MRH: I was surprised to learn that the Black Panther organization had made short films, which were recently archived on a DVD set, What We Want, What We Believe -The Black Panther Party Library (2006). The four shorts had been run ragged - these 16mm films were scratched to hell - but as you said, the content was unique.

They provided an amazing glimpse into the time period, and to some extent, validated some of the points the group had been making at the time about social welfare. The set also has more recent archival video footage of Q&As with surviving Panther members, and I’m sure the people who produced the set were aware that the content was very important to legal advocates and historians, so the technical quality of the footage was of lesser concern.

For Watkins’ The Journey, I wonder if there must be other groups in the market, besides collectors and completists, that you can cater the remaining films to.

OG: Of course, with the releases that I’ve done up to now, they’ve basically been targeted at the standard film enthusiast; the ultra-aware enthusiast who has picked up on Watkins as a particular filmmaker.

With a film like The Journey, it has its difficulties because of its length, but I agree with you that it also has a particular quality in that it should be of interest to peace groups and academics who would not necessarily be buying it because it’s a Peter Watkins film, unless they are aware it’s the guy who made The War Game.

Peter has the world rights to The Journey, so there’s no problem in terms of rights. I look to contacting either distributors or peace groups. So for a Swedish release, for example, it would carry Swedish subtitles, and for the French, there would be the alternative French language that was prepared in the 1980s.

The language options would be similar for other countries that I can perhaps interest in collaborating on this fairly large project, which would probably be something like a 5-DVD set, along with a fairly lengthy (although I’ve never seen it) study pack that Peter prepared at the time that’s been gathering dust at this particular point. From my point of view, that would be a fairly novel approach to get that film out the hole from which it’s lying at the moment.

MRH: For a lot of the older films, as a DVD producer, when you’re putting together special features, is it part of your hit list to try and get in contact with the actors or any of the people involved with the production?

OG: The main factor is to try and do something as economical as possible, because I could come up with a lot of ideas that would be quite interesting and perhaps even marketable. What I would like more than anything would be to get Peter Watkins to do a commentary, but he’s refused; he doesn’t want to do that.

MRH: He prefers to create his own statements on the film, as in the DVDs booklets.

OG: He says it’s in the films. That’s his position. He doesn’t have anything more to say, although there are these self-interviews that he writes these days.

MRH: I guess one advantage is that he ends up protecting himself and being beaten to death by the same questions year after year after year, as can happen to some directors. A director makes a cult film, and after the first round of retrospective questions, it gradually becomes tiresome for the director, and any further answers feel rehearsed and lack any spontaneity.

OG: Yes. Peter says these are based on questions he has been asked, but he can actually therefore position in a way to get the information out more succinctly that he wants.

MRH: I guess once you’ve gone through all the work involved in getting a final DVD master, is it hard getting the product into stores, or do stores really matter anymore? You’ve got so many online business alternatives and labels with their own websites, so I wonder whether stores really matter at this point, or is it certain niche markets to which that stores still importantly cater?

OG: I’m a one-man band. It’s basically just me. I produce the DVDs, I acquire the rights, pull them together, do everything virtually myself (as much as I can for cost reasons), and then I hand it over to New Yorker in the United States, and Morningstar here in Canada mostly, and let them get down to the sales.

I don’t particularly want to deal with the wholesalers in the stores and things like that; I’m not a salesperson. I produce the DVDs and working directly with the films is what stimulates me more.

I think that at this particular point in time, the traditional forms of distribution, through wholesalers and through stores, are still very important, and if you take one of the key online sales – amazon.com or amazon.ca –they’re a store like any other. I see my distribution reports from New Yorker, and I see the number of units that amazon.com take, and it’s listed with the other key retailers and wholesalers. The fact that they sell them online is almost incidental at this particular point in time.

MRH: One of the things that Watkins mentioned in the Privilege booklet, which is somewhat indicative of a number of filmmakers, is that sometimes they can’t get a copy of their own movie, which seems ridiculous. It’s amazing how the director will go to a studio and say, “Can I have a VHS copy?’ and they refuse.

OG: I don’t know the history, as far as Privilege is concerned, between Universal and Peter, but the film, of course, has never been released on VHS or DVD before now, and it has only been aware a gray market version which was probably sourced from a 4x3 TV transmission.

I don’t know the circumstances behind the reasons that Universal would’ve turned down Peter’s request. I have a feeling that probably, as you would have with organizations like that, he’s dealt with so many different people over the years who probably wouldn’t know the difference Privilege and a hole in the ground, and basically not come up very high on their totem pole of importance.