In the early 1980's, fans of old movies -- and movies in general -- were forced to live by the whims of television programmers and local theater owners -- if you missed a movie in theatrical distribution, chances were that you would have to wait until the movie went to television and hope that you were able to see it at the appointed time and date. And if the movie studios had their way--at least, Disney and MCA/Universal, who were parties to the Betamax lawsuit, that would have barred production of VCRs--this would still be the case today. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court felt differently, the VCR (soon joined by the laserdisc player) remained a legitimate creation, and this marked the dawn of a new "Golden Age" in movies. Today the viewer controls when, where, and how they watch movies, whether they were released early last season or early in this century.

Earlier generations of movie fans might only look with envy upon the availability of material for which they used to scan the airwaves, checking the late night listings in TV Guide, and obscure Ultra-High Frequency television stations (before cable equalized the VHF channels 2 thru 13 and the UHF channels 14 thru 83 in the early 1980's)--or, in the larger cities and university communities, keeping abreast of the local film repertory and revival theaters to catch a once-annual showing of some much-loved classic.

Nobody reading this introduction has to go through any of that, unless they choose to (seeing movies in a theater is still the ideal way to view them, and should never be wholly abandoned, if the option is there), in order to see what interests them. The contemporary viewer has more choice available to them than anyone in history, in terms of what to watch in movies, or when to watch them.

The question is, what to watch. Movies have been around for the better part of a century in some commercial form or other, and most of the people reading this introduction are probably not prepared to become scholars on 100 years worth of motion pictures, anymore than they might turn around and study the last 50 years of literature or painting--movies are generally supposed to be fun, and fun shouldn't take hard work. Most of us are busy enough just working hard enough to enjoy renting and buying videocassettes and laserdiscs of these movies, without having to start a second career to take full advantage of them.

That's the essential purpose of The All Video Guide --to avoid having to make that second career necessary, and make it easy to jump head-first into the 100 years of motion pictures and other programming available on home video, and immerse oneself in anything, from Buster Keaton to Tracy Lords, without risking too much time or effort in unexpected wrong turns.

We've done our best to include as much information as possible, in as accessible a manner as possible, to make your use of The All Video Guide fun as well as productive. We haven't included everything there is to know about movies, because that would require something 50 times as large, and equally expensive and inconvenient, but we've distilled down many of the essentials in this first edition to give the user a good start in getting the most out of home video, and the most out of movies and related programming. We'll be fine-tuning The All Video Guide, and working out some of the bugs in future editions, making it even more suited to your needs, and welcome your input as users, but we're sure that this first edition will entertain as well as enlighten you.

In a sense, preparing The All Video Guide is a lot like the history of the movies themselves, and their century-long journey, from a mere novelty creation of inventors and businessmen, to an innocuous diversion, to a dramatic art form and sophisticated entertainment.

In that century, movies evolved from a toy into the dominant popular art form of our population, and the history is worth a brief look, as a reminder of how we got here from there.

