New on Disc: 'Possessed' and more …

Possessed (Blu-ray)

Available via Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $21.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks.
1947. One of several postwar psychiatric dramas, Possessed features Joan Crawford as a paranoid schizophrenic, and her sometimes chilling performance gets further below the surface than a lot of the acting does even in some of the best noir competition.
Extras: Crawford is as vulnerable as she ever let herself be on screen, a point raised on the featurette this handsome Blu-ray has imported from the old DVD, one that features several familiar film noir specialists known to those who like digging into bonus extras.
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Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2014. In this “American Masters” presentation, which avoids being episodic, director Dyanna Taylor presents a portrait of her grandmother, famed Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange.
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Taylor Swift in Tune With the Studios

The music business has long mirrored the video industry, facing many of the same challenges. Singer Taylor Swift, fresh off the launch of her latest blockbuster album, 1989, recently pulled her catalog from subscription streaming service Spotify, saying artists and their labels aren’t paid enough for the many times listeners stream their songs.

“Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is,” she wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal.

Ah, it’s sounds so familiar to those of us in the home video business. The studios have been making the same accusation against subscription service Netflix and kiosk vendor Redbox — that they devalue entertainment. And several studios, too, have limited access to top entertainment on those services.

Unfortunately, consumers also help determine the value of entertainment, and since the advent of the great recession, they have flocked to the cheapest venues, some of them, such as YouTube or pirate sites, offering free entertainment. Low price has driven the rise of Netflix and Redbox, as much as innovative distribution models. For consumers squeezed by lower wages, the value of entertainment is heading downward. After Netflix raised prices to new subscribers, their growth slowed domestically in the last quarter. Redbox’s attempt to do the same could end badly, analysts have opined. Both are treading carefully, testing the waters.

Artists such as Swift may have the popular muscle to get fans to pay more by buying her album instead of streaming it through Spotify. But U2, one of the biggest bands in the world, recently took a different tack, offering their album at no charge on iTunes.

Here’s hoping that Swift has some effect on raising the value of entertainment. If there were a large supply of free diamonds or diamonds at little cost, no matter how beautiful they were, they too would lose their value. It’s high time we value the talent that produces our music, films and other artistic content. They work hard on their art, and not to pay them for it seems, well, out of tune with the idea of the American work ethic.

EST the Emperor's New Clothes?

I may get strung up by my feet for suggesting this, but I am beginning to wonder whether electronic sellthrough, or Digital HD, is something akin to "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Every three months, DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group releases a new set of quarterly numbers, derived mostly from the studios, that show consumer spending on the various forms of home entertainment.

Each time, disc sales are down, EST sales are up and we hear lots of crowing about how consumers are finally grasping the concept of buying movies, TV shows and other filmed content as downloadable files instead of on physical discs, and what a great thing this.

Freed from the burdens of manufacturing and distributing physical discs, not to mention dealing with returns, the studios are crowing about how great the margins are, how lucrative this new business model is, and how consumers will no doubt soon be abandoning disc purchases altogether in favor of buying filmed content electronically.

But I question whether this brave new world will ever materialize, and whether all this happy talk about EST's remarkable gains is really just something we all want to believe so badly that we have somehow convinced ourselves that the more we talk about it, the more likely it is to become true.

The plain and simple fact is that while EST sales do keep inching up, they still account for a tiny fraction of overall home entertainment purchases — 18% to 82%, I believe the latest set of numbers indicate.

And while pushing EST through early release windows and digital lockers is certainly the smart thing to do, I believe a fair amount of caution is in order.

For starters, the disc business is still quite healthy. Sometimes I think those of us who live on the coast get too caught up in technological advances and trends — 3D, anyone? — to stop and think what mainstream America is doing. And the numbers suggest an overwhelming percentage of people still prefer to buy discs instead of downloads, in large part because of the old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" axiom but also because there's something about ownership that almost mandates a physical object. If we're going to buy something, we want something tangible, not ethereal.

Secondly, I think there's a misconception about the correlation between the rise of digital delivery and the decline in disc sales. Disc sales aren't going down because people are finally starting to realize they can buy movies as digital downloads without having to worry about cluttering up their homes with more "stuff"; they are going down because 1) younger people simply don't have the same desire for owning something that we older folks do (as seen in everything from music to cars and the rise of Uber and Lyft) and 2) the alternatives to ownership are so easy and cheap. Why spend hundreds of dollars on a boxed set of a hot TV show like "Breaking Bad" when I can access the same content at any time on Netflix?

If, as some pundits believe, eventually we will obtain all of our content electronically, then our home entertainment business will be in big, big trouble. If studio executives were stunned to discover people weren't rebuying their libraries in the transition from DVD to Blu-ray Disc, I believe they will be absolutely shocked to discover how few people are going to buy movies electronically that they already own on disc — particularly since so many of the films we have collected over the years are instantly accessible through Netflix.

