The Extras - The Origins of Warner Archive with George Feltenstein

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Legendary Home Entertainment executive George Feltenstein returns to the show to talk about the early days of the Warner Archive.  In this episode, George takes us back to his work with Rhino Handmade on small-scale, but profitable soundtrack releases on CD during the late 1990’s.  That led to a fateful meeting in 2002 with fellow Warner Bros executive Jim Wuthrich, who was determined to find a way to execute the same concept on the deep Warner Bros film library.  That led Mr. Wuthrich to DVD made-on-demand technology, which by 2007 was robust enough that the Warner management team approved the development and launch of a direct-to-consumer service.  George’s task was to curate the 100 film releases that would launch the service, a task that grew ever greater when the number was expanded to 150 films soon before launch.  On March 23, 2009, The Warner Archive Collection premiered with 150 film titles, to immediate success.George Feltenstein then takes us through a review of the Warner Archive October 2021 release slate.Otaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers.  Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals.  www.otakumedia.tvThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. Today, we welcome back to the show the legendary home entertainment executive,

George Feltenstein, someone very familiar to those of you who follow the show. George talked about his career in episode six, Classic Hollywood with George Feltenstein, a career in classic film marketing. So for those of you who missed that episode, you can go back and listen to a very informative look at the development of the home entertainment industry. Today, George talks to us about the history of Warner Archive, a boutique division within Warner Home Video that helped change the business model for smaller releases that were a part of the Warner Library. He will also review the October releases from Warner Archive for those who enjoy hearing George's stories behind the releases. And as an extra bonus, George gives us a rundown of some of the new

responsibilities he's taking on at Warner Brothers, all of which sound very exciting. For those of you not familiar with George Feltenstein's background, he has long been involved in the marketing and distribution of classic film and television projects. He began his career at MGM UA Home Video, where he first brought the studio's classic film library to the home video market, eventually becoming the senior vice president and general manager of the division. He joined Time Warner in 1997 to lead various initiatives involving the studio's classics. In 2002, he officially joined the executive ranks at Warner Home Video as senior vice president of Theatrical Catalog Marketing, overseeing the restoration and release of the studio's massive classic catalog.

I first met George back in 2007 when I started working at Warner Home Video, and I've enjoyed working with him on numerous projects. So here's my interview with George Feltenstein. Hi, George. Welcome back to The Extras. Oh, thank you, Tim. It's great to be here. People really enjoyed hearing about your fascinating career in home entertainment in our last episodes. Well, I am delighted to hear that. And I really enjoyed listening to them again, because when you're talking and you're so deep in conversation, it's nice to go back and kind of relive it and hear it from another point of view.

It was delightful speaking with you then as it will be today. I'm delighted to be here. Well, one of the topics we didn't have time to get to was the history of the Warner Archive. So I'm excited to talk about that with you today. The Warner Archive has been a huge success in the home entertainment industry and one you are rightly associated with. So to tell the full story, why don't you take us back to the very beginning? Well, it is a very interesting story. in how it changed a business that when we initially contemplating it, we couldn't contemplate the changes that were ahead. And we were just dealing with what was in front of us.

And it really goes back to somewhere around, I'd say probably 2002, 2003. I'd say probably 2002, 2003. And I was working in catalog marketing for Warner Home Video. It was the, I won't say early days of DVD, but I guess now that the DVD format is 24 years old. Right. Yeah, I guess I have to say it was the early days. It certainly was the early days of classic films on DVD because we had just started to mine the library, started to put

together collections and so forth. And it was really a very, very golden time. In the meantime, I have always worn many hats at the company, most official, some not official, but always with the blessings of colleagues and management because of my unique interest in and passion for the library. And having worked in so many aspects of it, I'd often be called upon to do things that were out of the realm of just being a home video marketing executive. I had the great pleasure of overseeing a soundtrack album joint venture that we had. It was branded at the time, Turner Classic Movies Music, Rhino Movie Music. It was a joint venture that started between Turner and Rhino, built on classic films from the Turner Library a year before Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting. So that kind of was synchronous with my move from being at the company known as MGM, which at the time was the home video distributor of the Turner-owned classic MGM library. And my move to work for Time Warner, overseeing the marketing of the

Turner Entertainment Company library with different divisions of Warner Brothers and of Time Warner. And so not only was I in an advisory capacity for classics at Warner Home Video, had not joined the staff of Warner Home Video immediately. There's a little bit of a break there. I was the senior vice president of marketing for Turner Entertainment Company, which is the subsidiary that owned what was MGM. And that subsidiary also owned the pre-49 Warner Brothers Library and the RKO Library. So from those three libraries,

Turner put together a soundtrack deal with Rhino Records. And after the first year, I was no longer working at what we used to call New MGM. It gets very confusing, so I have to clarify all this. I had moved to Turner Entertainment Company and was working for a legendary, wonderful executive by the name of Roger Mayer. No relation. Turner side of the joint venture with Rhino of soundtracks drawn from the MGM pre-49 Warner

and RKO libraries. And CDs were still hot. There hadn't been the infusion yet of Napster and piracy. And the only piracy we had to worry about were people pirating our discs overseas. And that was a worry, believe me. But the whole purpose of this soundtrack joint venture was to take advantage of this amazing library of music that had never properly been put out in definitive editions and so forth and so on.

