Public Domain Video

 

 According to Hollywood legend, in the 1930s a harried Warner Bros. clerk was ordered by his boss not to register a cartoon with the U. S. copyright office. "Save  the fee!" he was commanded. Unfortunately, the hapless clerk took that to mean all movies and never registered anything again. Thus was born cinematic public domain. Public domain movies are the films consumers see in convenience stores and supermarkets, often for ten dollars or less-movies like Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, TheRobotvs. theAztecMummy, and The Indestructible Man. But PD also includes such classics as It's a Wonderful Life with James Stewart, His Girl Friday with Cary Grant, and Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage and The Lady Vanishes. Either by not being registered originally or because copyright has expired and was not renewed, public domain films come in all shapes and sIZes. 

"When a lot of these movies were made, " observes Frederick Ramsdell, the vice president of programming at Congress Video Group, "executives saw no secondary use for the material. There was no television, no video; they were careless with the restrictions and the rights. " The copyright holders' loss has been the public's gain. PD movies have been big business. Since 1982, when such films first started hitting the video market, at least 25 companies have used PD titles-for which there are no rights to obtain or royalties to pay-as their entry to the field. Kartes, Goodtimes, Congress, Hal Roach, Star Classics, Video Warehouse, Matinee, Select-a-Tape, Sheik, and Prism are just some of the labels that have been in the PD business. Anyone can sell a tape: there are currently 20 different issues of It's a Wonderful Life on the market (not counting the colorized, and therefore copyrighted, version). 

How can the public shop with such a plethora of seemingly identical titles? What's the difference between a Discount Video version of My Man Godfrey and one from Hal Roach? First, we need to understand how PD companies operate. 

The first step is to select titles. Usually they decide on the basis of recognizable stars or films. "Some movies are evergreen," says Ramsdell, citing It's a Wonderful Life, The Little Princess, and Sherlock Holmes. "If we find a title is selling particularly well," he adds, "we go out and research further to find other titles with the same stars." That research can be time-consuming, involving a thorough records check at the copyright office to see if a film is registered or if its copyright has lapsed. Searches are not always as thorough as they might be. 

"Some titles sold as PD are not," observes Ramsdell. A recent case in point involved three movies-The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and The Third Man-frequently seen in PD lines. Janus Films sued Cable Films claiming that-although the movies' copyright had expired-the stories upon which they were based were still protected. As the owner of those copyrights, Janus claimed the movies. The case is now on appeal. 

Such arguments are common to PD. "You'll think something is· PD and then you'll find that someone owns a copyright on three bars of music in it. So it's not PD and you've got to pay for that music," remarks Marcie Robinson, manager of advertising and publicity at Prism. JeffBaker, vice president of sales and marketing at Goodtimes, notes that his company voluntarily removed two Bruce Lee movies from the market, as well as Humphrey Bogart's Beat the Devil, when ownership questions came up. In PD, such hassles are generally not worth fighting. 

Once the rights are more or less established, the PD distributor/manufacturer must locate a usable print, which is not always an easy task. Collectors are usually the best source; as a result, prints can range from excellent to awful, intact or missing entire scenes. "There is a joke around here," comments Michael Pollack of New York's New Video retail chain. "The PD business has gotten so bad that The 39 Steps has become The 36 Steps." 

Companies will lease/borrow a film for anywhere between $200 and $2000. Hal Roach Studios sometimes edits together three or four different prints to get the best results. Some companies take an easier route: they steal from their competition by dubbing off extant videocassettes. "That's one of the big drawbacks of PD," remarks Tim Baskerville, president of Video Marketing, a Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm. "There are no protections." 

Congress' Ramsdell adds, "The irony is if we clear a title-and find it's in the public domain-we're clearing it for our competitors. The less scrupulous companies tan copy it and the consumer gets burned, since they get a third or fourth generation  copy on cheap tape." 

Tape is a consideration. Most reputable companies use such brand name stock as Scotch orTDK. (Congress Video provides a toll-free phone number consumers can call if one of their tapes is defective.) Sleazier outfits reportedly use inferior or second-hand tape, and shortchange the customer by recording at a slower speed that saves tape but adversely affects the image. 

