An irate friend of mine brought to my attention how the founder of Twilight Time the distributor of 20th Century- Fox’s special edition DVDs of its catalog of 50s and 60s movies, dissed the Warner Bros. Archive the first one out of the gate with on-demand DVDs. He claimed that Warner’s is devaluing its films. I strongly disagree. First, if it wasn’t for Warner’s success there would be no Twilight Time releases of Fox movies.
Secondly, though you can see a number of these films on Turner Classic Movies, WB has a gold mine of films rarely televised on TCM such as The Green Slime, and never televised such as Once You Kiss a Stranger and a slew of made-for-TV movies. Even the ones not remastered have received high praise from fans and this helps put the bootleggers of these titles out of business.
Twilight Time is going to release one film a month and so far the its first 5 choices leaving me yawning. The one thing I can say in agreement is that since all these movies are televised on the Fox Movie Channel over and over, adding bonus material and booklets will give them some additional value and cache.
Arguably the Twilight Time thing is more closely based on sub-licensing arrangement between Olive Films and Paramount. And since Warner’s Feltenstein singled out Fox catalog releases like the Joan Collins box (which I loved) as somehow killing off the DVD market, a rejoinder from the Fox camp was more than justified.
But yeah, I get what you’re saying: the fact that Twilight Time can only muster one release per month is a tacit argument in favor of the burn-on-demand model. I have a lot of issues with Warner Archive, but the one promise they’ve unarguably delivered on is volume.
And what, no love for THE KREMLIN LETTER or VIOLENT SATURDAY? Those are cult items I’ve been waiting for.
Didn’t know about the war of words between WB Archive and Fox, Stephen. Interesting.
As for the Fox releases, though Kremlin Letter and Fate Is the Hunter do have 60s starlets in them, Barbara Parkins (except in Valley of the Dolls of course) and Suzanne Pleshette (except in Rome Adventure) are two of my least favorites. Where are my Pleasure Seekers!?! LOL
Feltenstein has been catty in a couple of interviews about the Warner Archive. His attitude didn’t really help the case for a home video idea with a lot of extreme pluses and minuses, I thought:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xjtV9ig2R_YJ:www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/item_x1flym7p8C07ccJjPEMbQK+%22george+feltenstein%22+%22joan+collins%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
I love Barbara Parkins in PEYTON PLACE. Hers is one of the most complex characters, and she pulls it off surprisingly well. Although somehow that show managed to make a lot of actors with limited range (Ryan O’Neal, Lana Wood, even Mia) look good.
After the first five or six months, I have heard that TT (Twilight Time) is planning to begin releasing two discs per month. Of course, talk is cheap. I do suspect that the first five releases will function as a trial balloon; if they tank, who knows what will happen? THE KREMLIN LETTER seems a strange selection for the first release. I feel that THE EGYPTIAN and VIOLENT SATURDAY will find their genre fan bases, however.