So I had the business responsibility along with the people at Rhino since it was a joint venture, but I also produced most of the albums myself and I very often wrote the liner notes. And I very often wrote the liner notes. Then as the years progressed, we did start to see the music of music and iPods and so forth and so on were reducing shelf space or floor space for CDs in big box stores and places where people could go buy music. You had, of course, Tower Records, and you had other music chains and book chains like Borders. These are all long-gone establishments that were big customers of ours, both for Warner Home Video and as well for Rhino Records. So I was really working both sides of the business and enjoying it. I was really doing the soundtrack work also in synchronicity with some of the home video classic work. And it was around 2002 that Rhino started to come up with a reaction to the change in the music marketplace.

They came up with a new line of limited edition CDs that you could only get on the Internet, not available in stores. They were priced at $26.98, which is a high price. CDs that you could only get on the internet, not available in stores. They were priced at $26.98, which is a high price for a CD. And they were limited editions of $2,000 or $3,000. And when they're gone, they're gone. And I think the first thing they did, and they still do, they own the Monkees catalog of music. They own everything. They own the Monkey TV shows. They own everything but television rights to the Monkees TV show.

And they own the Monkees movie ad. And they were big Monkey fans, the guys that own rhino so they did a complete collection of all the recording sessions from the monkeys headquarters album which was the third monkeys album it was like nine cds and i apologize if i'm getting any of these facts wrong because i was not directly involved with that project i was not involved with that project at all, actually. I just knew about it. Right. So I hope I have my numbers right. But it was a huge success, and they sold out that set virtually overnight. Wow.

And so Rhino Handmade, as the division was called, had a small sub staff. sub-staff. So here you had a little boutique division of the Warner Music Group that specialized in reissues and cool stuff. Rhino was a great company at putting together cool music collections and they were just the biggest company. I will tell you, I have to say this, their original office that I went to when I first started dealing with them was on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. And the walls in the offices were not traditional flat square walls. They were all shaped differently. And everything was nonconformist. And everything was nonconformist.

And the floors were linoleum with crushed pieces of 45 singles built into the linoleum. It was the coolest place. And people could bring their dogs to work there. I mean, it was just awesome. And delightful, wonderful people who are there because they loved music. And you can't ask for better than that. So I loved working on the soundtracks we did there. And I produced soundtrack albums of things like Gone with the Wind and Singing in the Rain and so on. And as we began to see the market start to shrink, we were looking at the possibility of starting to release soundtrack albums from our library using the Rhino handmade model within the Rhino, the TCM Rhino movie music joint venture. We started to do that and it was very,

very successful. And it allowed us to bring albums out of music from movies that were not Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Singing in the Rain, you know, the most famous, famous, famous. But things were, if we sold 2,000 units and we kept the cost low, it was a big win for everyone. And most importantly, we were getting the music out there and preserving it. So that was a whole new layer to keeping the music going because the joint venture for music started in 1996. So now we're six years into it. Most of the big titles had already been released, which also included some more at the time, modern and recent films, things like Poltergeist, It wasn't just really old movies, but it was from that part of the library. So we started to release these. They were very successful. And I went to a Warner Home Video meeting with a bunch of these CDs under my arm. And I ran into Jim Wetherich, who at the time was, I think his title was that he was the executive director or VP of online, Warner Brothers Online.

You know, which was a, you know, the Internet was still very nascent for transactions and so forth and so on. forth and so on. Jim is now, of course, the president of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment and has been for many years and is an incredible individual, both professionally and personally. He's an amazing man. But he was fascinated by this business model when I explained what these CDs under my arm were. He said, I've got to come up with a way that we could do something like that for DVD. Because at the time, about 4,000 movies and other programs had been released by Warner Home Video on VHS and beta.