Film as a medium of entertainment and artistic expression has existed for a century, and from the beginning has displayed an uncanny durability in attracting audiences--in time of peace, war, prosperity, despair, the makers of movies have found ways of pulling millions of people into theaters; Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise, arguably the finest film ever made in France (and, to many people, the greatest movie ever made anywhere), was made during the German occupation. And many would say that American cinema reached its peak during the twin onslaughts of the Depression and World War II. The durability of film stems from its ability to transport the viewer into another world--a different frame of mind and reference, another time and place, even another sex. The power of the film frame, projected on the big screen or shown on the video monitor, is one of the great artistic discoveries of the twentieth century. In the beginning, there wasn't much more than a short stream of those frames, shown through moviolas (tiny screens into which individuals peered) to curiosity seekers--the subject matter might've been as simple as a falling wall or a variation on a slapstick vaudeville routine. With the presentation of movies on bigger screens, in front of mass audiences, the needs of the medium changed--it was discovered, largely (though not entirely) through the success of the 1903 Edwin S. Porter thriller The Great Train Robbery that coherent stories, coupled with tight editing and good stuntwork, that audiences could absorb more than sight gags and bodies in motion. And it was learned that when movies were shown to mass audiences in theaters, they worked even better with some kind of musical accompaniment--by 1908, scores were being licensed and prepared for use in theaters, by performers ranging from individual pianists to ensembles of up to a dozen players. During the first decade of this century, European filmmakers were already experimenting with longer story forms, most notably religious epics running upwards of an hour. These were successful in this country--silent movies merely needed new title cards in the appropriate language in order to be released in different countries--but had relatively little effect on the American movie industry at first. Partly this was a result of the unformed nature of the business--everybody was learning what worked and what made money, but few people had the ambition to experiment with new forms and ideas, as long as money was coming in. Additionally, the movie business in America was still in its adolescence--based in New York City and the surrounding area, where the money was, but where location shooting, even in the still largely rural outlying counties of Long Island and New Jersey, was restricted by the climate. By the end of the first half of the 'teens, the first wave of major stars, including Chaplin, William S. Hart, and Tom Mix, were established, and the movies were roaring along, profitably if not too ambitiously. It took D.W. Griffith--initially working behind the back of the Biograph company, which had sent him out to California to work on his latest film--to begin the process of expanding the dimensions of motion pictures, first with Judith of Bethulia (1913) and then, definitively, with The Birth of a Nation (1915). By the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, movies had matured into long form entertainment, and the film colony in Hollywood was established--the founding soon after of the filmmaking organizations that would finally evolve into major studios as they became known at the end of the 1920's took place, and movies as we know them had arrived. Ironically enough, the coming of sound in the middle and end of that decade nearly destroyed them, along with a lot of acting careers that otherwise might've gone on for decades. But in the end, after a difficult four years from 1927 thru 1931--during which some (though relatively few) superb and enduring movies were produced--the movies emerged intact, and evolved into the form that we know them best today. Other developments, such as color--which actually existed well back in the silent era, but didn't become economically or aesthetically practical until the end of the 1930's--and stereo sound, and processes such as widescreen (CinemaScope, Panavision, VistaVision, Cinerama, Super-Panavision, Todd-AO etc.) added a range of additional elements to the filmgoing experience over the next 25 years, many of which, alas, are muted or lost in their impact on the relatively small television screen. The most important developments in film during this period, however, took place not on the technological front, but an artistic level. Directors overcame the initial limitations imposed upon their work by the addition of sound; the editing of film and sound achieved levels of complexity and sophistication that could scarcely have been conceived at the outset of the 1930's; and the plot and characterization elements that went into movie storytelling evolved out of the conventions of the community theater--whence they'd arrived in the early 'teens, helped markedly but regrettably by the success of D.W. Griffith, whose level of sophistication in shaping characterization was one of his few major deficiencies as a filmmaker--and reached unexpected levels of sophistication. The quality of acting, which had always been stymied by the absence of sound, was nearly destroyed by the presence of the microphone, but after a four or five years of casting about for players and directors who could work in the new medium, a new generation of actors, mostly from the stage, but willing to relearn their way of working, with the omnipresent eye of the camera upon them, emerged. By the middle and end of the 1930's, the movies and movie making had evolved to their first peak of the post-silent era, and even relatively uninspired movies from this period--passable B-westerns, light comedy second features, etc.