Ten years into the DVD era, "The Wizard of Oz" has been issued a handful of times, and "Terminator 2" at least three. Sharon Stone's nearly forgotten "Sliver" has come out in unrated form; even such musty TV skeins as "Hazel" and "ALF" have made their way to disc.
But thousands of worthy offerings -- some that never made it to VHS, let alone DVD -- remain MIA as the industry gears up for next-generation delivery mechanisms like high-def discs and digital downloads.
Among the missing: classics such as "The African Queen," the Beatles' "Let It Be," works by John Ford, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet and Karel Reisz, such popular skeins as "The Wonder Years" and cult pics like "Toxic Zombies."
While the reasons vary with each title, they tend to revolve around rights issues, restoration requirements or small perceived demand compared with bigger, or at least more recent, hits.
"We're still scratching the surface of the great films out there," says Criterion Collection prexy Peter Becker.
"There's still stuff left, believe it or not," agrees Shout! Factory prexy Garson Foos, who's champing at the bit for rights to some of the retro fare.
Although there are more than 70,000 titles on disc in the U.S. and Canada, there are still huge gaps. Warner Home Video, for example, has a library of 6,700 titles but has released only 1,400 on DVD. Its mandate: 200-250 disc bows a year, not counting reissues.
"The list for us is staggering, overwhelming," says Warner Home Video
senior VP of catalog marketing George Feltenstein. "Where do we start?"
The backlog has gotten so severe Warner and Criterion have begun exploring alternate ways to distribute their riches. Criterion recently created a no-frills label, while Warner has started funneling pics such as Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" through Amazon's Unbox download service.
A "Hamlet" DVD is on the way, but in the meantime the $9.99 download is one of Unbox's most popular movies.
Criterion, on the other hand, is devoting its new Eclipse line to worthy, but overshadowed, works. The first installment, of early Ingmar Bergman pics, comes March 27 with "Torment," "Crisis," "Port of Call," "Thirst" and "To Joy"; one month later, a set of Louis Malle docus arrives, including "Phantom India."
Becker says Criterion decided to launch Eclipse after seeing the pent-up demand for helmers' less-celebrated films in retrospectives mounted by its theatrical distribution counterpart, Janus Films.
Criterion often takes years to prepare special editions, which meant many films were going unreleased. "We realized we are, in effect, suppressing these films while we are waiting to give them special edition treatment," Becker says.
"We are taking a fairly light hand in restoration of these films, but we are certainly taking the best master we can," he says. "The goal is to make films available."
Meanwhile, the boutique label's still devoting exacting care to releases of long-missing classics like Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" and Lindsay Anderson's "If ..." Becker also enthuses about esoterica such as William Greaves' 1968 doc-style "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One," which helmers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi recommended.
Warner's Feltenstein has been chasing down rights or materials for certain titles for decades. He pursued rights to Max Fleischer's Popeye cartoons for almost 20 years; it took 27 to sort out issues with the Irving Berlin estate for "Annie Get Your Gun" and 11 to iron out an agreement with John Steinbeck's estate for a DVD release of "East of Eden."
"Only right now are we able to release 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' " he says. Orson Welles' 1942 adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel, one of Warner's most requested titles, will come out on disc next year.
Music issues have proven especially thorny, bedeviling the disc bows of "My So-Called Life," "Let It Be," "Wonder Years" and "Ally McBeal."
"Let It Be" has proven popular over the years, with VHS copies commanding premium prices on sites trafficking in rare videos.
In other cases, the rights have expired and they've yet to be locked up by another entity.
Fox had the rights to "The African Queen," but they lapsed, so now Paramount has control of the 1951 John Huston pic. According to Par, it's awaiting restoration and has no set release date.
However, there isn't necessarily a market for everything.
"There are thousands of films not financially viable to release on DVD," Feltenstein says. "I always say, just because it's old doesn't mean it's a classic."
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