But the DVD number was far smaller and was going to grow. But around that time, somebody had written a book and maybe it's more than that. I don't claim to be an expert on these things, but the term of the long tail, long tail marketing, the deep library, the stuff that is very, very specific in interest. How do you market the long tail? This phrase was very much a hot button thought at the moment. And Jim said, I've got to find out a way to really, where we could do something like

that, that would allow us to take advantage of our library since it's the industry's largest. Right. And I said, I'm with you all the way. I think it's a great idea. Whenever you figure out how you're going to do it, I will provide you with the programming. So that was around 2002. And over the next, I'd say, three or four years, I would run into Jim in the hall, you know, or at meetings and whatnot, or he'd be having lunch and whatnot. He said, I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm still trying to figure this out. He was obsessed because, and this is while in the meantime, he was doing amazing things growing in his executive portfolio

within the organization. It was probably, I think, 2006 that he gave a demonstration of using a manufacturing on demand model where DVDs would be made on demand based on a consumer ordering them. And at the time we had an online shop, WB shop. And the concept was the consumer would see the film available. They would order it. WB shop would ship it to them. And it was basically, basically custom manufacture. The other thing that made this very, very attractive to us, aside from it being a good business model that could bring in some incremental revenue, really didn't have any idea what it would grow into becoming. It also would solve a problem that we had of people both in the industry and talent, as well as Joe you know, Joe Smith, USA, wanting a specific copy of something on DVD that

wasn't available. You know, if you've got a filmmaker or an actor that desperately wants a copy of something on DVD and we're sorry, it's not available. Well, isn't there some way that, you know, you could make one? And, you know, I was like, well, it's very complicated. You just can't do that, you know. So we basically were looking at this idea that Jim had and how to do it. Management gave it in the thumbs up and said, go for it. it. Management gave it the thumbs up and said, go for it. At the time, I think we had just split off the organization into Warner Home Video and Warner Brothers Digital Distribution. So this was a project of the digital distribution portion of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment.

The digital distribution team was a whole different group of people. They were exploring what was brand new with movies on iTunes and things like that. So in a sense, we were creating physical products, but using the infrastructure of the digital division. And the digital division was very nimble and creative and excited to be changing things, and excited to be changing things, making things differently, and finding new ways to solve old problems and to do so profitably and efficiently. So from that, you've got a green light in 2006. We were planning to launch the business in 2008. And I had selected 100 feature films that had never been available on DVD before.

Some of them, I'd say probably half had been out on VHS before. But I basically had two qualifications. The first qualification is that the master had to be in the proper aspect ratio for the widescreen film. It had to be presented widescreen. And then the other strata was that we had to be able to provide good quality. And that is not that easy to do if you're using masters that are just sitting around on the shelf. There weren't a lot of them. So I was going through looking at hundreds and hundreds of titles to see if the masters would qualify. And I finally came up with a list of a hundred titles and we were going to get ready to launch in the summer of 2008.

And we didn't know what we were going to call the business. We were even going to call it, you know, Warner vault. And that sounded a little bit too much like Walt Disney. Warner Vault, and that sounded a little bit too much like Walt Disney. So we didn't pursue that route. And we finally came up with Warner Archive Collection. I don't remember exactly who came up with the name. It wasn't me. I wish I could take credit for that. But that was the name that we came out with. And we tried a lot of different companies were in this business of manufacturing on demand. And we tried a lot of different partners and had samples from about 21 companies. And most of them were not very good. But we found one company that was really exceptional and they were ultimately who we decided to go with. By the time we were ready to launch, the holidays were approaching and

our launch date was March 23rd, 2009. And indeed we did launch on March 23rd, 2009, but not with a hundred movies, but 150 movies, because at the last minute, you know, I was told we, we, we need to make this offering more robust. We need another 50 movies. And, uh, I had a lot of late nights, you know, going through and finding the right things and also trying to not, there couldn't be any cannibalization. They had to be all new to DVD, things that had never been out before and things that would have an audience. Right. And we had some limitations.

things that would have an audience. And we had some limitations. These discs that we manufactured on demand could only be movies that were less than two hours long because the process at the time could only use what is known as a DVD5. If people are listening and they're not familiar with this term, a DVD 5 is a single-sided disc. And about the second or third year of DVD's existence, maybe earlier, they developed what is called a DVD 9, a dual-layer disc that could hold basically twice the amount of content. So there wasn't a way for us to use DVD nines when we launched the business. That came, I'd say, probably within the first year. It wasn't a possibility when we launched. So we had the 150 titles and we were ready to launch on March 23rd. We were all

set with the WB shop ready to promote. We hired a good friend of mine who I miss very much, the late Debbie Reynolds. We hired her to be our spokesperson and to go on The Today Show with Hoda and Kathy, I think it was at the time, was 2009. Since Debbie had starred in three or four of the movies among the 150 that we released, and I have known her or had known her at that point for probably over 10, 15 years, we were good friends. And it just worked out wonderfully. And that same night that we announced, you know, with Debbie on the Today Show during the day, we hit the wire with the press and lots of articles were written. And I went back and looked at some of those old articles just the other day. And I got a kick out at some of those old articles just the other day, and I got a kick out of how revolutionary this is going to be because it would provide another

factor that we haven't discussed. And that is that one of the problems, whether it be video cassette, DVD, Blu-ray, or any kind of physical product, this goes for books and records as well. DVD, Blu-ray, or any kind of physical product. This goes for books and records as well. You have to estimate what you're going to ship into the store and hope it all sells through. You don't want returned product that didn't sell. And returns were always the bane of my existence in my career in home video. bane of my existence in my career in home video. I remember, and this is a complete diversionary story, but it's funny.