--remain watchable to modern audiences, the more so if they have some familiar faces in them. Thus, the early films of Lucille Ball at RKO retain their audience today, as do such fast-moving thrillers as the Bulldog Drummond movies starring John Howard (although it should be said that the very best of the Drummond films is the one large budget, A-picture in their number, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back from 1934, starring Ronald Colman, which is presently unavailable on video). And many of the best A-pictures of the period, from the Marx Brothers' A Night At the Opera to the action adventure classics The Four Feathers and Gunga Din, to the screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, are every bit as watchable in the 1990's as they were in the 1930's. The 1940's coincided with World War II, which slowed some of the economic impetus behind film's evolution (movie audiences actually grew, as people in the United States--even with a major part of the population away overseas fighting--sought respite from the realities of the war in theaters, and film showings were often extended into late night and early morning hours to accomodate those millions of defense and factory workers put onto unusual shifts). But even so, there was progress of a different kind--having conquered all of the then understood technical boundaries of the medium, and having risen to become America's major visual entertainment medium, the major studios sought new areas in which to direct their energies. For the most succesful of the major studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, better known as MGM, and owned today by Turner Entertainment (with video releases through MGM/UA), this meant utilizing new talent in established areas, most notably the musical. New arrivals at the studio, such as Gene Kelly (a quadruple-threat dancer/actor/choreographer/singer) and directors Vincent Minnelli and Stanley Donen, joined by figures such as Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire, among many others, all under the leadership of songwriter-turned-producer Arthur Freed, helped provide the basis for movie musicals whose splendor and sophistication--from Cabin In the Sky and Anchors Aweigh thru An American In Paris and Singin' In the Rain --were never to be equalled, from the mid-1940's until the end of the next decade. Other studios were forced into new directions by their relative failure to achieve stability despite the box-office boom. RKO had suffered from management problems for years, and squandered a great deal of talent and success in the bargain, and in the early 1940's its management made the decision to aim for quality in its releases--the first results were two classic masterpieces by neophyte filmmaker Orson Welles, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, that lost money but arguably never squandered (from a business standpoint) a studio's resources to a better purpose. Other filmmakers at the studio followed suit with more restraint, with the result that RKO made some of the finest films in its history into the mid-1940's, including Cat People, The Seventh Victim, Till The End of Time, Crossfire, and The Set-Up. Only the purchase of the studio by Howard Hughes in the mid-1940's brought this work to a halt, as the new owner gradually dismembered the array of talent assembled by previous managements in an effort to exploit his purchase, with the ultimate result that the studio was finished by 1956, closed and sold for television production to Desilu. Republic Pictures, the biggest of the little studios, saw the impending development of television as an immediate threat to its unique brand of meat-and-potatoes, low-budget thrillers and comedies, and decided to protect its place in the box office by bringing in moderately-priced independent talent for one-shot film deals. The studio ended up making some unique and special pictures, several of them classics, including John Ford's The Quiet Man, Rio Grande, and The Sun Shines Bright, Orson Welles's Macbeth, and Lewis Milestone's The Red Pony. Other studios, such as Columbia Pictures, 20th Century-Fox, Universal, and Paramount all tried differing strategies to cope with a world that was changing around them, and all, to some extent, succeeded by surviving. But television did come, and eventually the studios came to realize that there was no possible way of maintaining a sufficient level of quality--or adding features such as widescreen pictures, stereo sound, 3-D etc.--without changing the kind of movies they were creating, to compete with what television offered for "free." It was a nightmare situation for the business and creative people alike--beyond the initial cost of a set (which was still high in the 1940's and 1950's) and the electricity to run it, the sponsors paid for everything to do with television. And soon, movie cast-offs, actors who had never quite made it on the big-screen, were creating competition that the studios could not possibly match or surpass for the price: Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were keeping people home by the millions, and emptying theaters in the bargain. Ultimately, what had to change was the kinds of movies that the studios were making. Biblical epics were one solution--they became very big during the 1950's, perhaps because the now standard use of color, coupled with stereo sound and widescreen pictures made the material seem, at last, bigger than life; and