what does it say about me that when I learned some of the DVDs I’d produced were being pirated in Italy, that my first response was to go purchase copies online so I get the new cover art, and only later got around to sending the threatening cease-and-desist letters?