In my days at MGM, about three years into my days at MGM, MGM had been bought. It had been bought and sold so many times. And in one of those transactions, and this is the time I was the head of MGM Home Video, our distributor was none other than Warner Home Video, and that's how I got to know a lot of people at Warner Home Video. And I remember when the Michael Keaton Batman movie was going to have a sequel, and when they found out the title was going to be batman returns the gentleman who was the head of sales at the time just was horrified in a humorous way because he was

dealing with so many returns of batman video not that that wasn't a huge hit. Of course it was. But people always would ship out too much. So you didn't have a problem with returns with this business model. If someone ordered. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of the Extras podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. A title, we would make it, we would ship it, we would sell it. And that's the end of it. And you don't have to worry about returns. So that night, the 23rd of March, I was on a chat on the home theater forum, a wonderful website that I recommend to everybody.

They're still roaring strong. But at the time, we had previously done a chat every year. It's something that has been basically made antique by social media and whatnot or Reddit and things like that. But basically, we would do a chat on the home theater forum once a year where consumers would ask us questions and we would answer them. And that night we announced the whole program and it was a surprise to everybody and people didn't know what it meant. And people were trying to get their arms wrapped around it. And there was a lot of excitement. There was some trepidation from certain people who thought it was like the way you make a DVD or would make a DVD on your computer, you know, when you'd burn a DVD or whatever. The technology was similar, but the media used was far more complex and sturdy and durable.

And the irony of it is, now I'm looking back, it's 2021 now, this is 2009, we had far more problems with people having defective discs that were replicated and pressed than we did people getting defective discs that had been burned. However, the burned disc was looked upon as a second-class citizen by a lot of people. And we needed to overcome that. However, that was the small part of the reaction. The majority of the reaction was joy and what could be made available and what could we do.

That was very, very exciting. And so we had a release schedule where we were releasing like 30 titles a month. And we were a staff of three. And then I had my own regular full-time job, you know, as head of catalog marketing for Warner Home Video. So I was really running two shifts. And I will clarify that by this time, the Rhino TCM Soundtrack Joint Venture had, it hadn't ended yet, but we had not produced any new CDs in many years by that time. So I didn't have that to deal with. And, and, and I was full time at Warner home video, you know, after those few years at Turner that I was referring to, just to keep the story straight for everybody.

Yeah. And I came on in 2007, which is kind of like the heyday, you know, it's like the peak. Right. You came at the pinnacle. I came at the pinnacle. The very pinnacle. Right. And, and part of that is the reason was, is they were, you know, you guys, you were mining the catalog, whether it was TV or kids in animation, which I did a lot of, we were doing the old Jetsons. We were doing, you know, all of the old catalog television animation. I mean, there was just so much that was being done at that time. It was just a wealth

of content and trying to figure out, you know, how to get it out there at that time. It was just a wealth of content and trying to figure out, you know, how to get it out there to the fans. It was a great time to be working at Warner Brothers. That's for sure. And you just had your hands in so much. And what was interesting as well was that we started out with 150 feature films and then we added 30 the next month and 30 the next month. And it's very funny because I think we ended up in that first year releasing probably about 700 movies, maybe. 700 movies, maybe. But in August of that year, we had a subset of releases that were built on made for television movies from the 70s. And I was unfortunately and painfully aware that these were very popular in bootlegging circles. So if there's a demand, why not make the real thing available legitimately instead of some kind of, you know, homemade, made in the basement,

copied off of television, that kind of thing. So by the end of our first year, we had expanded not only to made for television movies and miniseries, but we had also started to add some animated programming. And we were on the precipice of where we could go if we got more creative. We started to do double features. We started to do, I'm trying to remember the exact month, but sometime in the middle of 2010, we had perfected the ability to release movies. It might have been at the very end of the year,

I believe, we had perfected the ability to release movies on a dual-layer disc, a DVD-9. You've been listening to part one of my interview with George Feltenstein about the history of the Warner Archive. In part two, George continues the story of the 2009 launch, and then he takes us through the growth of the Warner Archive over the years and the move into Blu-ray releases. We will have part two as part of our discussion with George about the November releases for the Warner Archive. Now let's hear from George about some of his new responsibilities at Warner Brothers and the Warner Archive release schedule for October. Schedule for October.