it may have had to do with the perception on the part of many millions that the existence of atomic warfare as a potential reality put us all closer to the Almighty than we had ever seemed before. Another solution, at least as far as attracting a new paying audience (though one that the major studios would hardly have bothered looking to seriously in their 1930's or '40s heyday) was the making of science fiction and other exploitation movies, that brought teenagers into theaters to do what they could not normally do at home, regardless of who was on television--enjoy the attentions, physical and otherwise, of the opposite sex. Finally, at the end of the 1950's, with the old studio chiefs of the 1930's either weakened or deceased, the barriers that had always restrained filmmakers from moving too far out of the mainstream fell at last. Stories dealing with unpunished adultery, unrequited lust, pedophilia, and even veiled homosexuality, coupled with new levels of sadism, violence and cynicism, began working their way out to the public. For older filmgoers, the first few years of this change were confusing and also refreshing, as couples (and not always married couples) depicted on screen actually referred to their sex lives. But by the late 1960's, talk wasn't enough, and filmmakers were showing more than any producer or studio might have perceived possible in their wildest dreams (or worst nightmares) even 10 years earlier. Curiously enough, however, for all of the supposed openness of the period from the mid-1960's onward, the studios were still wary of dealing with subject matter that threatened to elicit objections that were too loud--to this day, in 1994, the only theatrical film in America to deal with court-ordered school desegregation is The Intruder, directed and produced by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner and Jeanne Cooper (the mother of Corbin Bernson), which is also the only one of Corman's movies ever to lose money; and only a pair of theatrical films from the major studios, Buzz Kulik's To Find A Man and John Erman's Making It, both dating from the early 1970's, have ever dealt with abortion in a serious way. Older filmgoers were alienated by these changes, and soon the demographics of the theater audience was changing--except for the occasional blockbuster by David Lean, or a picture in which such reliable middle-class icons as Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand appeared, most moviegoing was done by people in their teens thru their 30's. This became a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the studio heads--now business school graduates, with little knowledge or perception of movies as a creative medium--aware of who was going to theaters, only financed movies that would appeal to those 14-thru-30 year olds. Even Disney, which had made entertaining if unexceptional movies for children and their parents thru the end of the 1960's, mostly under the direction of Robert Stevenson, faltered by the early 1970's. And when George Lucas's Star Wars opened in 1977, it proved that there were hundreds of millions of dollars to be made with juvenile (albeit entertaining) cinema that the parents could neither understand nor appreciate. The arrival of home video during the end of the 1970's further constricted the economics of moviemaking. Now, or at least at some point in the future, it was clear, it would no longer be necessary to sample a film by going to a theater--it could be done in privacy. The first part of the industry to take advantage of the new medium successfully was the adult movie business, for the obvious reason that the appreciation of most adult movies is something that most audience members would always rather have done in private. Adult theaters began to disappear, but stores selling the latest (or even old '70s) adult fare for upward of $150 soon appeared in their place, sometimes in the same spaces. Mainstream distributors were not so fortunate. It became clear by the early 1980's that very few movie buffs were willing to pay the $100 asking price for a videotape of Catch-22 or Patton. Many stores that had sprung up in anticipation of the boom were left near bankruptcy, or survived by selling adult fare, and it seemed that most VCRs were bought for purposes of taping programs off-the-air. This, in turn, sent Universal and Disney into court seeking damages and an injunction, claiming that the taping of programs off the air for the viewer's own use violated their rights as copyright holders--fortunately, the courts ultimately disagreed. At the same time, the starving video dealer industry discovered a quirk in the copyright law, known as the "first sale doctrine," that allowed them to earn money from their unsold pre-recorded tapes by renting them, at only a few dollars a night. The studios were sent into a panic by this phenomenon, and ever since have periodically pondered getting the first-sale doctrine repealed so that they can charge fees to dealers who rent pre-recorded tapes--but the Congress has never been willing to incur the wrath of tens of millions of VCR owners by taking up the issue. By the mid-1980's, the whole history of movies was opening up to people born 80 years after the first commercial films were made, and the studios had resigned themselves to exploiting the rental market, while encouraging purchases, on both videocassette and the small, higher quality laserdisc format, which had taken hold in Japan by then and had a major foot-hold in America. And as the 1980's ended, the studios were busy rediscovering their own histories for the benefit of millions of viewers. And that brings us to today, and The All Video Guide. Use it and enjoy it. And happy viewing.