Many companies have grown tired of the headaches involved in PD and are getting out. Kartes and Prism, two early entrants, are not adding titles to their lines, concentrating instead on licensed and original product. Another reason for the exit, though, is the shortage of titles. "There's not a lot of recent PD, " notes Beth Bornhurst, video manager at Crown Video. Dick Draklich, the person in charge of vid- 

eo at RepubliclSpotIite, sees another problem. "There's a lot of PD I wouldn't think of putting out. We always considered our PD a collectors' library." 

Indeed, Jim Kartes, president of Kartes Communications, began his Video Film Classics line with just that in mind. A spokesman for the company says, "We don't refer to them as 'PD. ' We try to make them very upscale, with hardshell cases and quality tape. But we're getting into licensed product now, where everyone isn't copying you." 

So, whither PD? "It served an important function," remarks Michael Pollack, "as a testing ground that showed you didn't need expensive packaging or promotions, that you could sell tapes cheaply and in bulk, and that consumers would buy-rather than rent-if the price was right." 

"PD brought people into the stores to browse," observes Frederick Ramsdell. "Before PD tapes you didn't browse in tape stores. Our prices-$9.95-created a user-friendly market. It started a buying mentality. " 

In fact, the prices of the major film company videocassette releases have decreased dramatically. According to Video Marketing, the average retail price of a tape dropped to under $50 last year, down from over $70 in 1983. Average prices under $20 are being predicted by 1990. Some feel that will be the death knell of PD. 

"The reason PD was so attractive was its price," notes Jack Schember, associate editor of Video Store, a trade magazine for retailers. "Now that regular movies are going down that low, there's no need for PD. Retailers [outside the video industry] wanted to see if they should get into video. Now they'll stock up with better quality titles. " 

"There's always going to be a certain percentage of the market that are film buffs," observes Rob Word of Hal Roach As Michael Pollack puts it, "You can buy a copyrighted film like North by N orthwestfor $19.95, or a PD title like Sabotage for the same price. They're both by Hitchcock and they're both affordable. There isn't that great discrepancy in price anymore. PD has let the consumer and the collector have a choice." 

How do you choose the tape for you? "Price should not be that important," says· Michael Pollack of New Video. If you go by price alone, you might be dissatisfied. Public domain tape manufacturers and retailers offer some pointers: 

Pricing. "A lot of the low price stuff is garbage," notes Ted Ewing, president of Blackhawk Films. "If a buyer pays $5.95 for blank tape and $9.95 for a PD tape, after markup, packaging, etc., an under-$10 PD tape can't be much of a tape." 

But Jeff Baker of Goodtimes, a company which produces a large number of under-$10 PD titles, insists that large-scale production allows a company to sell cheaply. "The important thing to look at is the numberofreleases. If it's $9.99, how many more titles has the company produced? If there's a spread of a lot of product, he's probably not a fly-by-night producer." 

Packaging. Consider the presentation."A sleazy box probably means a sleazy tape inside, " notes Rob Word of Hal Roach. His company employs old movie posters and an elegant typeface. Others, like Video Warehouse and Star Classics, use uniform box design, presumably to save the cost of cre- 

ating a new one for each film. . 

Reputation. Find out as much as you can about the company. Has it been in business long? Ask the store owner or salesman if they get a lot of defective returns on the title you want. 

Tape Quality. If you're buying from a video outlet, you can rent the tape first to inspect it. Otherwise, see if it's recorded on brand name stock and at the fastest speed (SP). Some companies record at slower speeds to save on tape, which usually yields a poor image. 

VIDEO has conducted a survey of four widely available public domain titles: Sabotage (1936), a thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock; His GirlFriday (1940), a comedy starring Cary Grant and directed by Howard Hawks; Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), a mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; and The Terror (1962), a horror story directed by Roger Corman, with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. 

The first two are bona fide classics, typical of the sort of movie you wouldn't expect to be PD. If availability is any clue, the Holmes movie is probably the most popular PD title after It's a Wonderful Life and Night of the Living Dead. It is also typical of the tangled rights questions involving PD: of the 14 movies in the Rathbone-Bruce series, only 4 are PD; 8 are tied up in rights disputes and 2 have been released as licensed product by Playhouse. The Terror is a recent example of PD and the only color sample in the survey. It is not as widely available as other titles, perhaps because its producer/director is still around to make waves. 

Besides transfer quality, the survey looked at packaging and price. We covered ten companies, although each did not have every title sampled: Admit One, Budget, Congress, Crown, Goodtimes, Hal Roach, Kartes, Prism, Star, and Video Warehouse. Although Star Classics has Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon in its catalogue, we were unable to obtain a copy, so two later PD titles in the series, The Woman in Green and Dressed to Kill, were sampled from Star instead. One tape of each film was viewed in its entirety; for the rest, selected scenes were viewed. 