Before we get into discussing some of the actual October title releases. But I understand you've expanded your responsibilities at Warner Brothers over the last few months. Maybe you can provide us with an update on some of these new areas you are overseeing. Well, my job has always been or always was to be dealing with theatrical catalog marketing. That's what I did. You know, that was my title. But in 2003, when the first set of Looney Tunes were to be released in the market, I volunteered my services to my colleagues in the kids group, for lack of a better word. It's had lots of different names over the years, but, you know, I was kind of leading the crusade to treat classic animated films as classic animated films and not animated babysitters that are for kids.

The theatrical classic cartoons were made to be shown in theaters. They're not episodes. They are films. They're separate short films. I kind of had to wage a little bit of a campaign because there was a person working for our company at the time that was on a campaign for Looney Tunes DVDs to be released for moms and kids. And I said, absolutely, that needs to be done. And I said, absolutely, that needs to be done. However, there are some cartoons that are not appropriate for moms and kids and are more appropriate for an adult audience. And we need to be able to put them in the context of when they were made and how they were made and if there's references to ration books from the 40s during the war or whatever so we came up with this proposal to do the spotlight collection for for looney tunes which would be for moms and kids and the golden collections which would have tons and tons of bonus features and commentaries and make these cartoons available for the collectors

in a way that they would want. And that was very successful, but that was me lending myself from the catalog group to the kids group. And anything that involves the library has also been something that I'm insistent be hopefully done right. So I have volunteered to help anytime anybody needed anything. officially includes working with the mastering group, working with the preservation and restoration team. I work with the legal department on research. I work with our theatrical classics team. I'm basically here to help anybody, people at TCM and who have been helping for years. And more recently, the people at HBO Max, anybody that needs my help and my institutional knowledge and my experience. And we did this in this year in this way. And that's why. And when, oh, by the way, if you're going to be working on this film, you need to contact this person and this person because they have to

approve such and such. And all of this information needs to be someplace else other than my head. It needs to be committed into a place where everyone in the company that touches these things knows what to do and not to do. And I've been with the company long enough to know that, you know, there were many times where we had to, like, if a certain film element was missing a minute or two and we had to pull it from something else, where did that something else come from? Because we are now scanning 4K 16-bit with an ability to have a stabilized image that we could not have dreamed of 15 years ago or 10 years ago. Scanners have improved so much, not to mention how far we've come from the days of old telecine. So all of this needs to be communicated out to the company and to my colleagues. So I've been blessed to be part of the company and be kind of the go-to guy officially for anything that involves the library and its history.

It doesn't change my curation of the Warner Archive. It doesn't change anything I did before. I'm doing everything I did before plus more. And I love it. And I'm grateful. You mentioned also that you'll probably be more involved I love it and I'm grateful. You mentioned also that you'll probably be more involved in the restoration and preservation as well and will that impact the Warner Archive? Absolutely and it's actually been that way I would say probably for the last

four or five years. It's just it wasn't official. I let management know that I was helping, but now it's actually part of my job. It's part of my job description. That's not to minimize the importance of having marketing stripes within the organization. I love that and I to learn about something that happened if they're writing an article or someone's writing a book. Or another thing that I do is I have a lot of interaction with talent, as well as for some of the older films, the families and estates and heirs of talent so that they know they have someone they can call within Warner who will be there for them. I will not name names, but a very famous director who's been associated with our companies for probably close to 50 years. He called me earlier today asking a question and, you know, he loves the fact that he can call me up and get an answer. And I've been very proud of that. I've, I've nurtured those relationships and always tried to be there to help people because this is, I feel like, you know, I'm on a mission and my life's mission is to make as much of this content available as possible with the best possible quality

and authenticity and respect. And the respect gets extended beyond the big famous classics to other films that some people laugh at, but that are important to those other people. Like we have a film from 1969 called The Green Slime, and it was a science fiction film made in Japan with American actors and an Italian director. And it wasn't a big hit when it came out by any means, but we put it out on DVD and we sold a hell of a lot of them. And then we did a beautiful Blu-ray. So it isn't all Hitchcock and Howard Hawks and George Cukor and all the great directors. It's also the green slime and hammer horror films. And every, you know, we've been putting out series of films, like the Thin Man films are finally all coming out on Blu-ray

after selling hundreds of thousands, and I'm not exaggerating, hundreds and thousands of DVD sets. But the Thin Man series of films has never lost its ability to entertain audiences. And the first Thin Man film was made, let's see, 87 years ago. So what do you say about that? It reminds me of something I read when in 1974, Jack Haley Jr. made a compilation film about the MGM musicals called That's Entertainment. It was actually the sixth highest grossing movie of 1974.

