Films The Internet Forgot

It wasn’t so long ago that your film watching choices depended entirely on how good a video store you happened to live nearby. But the days of movie rental treasure troves are all but gone, with the rotating sushi train selections of Netflix now firmly in charge. So in the age of online, what happens to all the cinema obscurities?

Films The Internet Forgot

As a struggling young actress in 1940s Hollywood, Ann Savage had her sights firmly set on a starring role. Any role. She just needed one big break to catapult her to stardom. By the mid 1950s, reality had set in. But before Savage walked away from acting, she made one gritty little masterpiece - the 1945 film noir, Detour. It would be 40 odd years before anyone noticed.

Working as an office clerk in Hollywood, her short stint on the cinema screen quickly became a distant memory. But in 1983, she heard about a planned tribute to the late film director Edgar Ulmer, who had directed her in Detour years earlier.

In her day, films were a disposable commodity. Without home entertainment, audiences consumed the medium on the understanding that once they were gone, that was it. But the 1980s brought about a massive cultural shift - the VCR. Suddenly, Ann Savage found herself at the centre of a cult following.

Detour was a B-movie in every sense. Produced for a pittance, the film was praised but breezed by fairly uneventfully. Today, however, it’s widely considered one of the finest films of the era.

Sitting in the audience of Ulmer’s tribute in 1983, Ann Savage listened intently as the late director’s wife remarked at how marvellous her performance had been. However, no one ever knew what became of Ann Savage. In an instant, she took to her feet and shouted, “I’m right here”.

And finally, decades later, Ann Savage received her stardom.

In 2014, as we forget about the video store and binge watch hours of telly on demand, a sad little side-effect is quietly taking place. As any cinephile will tell you, Netflix is rarely a destination for the less mainstream fare. And we’re not just talking about Joe Dante’s 1968 five hour experimental piece The Movie Orgy.

Try searching for some of Woody Allen’s better known back catalogue, or Bette Midler’s foray in the musical remake of Gypsy, or even some high profile Oscar winners from last decade. By its own admission, Netflix doesn’t aim to be a broad distributor of films (preferring the term “expert programmer”).

So where does this leave the avid cinema-hunter in search of a specific title? Well, the sad and infuriating truth is, if it’s not available for rent/stream by Google, iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix, spending $20 to buy the DVD and waiting a few days/weeks might just be the only legal option.

And as cinephile Jon Brooks found when he was tasked with watching a reasonably well known and important film, this issue isn’t just limited to the cinema obsessed. By their nature, movie streaming sites respond to popularity. And it makes little business sense to keep a title that no one’s watching.

Now in the public domain, Detour is available (albeit crackly and unrestored). But if it took 40-plus years for people to decide the filmwasn’t just a disposable B-movie but is actually worth preserving in the Library of Congress, aren’t we in danger of missing other cinematic gems? Once upon a time they might’ve sat at the bottom of the $1 weekly bin at Vulcan Video. Now, who knows where they’ll end up.