 

SABOTAGE 

There does not seem to be a good obtainable print of Sabotage, and such evi-  

dence as splices and scratches indicates that a number of companies probably used the same one. Congress comes out ahead here, although all the versions are washedout, with high contrast and multiple scratches throughout. The image in Crown Home Video's release gets so bad at points that actors' heads blend into the walls: 

This is nothing, however, next to Video Warehouse's edition-a bargain-basement copy available in some stores for as low as $7.77. Recording is at the LP speed on a 45-minute tape and the fuzzy image looks like it might have come from another halfinch. Suspiciously, the jacket copy is identical to that on Congress' box. 

Goodtimes, Star, and Video Warehouse all have buzzes on their soundtracks. Crown's package design is the best, although most are fine. Four of the seven tapes reviewed misspell star Sylvia Sydney's name in a variety of ways. 

 

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON 

The best of this batch is Hal Roach's, followed by Prism and Kartes. Roach obtained a 35-millimeter print for colorization purposes; although those results were unavailable for screening, the print yielded the best B&W video version available: mint, with a flawless picture and wonderful sound. 

Kartes is the runner-up (although the liner notes on the plastic case reveal the entire plot), followed by Prism and Crown, both of which have slightly soft versions with muffled sound. From jacket to tape quality, Congress' is the poorest of their tapes screened, but the worst of this lot comes from Video Warehouse. Its tape is again at LP speed; the print is in shockingly bad condition, even for this house. The movie is missing two whole sequences, about 15 minutes' worth. Goodtimes'version is also at LP and has a poor im~ge, but the film is intact. 

 

THE TERROR 

The quality here does not vary widely, although Roach comes out ahead with an attractive package and a good image. All three editions (Roach, Goodtimes, Prism) verge on the reddish. Goodtimes' is the poorest, looking like a second generation copy made without an available film master. The soundtrack on all three is slightly muddy. 

 

HIS GIRL FRIDAY 

The best versions here are from Prism and Crown, with the former falling short only because of a technical error which repeats a one-minute sequence. Otherwise, Crown's tape has a sharp image with tone, clean, crisp sound, and few scratches. The package design and liner notes are also nicely done. Prism's is about as good: the viewer can actually see through background windows that are mere white patches in other versions. Their tape comes in a plastic case with a 20-page trivia booklet. 

Congress' and Kartes' soundtracks are hollow and/or noisy, Goodtimes' has tape damage, and Video Warehouse is again in the pits: at LP speed, with everything looking like it was photographed through a fishbowl. 

Although generalizations are, difficult, Hal Roach Studios scores the best in packaging, pricing, and picture quality. The studio seems the most interested in making quality budget tapes available to collectors, going out of the way to produce attractive and, in the liner notes, informative material. The next best are Crown, which has modem packaging and, in general, careful prints, Kartes, and Prism. Midd1e-of-the-line PD companies, neither exceptional nor execrable, are Congress and Goodtimes, which do a workmanlike job of providing the public with material. 

 

 

YES, IT'S PUBLIC DOMAIN ...

Some films classics, right? 

 

Classics are owned by someone, right? Wrong. The following films, for one reason or another, are all in the public domain: 

My Man Godfrey (William Powell) As You Like It (Laurence Olivier) The General (Buster Keaton) Gulliver's Travels (animated) 

Night of the Living Dead 

It'~ a Wonderful Life Games 

Stewart) 

Second Chorus. (Fred Astaire) Our Town (William Holden) The Stranger (Orson Welles) 

Diabolique (Simone Signoret) 

Angel and the .Badman Gghn Wayne) 

Why We Fight (dir. FrankCapra) Meet John Doe (Gary Cooper)

Flying Deuces (Laurel & Hardy)

The Man Who Know Too Much (1934 dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 

The Secret Agent (dir. Hitchcock) 

Rain Goan Crawford) , 

Things to Come (Raymond Massey), Fire Over England (Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh) 

My Favorite Brunette (Bob Hope) Of Human Bondage (Bette Davis)

Algiers (Ch~les Boyer) Suddenly (Frank Sinatra) 

The Magician (Ingrid Bergmarl) This Is the Army\(Ronaid Reagari, 

 

VIDEO, December 1986