If you remember the MPAA vs DeCSS fight from the early 00's.. what Scorsese was doing here would be considered serious copyright infringement by the MPAA.
The reasonable person would consider it fair use to gather reference material for their job. The MPAA was arguing in court that any violation of their DRM was illegal, reprehensible, irredeemable. And Scorsese was likely a member!
He was buddies with Jack Valenti!! Via wikipedia:
In 2007, Scorsese was honored by the National Italian American Foundation (N.I.A.F.) at the nonprofit's thirty-second Anniversary Gala. During the ceremony, Scorsese helped launch N.I.A.F.'s Jack Valenti Institute in memory of former foundation board member and past president of the Motion Picture Association of America (M.P.A.A.) Jack Valenti.
First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
UK TV comedian Bob Monkhouse was another obsessive VHS archivist. He amassed a collection of 35k tapes and saved some recordings of UK TV shows which were previously thought to have been lost by the BBC.
I'm honestly surprised when I see On Cinema references in the wild, mainly because I'm still amazed that they survived cancellation by Adult Swim only to create their own hyper-niche streaming service that has survived for going on three years.
It's always fascinating to see how accomplished artists work to be in conversation with others in their medium. How do people use the past to form their current goals, and how do people use their current goals to guide their research into the past? How do they deconstruct what they think works, what doesn't? And how do they organize all of this thinking?
These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically like these artists do.
I dunno exactly why but the idea of being some university student in some back room, watching and digitizing what Scorsese thought was interesting decades ago, ideally at 1am, seems incredibly cozy to me.
I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells incredible.
Marty's obsession with collecting films is very well known in the film industry since the eighties. Just read any better 80ies film book about New Hollywood. He sat hours a day in his basement, and often invited others to watch movies with him.
I think the biggest obstacle right now is not the software, but the hardware. The software works, but requires either buying a $300-$500 set of three circuit boards, or finding a specific PCIe capture card and potentially modifying it. If someone made a nicer version of the Domesday Duplicator - single board in a case, $100 to $200 - I think that would make the project a lot more accessible. Even better would be if someone started selling modified VHS players, having replaced their normal electronics with a capture device and a USB3 port. After all, many people don't have a soldering iron or a desktop computer.
> Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.
Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
When you're that rich and that interested in your niche, in a world where there aren't any other ways to catalog then you do what you gotta do even if it's pay ~$1 million / year.
For Scorsese, by paying for this system he can make sure that he can do the watching and the research he wants, no matter what. The "no matter what" is the important part; no matter matter who makes a show/movie, no matter what his relationship with it's creator/owner, no matter if the studio wipes the tapes hours after airing it just the one time, Scorsese will have his own copy as sure as the sun will rise. For many a rich folk, they will blow 7 figure sums on things they themselves feel are less important than such an ironclad guarantee without a moment's hesitation.
I doubt Martin Scorsese was all that wealthy in the 80's when he started this. He was well-respected, sure, but he made art films, not summer blockbusters like Spielberg and Lucas or big-time comedies, and the external revenue streams (HBO, video rental) were fewer and smaller. He was known, but he wasn't MARTIN SCORSESE like we know him today (that would probably have been Coppola). And I'm guessing most of what he was taping was news and talk shows (to get accents, styles, vernacular, etc), which would often not be kept permanently by the broadcasters, and lots of more obscure things that would be difficult to track down.
> simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
I suspect that's a far more miserable, time-consuming and failure prone approach than simply taping them off the TV. The studios aren't set up to show films, they're to hand them off to distributors. The whole system is set up to deal with films in bulk, not to individual users. And they won't have them in convenient VHS format, so even if Scorsese had a guy he could just ring and ask for Film X, what he'd get would be .. several reels of 35mm. Sure, he's probably got a little cinema for that as well, but it's not as convenient as a TV.
And of course asking the studio runs a high risk of "no".
I'm thinking the system helped him avoid Hollywood politics. If a studio lost the bidding to distribute his next film, they might try cutting him off from high-quality originals out of spite.
This is cool for sure, but given the horrific resolution of the medium
any recovered rare movies would, at least forme me, make watching it
a painful experience.
