Building a Film Library: The Early Days
I suppose if I were a 16- or 17-year-old teenager today, I doubt very much that I would have experienced the adulation and pure joy of adding great films to your own Colleton. The truth is, today everything is so easily accessible – that ‘thrill of the hunt’ simply doesn’t exist anymore. When someone like the BBC ran a film season, or a Moviedrome season – we would be straight down to our local supplier and filling our boots with a couple of packs of E180 video cassettes – locked and loaded to record and own our own copy for anytime and repeated viewing. All of this was made possible of cause thanks to the coming of home video, a boom and swell that flooded the market in the early 80s.
If you could afford it, you could of course buy the studio releases of certain films – the drawback here was naturally the cost, a very expensive habit – which would see certain titles being sold for anything up to £80 a movie. I remember treating myself to my first sell through title, Dirty Harry on Warner Home Video for £35 – but that was an exception. The cheaper way by far was to record an off-air version – when the channels came to screening a film. It was always a bonus if shown by the BBC, the obvious screening without ad breaks made the recording process a whole lot easier.
But the hunt didn’t end there – then there was the enjoyable task of sifting through 100’s of promo sleeves for the video release – a very useful element as boxes of these sleeves would show up at film fairs – a 50p outlay, find yourself a big box case or the smaller sell through version – and all of a sudden you have that film on your shelf with a full sleeve intact. Now that was the ‘thrill of the hunt’ – today, it is simply too easy, a few minutes of your time and you can have a movie downloaded on your device.
Back in the day we simply weren’t that spoilt. There was a real and genuine sense of appreciation when the chance came along. The Christmas season was also another time – picking out 20-25 titles from that 2-week holiday season was very easy – a bit of an outlay on multipack blank video cassettes – but the rewards certainly made it worthwhile.
I was going through some cuttings – which I guess took me back to those great times – a full page from a Radio Times which featured one of those seasons – I’m not sure what the year was as i forgot to date it on the reverse. But this ‘Hollywood Superstars’ season serves as a great reminder of these early days of building a film library. Great films, great stars, great days….