That's why it behooves our industry to support, market, and promote discs as much as we can, as diligently as we can — lest this business wakes up one morning and finds itself stripped to its undershorts.

 
 

Special Covers Dominate Nov. 4 Titles

A slew of new titles on the Nov. 4 slate arrived in stores with special covers, box art and packaging exclusives to certain retailers.

Target offered exclusive packaging variants on two different titles: a steelbook case for Warner's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug — Extended Edition Blu-ray and a storybook edition of Paramount's Hercules Blu-ray. Target also offered a "Brave Firefighters" digital storybook with the Blu-ray of Disney's Planes: Fire & Rescue; shoppers could get a $5 discount buying the Blu-ray together with a die-cast "Planes" toy.

Best Buy offered the Planes: Fire & Rescue Blu-ray with a lenticular cover, and packed the new "Hobbit" release with a Key of Oakenshield collectible. Best Buy's Hercules Blu-ray came with a bonus disc containing an hour of bonus material. Best Buy also had an exclusive DVD boxed set of HBO's Eastbound & Down: The Complete Series.

Walmart offered a Hercules Blu-ray steelbook edition, and packed the Planes: Fire & Rescue Blu-ray with a Wildfire Air Attack Team Trainer interactive bonus DVD. Walmart also seemed to be the only retailer with a DVD-only version of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug — Extended Edition.

Amazon offered an exclusive of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug — Extended Edition that included a special statue depicting the Hobbits' river escape.

New on Disc: 'The Believers' and more …

The Believers (Blu-ray)

Available via ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Horror, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘R.’
Stars Martin Sheen, Helen Shaver, Robert Loggia, Harley Cross.
1987. Aside from not having the kind of high-profile cast from which pedigrees are fashioned, this John Schlesinger urban horror film is one icky movie even before the movie loses a few beats on its way to a wrap-up that some may find risible.
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Gold Is Where You Find It

Available via Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $21.99 DVD, NR.
Stars George Brent, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Margaret Lindsay.
1938. Take away a good supporting cast and one topical selling point of interest to the ecologically minded, and we likely wouldn’t be giving this semi-obscurity too much notice were it not for its visual novelty value, which is seeing Northern California and its apple orchards in 1930s pigmentary splendor.
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Target Has Exclusive 'Brady Bunch' DVDs

Target shoppers looking over the Oct. 28 might have raised an eyebrow at seeing a sizable promotion for individual DVD season sets of the 1969-74 TV sitcom “The Brady Bunch,” on disc from CBS and Paramount.

The show was released on DVD in 2005 and 2006, before CBS took over the rights, but now Target is exclusively selling the re-release at $9.99 per season. This is an exclusive early window for the retailer, as the DVDs will be widely available Dec. 9.

Target also has early availability of Disney’s Phineas & Ferb: Star Wars, which won’t be widely available until Nov. 11.

Target also offered an exclusive bracelet with Shout! Factory’s My Little Pony Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks.

Walmart had a re-release of Fox’s Free Birds DVD with a plush toy

Best Buy offered some incentives on preorders, including 100 My Best Buy bonus points for each $19.99 preorder of such titles as Disney’s Maleficent, DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon 2, Fox’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Sony Pictures’ 22 Jump Street (with bonus content), Paramount’s Hercules (with bonus content) and Paramount’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (with steelbook packaging).

Good-Bye Mrs. Kotter

Back in the mid-1980s I managed a bike shop — Ernie’s Pro Bikes — on trendy San Vicente Blvd., in the swanky Brentwood suburb of West Los Angeles.

Actress Marcia Strassman, who died Oct. 24 at age 66 following a seven-year battle with breast cancer, parlayed a brief but mundane role at the end of each episode as Gabe Kaplan’s understanding wife on the hit ’70s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter,” to cult status.

Even at 5-10 with sparkling eyes and lean figure, Strassman didn’t necessarily stand out. She didn’t need to. Her air of normalcy in a town awash with manufactured vanity — a welcomed respite, especially at Ernie’s where she would pop in on occasion for no apparent reason. An unhappy marriage ventured during one visit.

Strassman had just caught lightning in a bottle for a second time with the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movie franchise — again playing the wife character to lead actor Rick Moranis. 

While she really wasn’t interested in cycling, the colorful bikes, Lycra clothing and related accessories intrigued her. She would pull up on a shop stool and ask oddball questions like why male cyclists shaved their legs? Or how do the gears on a bike work?

When I told her I could show her a few shaving tricks, she blushed and smiled. She once vented her frustration out loud on the pay inequalities with the 1992 sequel, Honey, I Blew Up the Kid. She also joked having “made it” in Hollywood by virtue of a “hunky” personal driver assigned during filming.

If Los Angeles is indeed a constellation of plastic, Strassman seemed an odd fit. Like a lot of LA stories, Ernie’s is no more — replaced by a trendy eatery du jour. But the memory of Ms. Strassman remains.