And Jack Haley Jr. is a famous documentary filmmaker, but his father was even more famous as being the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. So after the premiere of the movie, Jack Kelly Jr. asked his father, so dad, what'd you think of the movie? So, Dad, what did you think of the movie? And his father said, this movie is great because the footage that is in this movie is timeless. It will always entertain, and therefore, it will always be of value. Now, that was what he said about that specific film. But I look at so many of the films in our library and people will have differing opinions and that is their right. But the person that's passionate about a valutant horror film may hate MGM musicals. And the person that loves MGM musicals might also love

Val Luton horror films or Hanler horror films or a movie like Waiting for Guffman. They're all part of the Warner Archive collection. And, you know, that's why whatever the goal is, and especially as I expand my purview into other aspects of the library and other media, it's still the same thing. When you are the caretakers of what is generally considered to be the greatest and largest collection of Hollywood's history owned by Warner Media. That's an enormous responsibility. And to preserve it and take care of it. And like Martin Scorsese said in one of the documentaries about film preservation, you take care of your library and it will take care of you.

preservation. You take care of your library and it will take care of you. So I'm happy and grateful, beyond grateful, to be in a position to be a caretaker. Well, it's been a number of months since you've been able to share with the fans the Warner Archive release schedule. And you were talking about the diversity of the releases. And I think that looking at the releases coming up in October, it represents that in many ways as well. Shall we dive into the release schedule for the fans? Absolutely. I think as as we record this, I believe shortly thereafter will be our October newsletter, which will go into all these releases. But October 5th, we have Tech Savory Screwball Classics Volume 3 with all brand new 2021 HD masters of these great MGM classic cartoons. There are 20 of them on the disc. And there's actually a bonus cartoon on the disc that was made by Tex Avery when he was

working as an animator at Warner Brothers in 1941. This cartoon is called The Crackpot Quail. Why did we put this on there? We put it on there because it's very similar in style to what Tex Avery did when he moved over to MGM. He got far more surrealistic and crazy and wonderful. But there is also the quail in The Crackpot Quail. If you've seen the cartoon before, he has a whistle when he talks. Well, the original soundtrack had him giving the raspberry, if you know what that means, you know, and that was considered a no-no by the censors.

So the version of the film with the original audio were them giving the raspberry. We were able to locate it at UCLA. It was in our Warner collection. All the Warner Nitrate Studio prints are at UCLA. And we took the audio from that print and married it to a beautiful new restoration of the cartoon. So that's a bonus on that disc. And our Tex A. Screwball Classics Volume 1 broke sales records, and Volume 2 was a very welcome release, and now we're Howard's big studio directorial debut film, Night Shift, which starred the Fonz, Henry Winkler, and Michael Keaton in one of his earliest screen appearances. And this is Michael Keaton before Mr. Mom and before he became Batman. And Shelley Long. I don't know if this came out theatrically right as Cheers was beginning or before, but it's an R-rated comedy. It's really, really funny. And we've had so many requests for

it to be on Blu-ray. And this is the kind of movie that for it to be on blu-ray and this is the kind of movie that should have come out on blu-ray like 12 years ago yeah it's surprising to see it on here in for october because you would have i would have thought it would come out earlier yeah because our library is so large and for many years the many of the best titles in the library were overlooked because there was a period of time when I was not involved in the programming of the retail release schedule. As Warner Archive was really taking off, that eventually became a full-time responsibility for me. became a full-time responsibility for me. And then in the middle of the decade, I became both again. And that's when 4K and other things started being part of something where I had a seat at the table. But yeah, this is part of the problem is we've got these really, really great older classics, but we also have fairly recent movies. This movie is only 39 years old.

But when you're dealing with a library as old as ours and as broad as ours, that's a picture that a lot of people saw when they were growing up on HBO, where they had the video cassette that they rented at Blockbuster. You know, and it was an early DVD, but it didn't look that good. Now it looks gorgeous. And so that's the first week of October. The second week of October, again, to show how broad and differential we are, we are releasing the fourth and final season of the CWDC series, Black Lightning. This is season four, both on Blu-ray and DVD. Television on both DVD and Blu-ray, but particularly Blu-ray, has had a hard time in the marketplace, especially with the growth of streaming. But we know that the

