Silencio!

Film Threat interviews Jeff Mashino, the Indiana Jones of silent movie fans. He tracks down rare silent films, and has them restored and released.

Is there a market in today’s DVD world for silent movies? And what have been the challenges and strategies you’ve faced in getting the word out on your titles?
Absolutely! It is the lesson of “The Long Tail,” the theory popularized by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream studio-produced DVDs and mass retail distribution) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of “specialty market” niches in the tail, driven in part by the Internet, which has allowed the costs of distribution to become cheaper and has provided a means by which more people can become educated about film history. I’ve tried to use this (and low overhead) to my advantage with Flicker Alley – since I am not entrenched in the traditional “bricks and mortar” retail store route, I rely on online promotion and sales.

The better mousetrap will be the one that keeps people interested in buying movies at all. We don’t make too many classics these days. The Departed and Pulp Fiction come to mind, but little else. There will be dozens more movies like Spider-Man and TransFormers, but they’ll be disposable as always.

The archivists of tomorrow will be sending off plenty of emails, looking for those lost, “great” YouTube videos. Let’s hope something truly great comes along between now and then, so we can say we lived through it. (Hint: It won’t come from Hollywood.)