New on Disc: 'Fedora' and more …

Fedora

Street 10/28
Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘PG.’
Stars William Holden, Marthe Keller, Hildegarde Knef, Jose Ferrer.
1978. Billy Wilder’s troubled penultimate project has enough qualified admirers to make its Blu-ray release something of a minor event for major league movie buffs. Three-movie Wilder veteran William Holden (just off Network) plays a filmmaker facing some of the same problems his own writer-director was facing during production as an old man in a young man’s business.
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Married to the Mob (Blu-ray)

Kino Lorber, Comedy, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘R.’
Stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modine, Dean Stockwell, Alec Baldwin.
1988. This movie, about the challenges of an undercover FBI agent (Matthew Modine) to survive at his job while simultaneously romancing a recently widowed mob wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) is of a piece with director Jonathan Demme’s more-esteemed Something Wild (1986), thanks to its incessant wacky streak, creative casting, beat-heavy musical soundtrack and vibrant color schemes.
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Subscription Fever Could Break

Recent news is awash with content owners and producers breaking the cable cord and following the Netflix model of online subscription streaming. Companies such as HBO, CBS and Lionsgate are looking to the Web to create a new avenue to the consumer.

It is particularly interesting that both a broadcast network, CBS, and a major cable network, HBO, are looking to the Web to capture viewers. They represent the entrenched establishment of television programming. Both CBS and HBO have made fortunes via the traditional cable and broadcast route.

CBS Corp. Oct. 16 announced the launch of “CBS All Access,” a $5.99-per-month standalone subscription streaming service that doesn’t require a concurrent pay-TV subscription. That came on the heels of an announcement to an investor group by HBO’s Richard Plepler that the company will launch a standalone over-the-top video service not requiring a cable/satellite/telecom subscription (as opposed to the current HBO Go service) in the United States in 2015. It all makes me think of the World Wrestling Entertainment announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show last January. The wrestling company unveiled a grand plan to go directly to its consumers via a 24-hour streaming network, with a $9.99 a month subscription offering live PPV events, reality shows, original shows, documentaries, classic matches and more than 1,500 hours of VOD programming.

My question is what does this all add up to for the average consumer? Say I’m a wrestling fan ($9.99 a month) who wants to have access to CBS programming ($5.99 a month) with a basic Netflix subscription ($7.99 or more a month) in addition to my basic internet/cable access cost and goodness knows what other programming.

It seems to me that cord cutters may get more specific choices, but may end up paying more than what they would with your average cable package. As any restaurant customer knows, a la carte menu items often end up costing more than the buffet.

Charting 35 Years of Change

I'm writing this from the outdoor patio at the Ritz Carlton in Marina Del Rey, Calif., where I have just finished speaking on a panel discussion on OTT, subscription streaming and how Netflix, in the words of one panelist, "is eating everyone's lunch."

Reflecting on the 35 years that Home Media Magazine, originally Video Store Magazine, has been covering home entertainment, the changes in our business truly have been monumental since the late Stuart Karl launched a trade magazine to cater to the growing flock of video rental stores that were popping up in the wake of that pivotal moment the year before when Andre Blay licensed 50 movies from 20th Century Fox and released them on videocassette.

The very concept of "streaming" would have seemed like something out of “Star Trek” to the early readers of Video Store Magazine back in 1979, those Neanderthal days before the Internet and the personal computer.

"Connected" meant ties to organized crime, "content" meant you were satisfied and "digit" anything made you think of fingers and thumbs.

And yet, at the same time, lots of things have not changed — fundamental, bigger-picture things that call to mind the saying, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

The studios, as lords of filmed entertainment, still want ultimate control over that entertainment — and they prefer clean, neat sales transactions directly to the consumer, with no middle-man, no sharing of the spoils. In 1979 they battled mom-and-pop rental stores over the right to rent; today, they're pushing electronic sellthrough to consumers in love with Netflix and that infernal subscription streaming genie the studios wish they could somehow cram back into the bottle.

On the distribution side, there's still someone who's eating everyone else's lunch — Netflix today, Blockbuster a generation ago.

And among consumers, there continues to be a rabid appetite for entertainment that seems to be increasing now that our TVs are connected and our smartphones function as mini-home theaters.

That, and a burning desire to have that entertainment delivered on demand as cheaply and as simply as possible. VHS opened the door to consumers being able to watch what they want, when they want, where they want. DVD made things even easier, with its low sale price (no need for a return trip to the rental store) and random access. Netflix simplified the process even more with its by-mail subscriptions — heck, now you didn't even have to leave your home. And with subscription streaming the process of watching on-demand entertainment is even easier and cheaper than it's ever been.

What's going to be the next step in this steady progression of ease and simplicity? I have no clue — and yet I can't wait to find out.