Black Lightning fans are out there. And we put out Black Lightning season two DVD only because we didn't think we'd sell enough Blu-rays. The fans got really, really upset and let us know how they felt. So I said, you know what? We're going to take a roll of the dice. When we release season three, we're going to go back and give them season two in Blu-ray. And it turned out to be a very wise decision. So we're finishing the series both in Blu-ray and DVD on October 12th. And that same day for classic horror movie fans, they have not one, but two films from RKO horror producer extraordinaire Val Lewton. There's a film from 1943 called Ghost Ship

and a film starring Boris Karloff from 1946 called Bedlam. And these two films are on one disc. So it's a double feature disc. Both films were scanned off the original camera negatives stored at the Library of Congress, were stored as part of our corporate preservation program. And then we created a new master at Wooden Brothers Motion Picture Imaging. And the classic horror film gets what they want, especially since October is Halloween month. That's right. Before we go on to the next one, I did want to also just point out that on the Black Lightning release, there is a special feature. It's the DC Fandom panel from last year, I i believe so that will be on there for the fans and then for the ghost ship bedlam there is a commentary on bedlam by tom weaver so there's a

few extras on those i'm glad you mentioned that because tom weaver has been my friends i i like to joke since we were children now we actually we actually met when we were both in our early 20s and we were both working for the same company in film distribution in New York. And Tom has since become a very well-renowned horror expert. But when I got into the home video business, when I was doing anything with classic horror, I would call Tom because he is just a font of knowledge. And I think that that's something that I'm particularly excited about is that when you have people that have a particular area of expertise and you can reach out to them and work with them, it is such a joy. And I had nothing to do with Tom getting the gig to do the commentary. It's just that he's so well known that they called him up and he said, of course, I'll do it.

And I'm glad you mentioned the black lighting panel as well. You know, I worked on a lot of TV and in 2020, we just couldn't interview the cast and the producers. So, uh, fandom was a great way to bring the cast and the producers together for the fans. So I'm, I'm really glad that that will be on that release for them. Yeah. And so I'm really glad that that will be on that release for them. Yeah, and I'm very grateful that we were able to complete the series in both formats. We haven't been doing very much on DVD in recent years, just as a reflection of where the market is going.

DVD is still very, very strong. And in certain releases, the sales of DVD will be more than sales of Blu-ray. Not for Warner Archive as much as for newer products. But that's reflective of what's still sold in stores. And it shocks me, but a lot of people still only have DVD players and never made the move to blue, no less to 4K. But, you know, to each his own. And some things also don't require, you know, I mean, everything looks better in high definition. But the next release that we have in October is a wonderful and insightful and honest portrayal debut of Peter Lorre, Horror Meister Extraordinaire. His American film debut from 1935 on Blu-ray, Mad Love. And this is an MGM horror film. And MGM rarely went into the genre, but this is based on the famous story, The Hands of Orlac.

And there have been many films based on that story. But this is so super creepy. And what's really interesting about this movie is the director was Karl Freund, who was a very famous cinematographer. And about 15 years later, ironically, which has nothing to do with horror films or Mad Love, he was one of the architects of the three-camera sitcom format of shooting 35mm from three cameras and cutting between them for I Love Lucy. I mean, amazing, you know, just a wild connection. He made this as a director and it's quite a powerful movie. And people were kind of shocked and delighted when they heard that we were doing this. And then the following week on the 26th, we have four new Blu-rays in one day.

Wow. Pretty amazing. The first two, again, are, you know, for the Halloween fan, the first is a sequel to a great classic that we released a few years ago. This is Children of the Damned, the sequel to Village of the Damned. And this has been highly requested. And of course, when it's highly requested, we tried to comply with the request. This is shot at the MGM British Studios.

It's a really good movie. And it also has a commentary by the screenwriter. I saw that john braley is really really impressive and and i think people will like what he has to say and then we also have eye of the devil which stars hollywood legends deborah carr and davidiven, but also features a very early screen appearance by Sharon Tate. For some reason, they chose to dub her in this movie, but it's very strange because she really had a very, you know, beautiful speaking voice,

but maybe it had something to do with the English accent or something. You know, I'm sure there's somebody out there that knows the backstory. I don't. But this is a very popular movie when we released it on DVD, and we've now remastered it for Blu-ray. And our next film takes you back more than 30 years and is one of the greatest classic comedies, both of stage and screen, because it started as a play.

This is Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor, starring an amazing all-star cast. John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Gene Harlow, Billy Burke, Lee Tracy, all these great stars. It was MGM had such success, the Grand Hotel in 1932, that they needed to make another all-star film. Only this time it's a comedy and it was made before the production code. So it's a little bit racy. And the scenes between Wallace Beery,

who I didn't mention before, and was one of the biggest stars at MGM at the time. The scenes between Wallace Beery and Gene Harlow are incredibly famous. This is another one of those movies where you say, why did it take so long to come to Blu-ray? And this is because of the age of the film, 88 years old. This was a challenge in the original the original negative has been long gone. And the more popular a movie is, the more battered the materials are. So the restoration job here is really, really impressive.