He could have the best VHS records out there and the best tapes, but
the source material being recorded would be painfully limited, as
would the recordings.
I would have expected Scorsese to have requested, threatened, manipulated, bribed, and so on to obtain film reels.
This would not be possible for a lot of the content but surely for quite a few.
He could do the same for original VHS cassettes with the movies (like you would find in a rental store. Just unwatched ones.
Also that he would have people to buy DVD version when (if) they came out.
Still if a DVD version was released that would indicate that the source
film was available and Scorsese could have a copy of that instead.
VHS is indeed horribble, if watched on today's TVs and wasn't that great back then. European PAL was a bit better than NTSC. And, while it's full of noise, it doesn't have the smear of digital noise reduction.
Scorsese grew up with this TV resolution and I'm sure he would have preferred high quality for things we cared about, but for day-to-day use, having VHS was fine. (If he really cared, he could have gotten a betamax recorder or a super-VHS recorder to record off the TV)
I'm pretty sure that he'll stream better copies - but for those not available, having a noisy VHS is great. And with streaming/digital "sales" you never know which films you're going to lose next...
To write good piece of music you need to know by heart a lot of music in such and other styles. Thes same with movies. As I have watched many Scorcese's and Tarantino's movies, I'm not surprised by what they put into their masterpieces, these guys are learning from old school.
On the other hand, I am outraged that I am forbidden to watch old movies, as they are not publicly available, and enshittification of streaming services is progressing. Less classic content, more money, divided by studios/companies/corporations. Am I supposed to pay 200$/month for 6(7?) subscriptions to have 30% of the content I want to watch
I spent the early '00s watching old and obscure movies via torrent. Megacorp stores didn't stock them then and mega-streaming networks today won't either. Don't look for art at the toy store.
> The entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work. For the moment, the university requires the person requesting materials to pay for the digitization of any tape that hasn’t already been converted.
Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then… deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos could be publicly archived, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982
Worth noting, for crusaders against administrative overhead at colleges & universities:
> In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
> For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese’s tapes are more than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work.
In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah. Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of this burden.
In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if universities provided detailed, honest financial statements - which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history" technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny new student amenities are higher priorities.
For what it's worth, I'm sure that, if you asked every direct report why they created a position below them, they'd give a perfectly cromulent justification. That doesn't explain away the inefficiencies of college in general, but I do think there are root causes of that that are worth going in depth into.
For example, presidents have large offices because they would say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money: fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments that open entire research units, dealing with internal governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can handle all of these responsibilities.
Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a need to support certain student populations to increase retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more good press about alums), so you now have people that create programming to engage first-generation college students, Black students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and no one person can do all of that as well.
The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental health care, people that help students navigate this internal system, for example), because American society and government doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
> Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
Seems like he employs an archivist, not that he's an archivist. A better title might be Scoreses's secret VHS archive, I don't know. Archivist is a specific job with specific, non-trivial training. It's a nitpick, but it reminds me of when people acted like Elon Musk designed the rockets for SpaceX or his Tesla cars, or when they talk about Steve Jobs creating the iPhone. The person with the money and the vision is critical to success, but it's just not accurate to say that they did these things themselves.
If all they do is follow his instructions on labeling and categorization, he himself is also an archivist, with the people being his clerks. He started taping on his own long before it became a multi-VHS "i need people to do this" setup.
[+] [-] mewse-hn|2 years ago|reply
The reasonable person would consider it fair use to gather reference material for their job. The MPAA was arguing in court that any violation of their DRM was illegal, reprehensible, irredeemable. And Scorsese was likely a member!
He was buddies with Jack Valenti!! Via wikipedia:
[+] [-] BMc2020|2 years ago|reply
The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
[+] [-] kerrsclyde|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Monkhouse#Film_and_televis...
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
"going back to when Monkhouse first bought a home video recorder in 1966"
Wow... if he started that early, the costs must have been astronomical in the beginning.
[+] [-] max_|2 years ago|reply
Made me understand how seriously he takes film.
[1]: An interview with letter box on Killers of the Flower Moon on YouTube
[+] [-] neetrain|2 years ago|reply
The numbers of films produced per year has dropped significantly over time.
