Leonard Maltin tries to rent Martin and Lewis films

I read the curious tidbit in the book A THOUDSAND CUTS about Leonard Maltin trying to rent Martin and Lewis films in the 70s from(where else?)Films, Inc., only to be told that they needed written permission from Paramount before he could rent Paramount films that were IN THE CATALOG!! Did this happen to anyone else? How typical was this? I know my boarding school showed THE LEMON DROP KID and I don't think they had that kind of trouble!

 

If you weren't an educational institution (like a university), Films Inc. didn't want to rent to you. They were forbidden by the studios to rent to individuals by contract. If you could get the studios to sign off and say you were a "legitimate scholar or researcher," then you could rent the films.

An old pal of mine in the 1970s used to rent 16mm prints from Films Inc. and a couple of other companies by basically dummying up stationary that said "Joe Schmo University Film Society" (or something like that), and they'd gladly ship out as many films as he wanted. There were also some occasions where he'd split a rental with one of the local universities and they'd just screen it legitimately for a class as part of the curriculum.

When I worked with a friend of mine on a proposed film book in the 1980s, we just called up one of the local studios and talked their PR department into screening whatever we wanted right there on the lot. Now, all this stuff is generally available to the point where you can find it on the net, on home video, or streaming. The quality isn't always great, but if you're just writing about it for a historical book -- as Maltin was doing -- it'd be fine.

 

The Garson Kanin book in the early 1970s on Tracy and Hepburn has an anecdote about them with Kanin's wife Ruth Gordon being able to get a coupleof Charlie Chaplin's films from the late 1940s...which they decided that by watching them with no sound was better...Chaplin resisted sound for a long time. The impression I had was it took a bit of finagling by some prominent Hollywood people to get what are not highly regarded films.

Around the same time some high school friends and I got a film catalog from some outfit (Blackhawk films?). It was mainly silent films with the public domain 1950s stuff like "Earth vs the Flying Saucers". Between the high prices, no 16 mm projector and the poor selection we didn't pursue it. Hollywood did not want to sell you those things. The Sony Betamax decision in the early 1980s was a hard fought thing. It only prevailed by a 5-4 decision with a couple judges citing Fred Rogers of PBS filing a "amicus curiae " statement saying he thought it was a good thing if one extra child could see his show because of time shifting. Hard to believe now with all the money Hollywood makes off these things.

 

Note that this was (and still is) a copyrighted Columbia Pictures release owned by Sony, and they renewed the copyright. Still protected, not P.D.

I testified three times as a witness in the Universal/Disney vs. Sony case in Federal court, and it's interesting that Sony won the first round, lost the appeal, then finally won the Supreme Court case. I'm glad they did, because the Universal attorney told me that my name and ten other people would be on the next round of lawsuits... which never happened.

Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. - Wikipedia ».

One reason why Universal lost the case is that it became increasingly hard for them to claim any losses because of home video, since by 1983 they were making millions and millions of dollars with pre-recorded tapes. I don't think a lot of people could have foreseen this in the fall of 1976, when the lawsuit was first filed.

 

In a completely opposite situation, some distributors didn't allow Public Libraries to lend films to Schools, only to residential facilities(Don't know about individuals). Even the Castle Marx Brothers abridgements weren't available to Schools from our local(Fitchburg, MA)library.