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Sorry if this post seems ill-conceived!

I realized yesterday that Richard Schickel's The Men Who Made the Movies series; or at least the ones available, are my most-watched DVD supplements...not counting supplementary short films. Its one of the reasons I'm so anxious about Warner releasing The Strawberry Blonde; apart from supposedly being Walsh's best film, would be an ideal vehicle for his episode. I'm very eager to see this film about one of my favorite directors.

Only four of these documentaries are available on DVD...can anyone who has seen the remaining five (Walsh, Hitchcock, Capra, Vidor, Wellman) comment on their quality and content, or any other information? At this point, the Wellman doc is the only one that seems unlikely to appear on a Warner DVD (Warner has plenty of unreleased Walsh; North by Northwest is being restored, Arsenic and Old Lace is worthy of a special edition and approaching its 65th anniversary, and the silent Vidors have been just around the corner for three or four years).

Chances are if you know even a little about Hitchcock, you'll be familiar with most of the Hitchcock episode. All I remember is hearing the same stories I already knew and that they showed the entire Torn Curtain murder. The only other one I've seen is the Hawks one-- mind giving a break down what you pulled the others from? I only know off the top of my head Rio Bravo has the Hawks ep.

I enjoy these too. The Hitchcock one was on TCM just last week and I watched it, though it seemed odd to skip any discussion of his films from the '50s. Wellman's episode aired earlier this year, as well.

The Big Red One - The Reconstruction has Sam Fuller's. Bringing Up Baby and Rio Bravo both have the Hawks episode. Cukor's is on The Philadelphia Story and Minnelli's is on The Band Wagon.

Of the episodes that I've seen in this series, I like the interview clips with the directors themselves, but the clips from the films go on for way too long.

The episodes from this series that I've seen on DVD are revised versions of the originals I saw in the mid-1970s. Understandably, the film clips have been upgraded and new narration added (when the programmes were first shown, the directors were still alive and some even working).

The line-up of the original series was indeed Hitchcock, Walsh, Capra, Minnelli, Cukor, Hawks, Wellman, King Vidor. (Fuller was not included.) This is confirmed by the useful book of interview transcripts that Schickel published in 1975.

Film clips were usually much longer in documentaries then than we are used to today. I think this is partly because viewers were then assumed to have a greater degree of concentration (I hate the modern documentary style where film clips seldom run more than 10 seconds and are usually overlaid with commentary).

Also, in the 1970s the films themselves were much more difficult to access for most people. This was not only pre-DVD but also pre-VHS of course, so few film buffs had private collections of movies and (at least here in the UK) it might take years for even a popular classic to be re-shown on TV. So the lengthy clips were much more welcome then as a reminder or even a first glimpse of a particular film. In the book Schickel acknowledges that the movie corporations "went to unusual pains to help us clear obscure rights and lay our hands on rare films".

This series certainly had a great impact on me as a teenager in the 1970s. It started me thinking about Hollywood films in terms of directors - until then, I only knew Hitchcock.

Jonathan S wrote:Also, in the 1970s the films themselves were much more difficult to access for most people. This was not only pre-DVD but also pre-VHS of course, so few film buffs had private collections of movies and (at least here in the UK) it might take years for even a popular classic to be re-shown on TV. So the lengthy clips were much more welcome then as a reminder or even a first glimpse of a particular film. In the book Schickel acknowledges that the movie corporations "went to unusual pains to help us clear obscure rights and lay our hands on rare films".

I guess that's the main point, they were designed for a different level of familiarity with the films themselves. After I've just watched the Ultra-Resolution DVD of The Band Wagon, I don't particularly want to see the entire "Shine on Your Shoes" number in a documentary on the next DVD, but it might have been pretty great for people who had never seen the film.

So while it's true that I've gotten used to seeing much shorter clips in documentaries on film people, and that I usually dislike seeing uninterrupted long ones, I don't think it's because my attention span is short. I just don't think it adds that much more to my appreciation of a film I haven't seen if someone shows me a long clip from it. The overwhelming majority of films, IMO, should be seen in their entirety in order to have any meaningful understanding of what the director (or cinematographer, writer, etc., whoever the subject of the documentary is) was trying to accomplish. Admittedly, the current era of always-increasing availability of older films in good quality home video representations has pushed me in that direction.

I remember the Wellman as having what was then a lot of bad language (from Wellman) you'd never have gotten away with on commercial television at the time. Other than "Wild Boys of the Road", there wasn't much emphasis on his pre-code period where a lot of the emphasis is now thanks to TCM. Most of the emphasis was on "Ox Bow Incident" and his flying pictures.

Haggai wrote:So while it's true that I've gotten used to seeing much shorter clips in documentaries on film people, and that I usually dislike seeing uninterrupted long ones, I don't think it's because my attention span is short.

I wasn't of course suggesting that was likely to be your reason for preferring shorter clips - sorry if I seemed to imply that.

But I do think it's one major reason why most modern documentaries (not just about cinema) avoid long extracts. Another reason of course may be the much higher cost of licensing clips. Schickel mentions in his book that even in the 1970s he got clips at lower rates than usual.

This series is absolutely wonderful -- the best thing Schickel has ever done. And their value is precisely in that they allow the directors to speak for themselves, which is what their goal always was. The Hitchcock one is indeed the weakest one -- because, as Domino points out, most of Hitch's anecdotes are the most widely publicized ones (and surely Truffaut's book renders this episode redundant). The others are well worth the effort, especially since they all run about an hour. I recall that Wellman ended up talking much more about his own biography than the other directors did, which is perhaps why there were fewer films discussed. The only one I have not seen is Capra's.

And of course, the long clips are there precisely because of the non-existence of home video in those days. Personally, I don't find many of the clips excruciately or unnecessarily long. Most of them are pretty short and well-chosen for their illustrative importance.

Five of these (Vidor, Hawks, Walsh, Fuller, Wellman) will air consecutively on TCM on September 2nd, beginning at 6:00 in the morning.