[+] [-] tracerbulletx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|2 years ago|reply
https://archives.colorado.edu/repositories/2/resources/1887
[+] [-] lapetitejort|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kouru225|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mewse-hn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CurrentB|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxobject|2 years ago|reply
These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically like these artists do.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|2 years ago|reply
I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells incredible.
[+] [-] speedylight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rurban|2 years ago|reply
So, not secret at all.
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
It's the ultimate in VHS preservation.
I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make this happen!
[+] [-] pkkm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kouru225|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] beebmam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dedman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Solvency|2 years ago|reply
Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
[+] [-] lelandbatey|2 years ago|reply
For Scorsese, by paying for this system he can make sure that he can do the watching and the research he wants, no matter what. The "no matter what" is the important part; no matter matter who makes a show/movie, no matter what his relationship with it's creator/owner, no matter if the studio wipes the tapes hours after airing it just the one time, Scorsese will have his own copy as sure as the sun will rise. For many a rich folk, they will blow 7 figure sums on things they themselves feel are less important than such an ironclad guarantee without a moment's hesitation.
It's not too far fetched.
[+] [-] listenallyall|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
I suspect that's a far more miserable, time-consuming and failure prone approach than simply taping them off the TV. The studios aren't set up to show films, they're to hand them off to distributors. The whole system is set up to deal with films in bulk, not to individual users. And they won't have them in convenient VHS format, so even if Scorsese had a guy he could just ring and ask for Film X, what he'd get would be .. several reels of 35mm. Sure, he's probably got a little cinema for that as well, but it's not as convenient as a TV.
And of course asking the studio runs a high risk of "no".
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shannifin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] The-Bus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|2 years ago|reply
He could have the best VHS records out there and the best tapes, but the source material being recorded would be painfully limited, as would the recordings.
I would have expected Scorsese to have requested, threatened, manipulated, bribed, and so on to obtain film reels.
This would not be possible for a lot of the content but surely for quite a few.
He could do the same for original VHS cassettes with the movies (like you would find in a rental store. Just unwatched ones.
Also that he would have people to buy DVD version when (if) they came out. Still if a DVD version was released that would indicate that the source film was available and Scorsese could have a copy of that instead.
[+] [-] airtag|2 years ago|reply
Scorsese grew up with this TV resolution and I'm sure he would have preferred high quality for things we cared about, but for day-to-day use, having VHS was fine. (If he really cared, he could have gotten a betamax recorder or a super-VHS recorder to record off the TV)
I'm pretty sure that he'll stream better copies - but for those not available, having a noisy VHS is great. And with streaming/digital "sales" you never know which films you're going to lose next...
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|2 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I am outraged that I am forbidden to watch old movies, as they are not publicly available, and enshittification of streaming services is progressing. Less classic content, more money, divided by studios/companies/corporations. Am I supposed to pay 200$/month for 6(7?) subscriptions to have 30% of the content I want to watch
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walterbell|2 years ago|reply
Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then… deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos could be publicly archived, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982
[+] [-] bscphil|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_af|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
> In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
> For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese’s tapes are more than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work.
In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah. Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of this burden.
In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if universities provided detailed, honest financial statements - which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history" technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny new student amenities are higher priorities.
[+] [-] nxobject|2 years ago|reply
For example, presidents have large offices because they would say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money: fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments that open entire research units, dealing with internal governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can handle all of these responsibilities.
Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a need to support certain student populations to increase retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more good press about alums), so you now have people that create programming to engage first-generation college students, Black students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and no one person can do all of that as well.
The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental health care, people that help students navigate this internal system, for example), because American society and government doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
Seems like he employs an archivist, not that he's an archivist. A better title might be Scoreses's secret VHS archive, I don't know. Archivist is a specific job with specific, non-trivial training. It's a nitpick, but it reminds me of when people acted like Elon Musk designed the rockets for SpaceX or his Tesla cars, or when they talk about Steve Jobs creating the iPhone. The person with the money and the vision is critical to success, but it's just not accurate to say that they did these things themselves.
[+] [-] porbelm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]