Mark R. Hasan: With studios cutting back on the release of older titles, I’m curious if you find Twilight Time’s ‘timing’ has been ideal in tapping into the classic film collector demand the studios have largely abandoned?

Nick Redman: You could say that was a very important aspect to Twilight Time’s [TT] starting. I don’t think we could’ve started TT had the studios been doing the same thing today that they were doing in 2007.

At Fox, where I’ve been involved since the early nineties running the catalog music restoration program (which is ongoing), we pioneered the limited edition market, and we’ve also continued working with Fox Home Entertainment over the years doing isolated scores, commentary tracks, all kinds of things to tie-in with Fox Home Ent.

At the end of 2010, it was becoming apparent that Fox, like every other studio, was completely dropping out of the catalogue DVD business, and so it seemed logical to go to them and say ‘Look, you know what we’ve been doing with limited editions soundtracks for the past couple of decades. Why don’t we have a go at doing it with DVDs?’ and that’s how it began.

MRH: I don’t know if it’s the business arrangement that exists between Fox North America vs. Fox Europe where there are a number of classic films still being released in Spain or Germany, for example, but with very few exceptions, in North America it’s virtually dried up.

NR: When we’re doing the soundtracks, we kind of control the market here in North America, in the sense that we put out the soundtrack and Fox in Europe or some other label does not put it out in some other territory due to various rights agreements.

We discovered that’s not the case with the DVD business where the territories act completely independently. I mean, there is no reciprocal arrangement between Fox North America and Fox Spain, Fox France, Fox U.K., and Fox anywhere else. For those people, if they have adequate masters in the Fox territories, they’ll put out what they can do, and if they want to continue doing classic films for a while, they will do so.

Fox America doesn’t tell them what to do, and it seems has no interest in what they’re doing. For example, we’ve noticed that for a couple of foreign releases, where they’ve come out as 16x9 high-def masters, we don’t have high-def masters on those titles in the Fox vaults, and we have no access to them. That’s something that was generated by the foreign territories and not generated by Fox America.

MRH: Is it unusual that Fox wouldn’t create a definitive digital master for all territories and ancillary markets, much in the way Sony has done for their catalogue, and Warner Home Video have done by mastering some region-free Blu-ray titles with multiple language and subtitle tracks, leaving it up to the territorial distribution arms to address native packaging nuances?

NR: I can only assume policies differ from studio to studio, and perhaps that it is the way it is for new releases and certain older blockbusters, but not for the majority of deep-catalogue titles.

Fox America seems to have given up on catalogue titles, but it’s not just Fox; it’s every studio. What is strange to me is the coming of the high-def market was a huge problem because it came too soon.

When DVD arrived in the late 1990s, it converted the American public from renters to buyers. That was always going to be the big thing with DVD: were they going to be successful in converting a renting public into a buying public? They succeeded tremendously well. Then when the hi-def master became possible in the home, it was just too much change-too soon for the majority to consider upgrading their collections.

Then there was the competing war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. People became incredibly confused just as they had done way back in the Betamax-VHS days, so that put a lot of people off of upgrading. And then when that war was settled and Blu-ray had won, there wasn’t enough interest in it. It settled into a niche market like laserdisc, so the studios thought ‘You know, maybe it’s not worth supporting as much as we thought it was.'

MRH: I’ve certainly noticed that on the font lines, as I was there when we carried the two HD formats and people just sort of looked at it and thought ‘Well, I just bought a DVD player after holding out for many years. Why do I want to get something new?”

Then there was the issue of pricing, and the variety of available new and catalogue titles. The studios didn’t know exactly what genres to support, so they offered one classic, two comedies, a few dramas, and some action, and it was a really strange mish-mash of titles coming out with high price points. Nobody was buying them, and it sort of contributed to the format being pushed to the margins like laserdiscs for a while.

I’m curious of your thoughts on the Movies on Demand [MOD] format, which is part of the studios’ plans to reassert themselves through digital downloads & custom releases?

NR: I think the general idea, much as they will deny it point blank, is to go gradually to streaming and piping it directly to your home and bypass a physical media. I’m not going to say that it’s a long-term goal, but it’s not that far away, and depending on who you talk to, 5-7 years at the very most.

What we were able to recognize in starting TT is exactly the same principle that happened in the nineties when major labels started to back away completely from soundtracks: it became a niche label business.

We never thought (and I never dreamed) the day would come so quickly that the DVD business - which was so big just 4 years ago with the studios, deriving so much revenue - would be a business that they would allow to dwindle away. It’s going to devolve to a niche label business; it’s going to be labels like TT, Criterion, Image Entertainment – all the ones that we know about – and it’s going to be exclusively a sub-license business for physical media, with the studios owning and controlling all forms of streaming and downloading.

I think the Warner model that began with their on-demand DVD-R is a strange one. It’s good in the sense that yes, you can buy a DVD-R of your favourite movie if they deem it worthwhile to put it out, but it seems awfully strange to me that you would pay say $19.95 to Warners for a glitchy DVD-R, $26.98 if you’re buying it from Amazon, and that they are selling their catalogue Blu-rays for $10, like Bullitt. It seems to me that the pricing is topsy-turvy.