MRH: What are your thoughts on newer generations who aren’t getting exposed to silent films, as well as stuff from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and who regard “old movies” as films from the nineties?

JK: It’s weird. It does sometimes feel as if people are unwilling to look beyond this very narrow, 10-year period in which they currently exist: their spectrum encompasses 5 years ago, today, and potentially looking ahead 5 years from now.

I don’t know what that’s about because there’s so much that you can get from a broader view in any art form. I’m talking about music and literature and painting and all of those things. There’s so much richness, and it’s just out there waiting to be enjoyed. We have this whole rich past, and sometimes I feel as though people are beginning to see that again, and then other times I feel really discouraged.

Maybe it has to do with the idea of the Me generation: if you’re thinking very much in terms of yourself, maybe you can only think in terms of the now, or of your own narrow life. I grew up imagining and fantasizing so much about the past. It’s hard for me to get into the mindset of someone who never thinks about that. To me, it’s baffling, because I just think they’re denying themselves so much sheer pleasure.

MRH: I mentioned to Nick this weird trend where a lot of classic films tend to be released on a physical medium in Europe, particularly in Spain. Spain has a lot of classic Fox films that aren’t available here at all.

Soon after, I was having coffee with a friend who writes for one of the major publications in Toronto, and I asked him about Touch of Evil (1958), which is available as a limited Blu-ray in Britain, along with Silent Running (1972), and I asked if he thought the films would be coming out soon in North America. His response was ‘I don’t think so,’ because Universal’s Blu-ray of Psycho didn’t do well at all.

I thought ‘How is that possible?” unless it’s one of those films that’s come out so many times on home video that all the people that want it already have a copy, and they’ve just drawn lines and said ‘You know what? Enough. I’ve got the movie, and I’m happy with that.’

It’s as though the constant re-releasing and reissuing of the same titles has backfired, and what we’ll have are limited releases done by independent companies in various territories. Not only are the studios staying away from obscure stuff, but they’re cutting back on the major classics, and just focusing on the Top 10 or Top 100, which is even more bizarre.

Just announced this week is Olive Films release of a 3-disc set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s uncut 1900 (1976) on DVD and Blu-ray. Paramount released a 2-disc edition in 2006, after which it soon went out of print. Olive’s done a fine job mining previously unreleased titles from Paramount’s catalogue for the past few years, but why wouldn’t Paramount want to handle what’s clearly a propriety production in a deluxe special edition?

JK: I frankly don’t understand it, but I think it’s a situation that may be lucky for labels like Twilight Time because these are things that we will be interested in releasing.

With a film like Mysterious Island (1961), wouldn’t you think that that is the most obvious candidate? There they have that wonderful restoration department at Sony, run by Grover Crisp, and the film's got Ray Harryhausen, Cy Endfield, Bernard Herrmann; it’s got every Saturday matinee indicator hung all over it, and you would think it’s such an obvious choice, but they just didn’t have faith in it as a Blu-ray release. Luckily, that meant we could have it for a limited edition release.

MRH: In the early days of DVD, Sony released their films in stunning dual layer transfers, or as flipper discs with optional widescreen & full screen transfers, and then they started to do something really dumb: replace certain titles like And Justice For All (1979), Mackenna’s Gold (1969), and The Odessa File (1974) with full screen-only editions. With the Harryhausen titles, you had Mysterious Island badly cropped to 1.85 on DVD, and then there were those special editions of It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) from 2007 which offered colorized versions that I can’t imagine anyone wanted, although I suspect Harryhausen felt it might give the films second lives.

There’s also the constant reissuing of the same titles by several studios, and combi-packs of the same film on 3D-BRD, Blu-ray, DVD, and a Digital Copy, or a DVD and Blu-ray sometimes packaged with a sampler CD that packs 4 cues from an album they still have to buy. I don’t know who these designer releases are supposed to serve, and yet more money is spent on these single-title sets – in mastering, packaging, promotion, distribution – and not titles that have never touched DVD.

JK: I think it’s very unorganized, and one of the problems lies up in the studio executive offices: it’s a revolving door, so there are few people who have been able to stick to the job over a period of years.

You do get these rarities like Grover Crisp, who’s been at Sony for a while, and Schawn Belston at Fox; these are guys who are in charge of Assets Management, and they’re the ones who are giving us these beautiful transfers.

One of the reasons they’re able to do such a good job is because they’ve been in those positions for some time. In the executive suite, it’s not always the case, and so you get differing philosophies about what’s important, and it makes for a lack of continuity.  There’s often no consistent drive to look at and utilize all the wonderful titles potentially available in deep catalogue.

This isn’t across the board, but there are too many people who are more interested in business than in the films. Of course, this has been the eternal argument in Hollywood - Art vs. Commerce, and ‘How do you keep a balance’ and so forth - but I think that the balance has tipped so far over to business and the bottom line that many studios have lost sight of the value of their catalogue, and they treat it sometimes very cheaply. For people who love movies, it’s really, really frustrating.

MRH: Do you have any thoughts as Twilight Time is approaching its first year anniversary?

JK: For me, it’s been an absolutely wonderful opportunity and a ton of fun, so I feel like I’ve been very, very lucky. We’ve done remarkably well, but I think we can do better. The hardest thing is letting people know that we exist, and that if there’s some beloved movie they’ve been looking for, they might try looking for it from us. We can’t put out too many things at once, but we’re now up to two titles a month, which seems amazing and wonderful.  It’s been an incredible adventure—I hope we get to keep at it.