And last but not least. Before we go on, I saw that Dinner at Eight also has a documentary special feature profile on Harlow, the blonde bombshell hosted by Sharon Stone. And then it also has a comedy short come to dinner. So there's some nice special features on there. Oh, absolutely. And the thing is that come to dinner was something I did not know anything about. And it was a former colleague at the company that told me about it as they were working on photochemical restoration of Warner Shorts of the era from the early 30s and making new preservation elements. He said, you know, you should think about, if you're putting Dinner at Eight out, you should think about adding Come to Dinner. There are no stars in it, but it's a

little 10-minute parody of Dinner at Eight. And it's kind of like the way Saturday Night Live does a sketch and makes fun of a movie now. Well, this is what the Warner Brothers Shorts department came up with to make fun of MGM. And the Sharon Stone documentary on Jean Harlow was originally shown on TNT in the 90s. And it is, she had such a short career and a short life. I think she was 26 when she passed away. It's unbelievable the legacy of great cinema. She left us in the few years that she was in front of the camera.

This is the first Gene Harlow movie I ever saw. I saw it when I was a kid. Our local movie theater used to show an old movie once a year for the adult film society and I got permission from my parents to go. And I think I was 11 or 12.

And I really was like blown away by how great and funny this movie is. And also there's some dramatic scenes and they're very well acted. It's just, it's one of the great classics of all time. And to wrap up the month, we have a film that probably most people have never heard of. And it's a very important movie, actually, for a lot of reasons. It's called Mary Stevens, M.D. And it stars Kay Francis, who at the time was one of the biggest stars at Warner Brothers, and she'd just come to

Warner Brothers the year before after being at Paramount. She plays a lady doctor, and this was made before the production code. So it deals with children born out of wedlock, adultery, wedlock, adultery, drug use, all these things that became things you couldn't talk about in future films a year later. And the prejudice against Kay Francis's character being a lady doctor, it's just so shocking to see what was then the real reaction to a woman having the nerve not to be a stay-at-home mom, but to become a doctor. And Warner Brothers pre-code movies, we've done many collections of them on DVD. This film has never been on VHS or DVD, and it's making its debut on Blu-ray, restored from the original negative. So again, tied into our preservation process, I happen to really like Kay Francis movies a great deal. until I started working on our Forbidden Hollywood series of pre-code movies, which is something I started doing in the late days of VHS and then Laserdisc and then DVD.

And now we're putting out this movie, which hasn't been available at all. And the reason it wasn't available before is because the film elements we had were so awful and the original negative was in beautiful condition sitting at the library of congress so we repatriated it to burbank and now everybody will be able to own it so it's quite a hefty lineup nine blu-rays and DVD, not to mention television and animation. You've got, it's a little microcosm of the differentiation of what Warner Archive is about. And November is going to be equally exciting, if not possibly more so. We usually don't do very much in December because really after the holidays, people have kind of made up their, you know, their minds about what they're going to do their shopping with and what's going to get some press attention. But we may still have a surprise or two before the end of the year. And then 2022 is going to start with a bang and hopefully the noise and the excitement

will be rising to great heights as we go into the future. Well, I look forward to getting you back here to talk about the November releases before too long and 2022 sounds very exciting it is it is and then the the fun part of it is that we're running into all sorts of challenges with these older films and we find that like we're missing a line of dialogue or, you know, we're missing a shot here. And how are we going to fix this? And we always manage to find a way. And it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle sometimes. Right, right.

But the reward is the happy consumer and getting a nice review from the reviewers and the bloggers is always much appreciated and we've gotten some very very nice compliments of late which i appreciate deeply and they again are a reflection of the work of so many people within the company who dedicate themselves selflessly to making our product the best that it can be. I'm very grateful to them. Well, thanks, George, for coming back on the show to take us through the history of Warner Archive, which I think so many people are interested in, and then to talk about the October releases. It's a very exciting lineup. Well, it's a perfect icing on the cake because these releases for October are a far cry from

the old DVDs that we started with. One thing I didn't mention is that when we started, we had not particularly attractive templated packaging. Right. And we had no menus and we had templated labels. And now we, probably for the last, I'd say, close to 10 years, the covers are the original theatrical key art, which I'm very particular about

because people love seeing the original campaign. And we have four color labels and we're very proud of our presentations and we want to give the consumer a high quality product. And it's an honor to be a part of it. And Tim, I can't thank you enough for allowing me the opportunity to share some of these stories with you. Yeah. Well, thank you. It's a lot of fun and I know the fans really enjoy hearing them. I want to thank George Feltenstein for joining the podcast today to talk to us about the Warner

Archive. As I mentioned previously, we will have part two of George's interview when he returns to tell us about the November Warner Archive releases. Be sure and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast provider so that you don't miss any of George's episodes. For those of you interested in learning more about the Warner Archive releases discussed in the show today, there will be detailed information on the website at www.theextras.tv. Also, follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheExtrasTV or Instagram at TheExtras.TV to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images and behind-the-scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. And if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. Until next time, you've been listening to The Extras with Tim Millard.

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